I Am Titanium
Author: John Patrick Kennedy
Date: 2015-06-19 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science Fiction; Young Adult; Fantasy; Superheroes; Urban Fantasy
Description: With great powers come great mistakes… Pax is a teenage genius. Learning how to contact the astral plane and communicate with a spiritual being changed his life. It's too bad he's dying. When Pax's astral mentor gives him a chance at life and immense power, he doesn't hesitate. All Pax has to do is help the astrals inspect Earth. Piece of cake. As Pax learns the astrals have their own agendas for his planet, he and his friend Scarlett's lives will be changed forever. And the astrals aren't even the biggest threat… Can Pax protect the Earth against beings who couldn't care less about mankind's
Publisher: Dark Trope Publishing

Table of Contents

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Epilogue

Dear Reader

I Am Titanium Book 1 of Pax Black

Copyright © 2015 by John Patrick Kennedy All rights reserved.

First Edition: June 2015

Cover by Whendell Souza, Paulo Bert

Formatting by Streetlight Graphics

No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to locales, events, business establishments, or actual persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.

Dedication

For Carolyn and Jade. “Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.”

And a heartfelt thanks to you, the reader, for the time you are about to spend on this journey.

When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.

-Lao Tzu

Chapter 1

Pax blinked and the world changed.

The delicate scents from the forest were gone, replaced by the stink of hospital cleaner. The thick mossy maples and cypress trees, dappled by the sunlight of the forest, were transformed into the harsh glare of fluorescent lights. His breath, so easy a moment before, labored against his ribcage. He sneezed, and the tubes of the O2 machine scraped against the mucous membranes in his nose.

He was back at Columbia University Medical Center, dying from acute diffuse scleroderma while his mom studied the progress of his disease. His immune system was bravely fighting a nonexistent infection, triggering his cells to turn to plaster collagen and calcium all over his internal organs like overeager wallpaper hangers.

Oh joy. Back to the world of bedrails and call buttons and sheets and rough new hospital gowns that felt like they were grating his skin like cheese. Back to the world of not being able to sit up by himself, of having to call for help to take a piss. Back to the world of coughing up blood. He could taste the iron of it in his mouth already. Blood, infection, and Jell-O, that’s what the world tasted like.

He wished he’d stayed on the astral plane and never come back.

The O2 machine wheezed, pushing oxygen into his lungs. Pax’s skull throbbed. His fingers twitched and he felt a hand in his. His fingers tightened on the hand, skidding over the surface of a latex glove.

Scarlett.

He’d met Scarlett a year ago, when she’d started volunteering at the hospital. She’d believed him about the astral plane. More than that, she could see him.

Pax didn’t know how, but she could. One time, he said he was going to take a nap and left his body. Scarlett had freaked out so badly he had to come back before actually reaching the astral plane. The nurses had scolded the hell out of her because nothing appeared on the monitors. He’d told the nurses it was all right and convinced them to leave. Then Scarlett had babbled about watching him leave his body, seeing his “ghost” become more and more faint.

That’s when he’d told her what was really going on.

His hands were probably the strongest part of him, from typing on his laptop so much. But her hands were stronger, full of actual life.

“Pax? Are you back? What did he say?”

He opened his eyes. Scarlett’s hair dangled in a smooth brown curtain in front of his face. She’d forgotten her surgical cap again.

He wheezed, trying to gather enough air to talk. “Gimme a minute.”

She leaned back a little and tucked her hair behind her ears. Scarlett wasn’t the most beautiful girl in the world. She was seventeen like him. And too pale, like him. Her face was as washed out as an old T-shirt. Her nose was long and thin and regrettably rat-like. She had dark circles under her eyes and a zit about to explode over the left one. But at least she was alive and she liked him.

A cough was still trying to bubble up. He looked around the room and breathed shallowly and slowly. Almost positively pneumonia. His breath popped, like far-away bubble wrap, as his lungs struggled past the mucus. He could hear the O2 machine whirring. He focused on inhaling the oxygen. If he let his levels go down, an alarm would go off and alert his mother. Not desirable.

His laptop was open on the swing-table, but the screen had gone dark. Another world he could access: the Internet. If he could lose himself in sorting through forum posts, he’d be able to breathe better. But not with Scarlett here. She’d be hurt if he ignored her.

So instead he stared at the salmon-colored wall, at a picture of himself with his mother and his dead father that hung next to the whiteboard listing his nursing staff for the day. The picture showed the three of them in Central Park. He was three or four, riding a bicycle and wearing a red helmet that made his head look deformed. One of the bike’s training wheels was off the ground, tilted at a crazy angle. His parents smiled at whoever was holding the camera. In retrospect, it was obvious an accident was about to happen.

A year later, his father was dead. Two years after that, Pax’s body started killing itself in a pointless battle against a nonexistent foe. For three years, it had declined to the point where his mother didn’t think he’d live past ten.

Then he’d stabilized, and for five years he’d lain in hospital beds, too sick to go home, too healthy to die and get it over with. Two years ago, his body started working on the second option.

It was nearly the end, and he couldn’t do a damn thing about it.

“Open the curtains,” Pax said.

Scarlett got up and pulled the cord. The heavy beige curtains were pulled back; the inner blinds zipped upward. He blinked at the sudden light.

It was spring. The sky was a deep blue, the elms and oaks covered with bright green leaves. The pears and dogwoods were finished blossoming; the yellow daffodils were winding down, and the crabapples had just started. He knew their names but it had been so long since he’d been outside he couldn’t remember what any of them smelled like.

Little kids in matching red or green uniforms ran back and forth across the park like ants, playing some kind of game while their parents cheered.

Scarlett sat beside him and squeezed his hand again. “Pax? What did he say? Will it work?”

“No,” Pax said. I wish I could go outside one more time. “It’s not going to work.”

Scarlett’s face pulled in on itself, like she was trying to keep from crying. Pax looked back out the window, not wanting to see, not wanting to start crying himself.

“Terry says it won’t work to channel energy from the astral plane to power my body. Physical flesh is too fragile to contain the amount of energy I’d need to heal myself and our current state of understanding of how the body works would almost guarantee that if I could hold that much energy, I’d almost certainly use it incorrectly and short out my nervous system, stopping my heart permanently.”

The O2 machine purred and then wheezed again.

“Oh, Pax,” she said. She crushed his hand painfully. “I’m so sorry.”

Pax looked back at the kids playing T-ball.

Scarlett wrote poetry about the astral plane, about Pax’s journeys. But what she couldn’t understand was that, from the perspective of the astral plane, they were all dying far too soon. In the other worlds Terry had shown Pax, the native life forms lived for thousands of years and in far greater harmony than the chaos he saw everywhere on Earth. Looking at Earth from the astral plane was like watching a race addicted to dying young.

Central Park was filled with hundreds of dying flames. Every single one of them were burning their life’s fuel faster than they should, burning up their bodies, getting old, and dying too soon.

Scarlett was a flame, a roaring flame. She was going to die far too young, just like everyone else.

Pax was just dying faster.

On the way up to Pax’s room, Scarlett stormed into the musty, tiled elevator and kicked the steel panel that ran along the bottom. Luckily, nobody was in the elevator with her. Her Chucks left a ghostlike shoe print on the metal. She wanted to leave a dent. She felt like smashing things. Throwing things. Hitting things. Punching certain people in the face.

It had been a shit day.

Pax had helped her study for her midterms, and she thought she’d done okay in calculus and physics. Pax was brilliant. A genuine genius. He could take things like relativity and four-dimensional shapes and, if not exactly make her understand, then at least help her get the idea, better than most people did. He’d also taught her there were things nobody really understood. It had been kind of an eye opener, knowing that some things confused even the most intelligent scientists, things like gravity and time. It made the whole universe seem bigger and, somehow, grander.

Bigger than just worrying about her physics test, anyway.

No. It was fucking English, the one subject she was actually good at, that was the problem.

On Friday she’d turned in a story for her midterms. She’d worked on it for weeks, tearing up draft after draft until it wasn’t just perfect, it had made her cry. She had said something that really mattered and said it with imagery, characters—a story.

And she’d gotten a D+ on it.

Because it wasn’t grammatically correct. Punctuation problems. Incomplete sentences. “Awkward” transitions.

Mr. Larkin had marked every stinking one of them. She’d gone to his class with a sticky-noted copy of Stephen King’s Dreamcatcher and showed him where Stephen King had made exactly the same “mistakes” and had been published anyway. Incomplete sentences could be found in just about any contemporary novel; it was a style. It was how people thought. Mr. Larkin sneered at her and told her King was just a hack.

She had stared at him for half a minute, imagining his hair on fire, imagining vampires at his window and his dead dog crawling out of its grave, and had run out of the class crying. Stories made her feel alive, made her feel and see so much more than school ever could: how could they be the work of a hack? It was as if Mr. Larkin had been saying her imagination was rotten.

The rest of the day—mockery from the popular girls during lunch, a fight with one of them during history, detention, and a lecture from her parents—who also told her one of the bestselling writers on the planet couldn’t write and they certainly hoped she wasn’t taking inspiration from him. As if, what, her other choice was to be the next Shakespeare? All this had left her raw, angry, burningly pissed. King knew about loneliness, terror, the need to have one person to trust, and what happened when you didn’t.

“Life isn’t as melodramatic as a Stephen King novel,” they’d said. Yeah, you wish.

She’d shoved the clean outfit on over her clothes, pulled a copy of the story out of her backpack, and stomped into Pax’s room.

He’d looked dead, even though the heart monitor said otherwise.

Shit.

She’d forgotten today was the day.

Pax was traveling to the astral plane to ask his friend, Terkun’shuks’pai, a.k.a. “Terry,” if Pax could save himself from dying. His idea was to heal himself with astral energy. She’d been scared to have too much hope, but she did anyway. Miracles could happen, right? Though she knew Pax would object to the word “miracle.” How about magic? Physics—astral travel—magic. It was all good.

His laptop screen was still on, but he was out cold, completely limp. If he hadn’t been hooked up to a dozen machines with screens and beeps and clicks and hums telling her that no, really, he was alive, then she would have panicked, he was so motionless.

He must have waited for her as long as he could and then gone without saying good-bye.

Scarlett dropped the printout into the trash. It shushed against the metal as it fell. She pulled a stool next to his bed and sat on it, slipping her gloved hand into his. She felt a fierce resentment at being alone, followed immediately by intense shame. She was a horrible, selfish person. She didn’t know why he was even her friend. God, she was awful. He was dying, and all she could think about was her stupid day. The D+ she’d received on her story was nothing compared to the F she should get at being a human being today.

Fuck English. And fuck Mr. Larkin.

She leaned on the cool, plastic bedrail and watched Pax’s face.

He was so skinny and pale, and his eyes were always rimmed with red. He smelled like baby wipes, although she would never tell him that. Today he was wearing the Sean John hoodie she’d bought him over his hospital gown. She’d told him it made him look pretty hot, which wasn’t true, but at least it didn’t make him look worse. The hood was pulled up over his head, which did look kind of cute. With some tattoos and a headband, he would have looked like Eminem—if he could put some muscle on his body. She laughed, trying to imagine what Pax would rap about. The astral plane… it’s insane… it gets in my brain… washes over me like rain… can’t feel no pain…

Pax’s hand twitched in hers. He was awake but keeping his eyes closed.

Because he didn’t want to look at her.

That meant bad news. She knew it even before she made him tell her. She shouldn’t ask—she should just let him say nothing, be one of those kind, sensitive people…

But she asked. And he told her.

She couldn’t stand it. “Oh, Pax,” she said. “You haven’t even lived yet.”

You have to be with me. She didn’t say it out loud. She never did. He knew what she felt about him—he had to. She loved him. She loved him so much it was burning her up inside.

He blinked and stared out the window when she so desperately wanted him to look at her.

“Oh, Jesus, Scarlett,” he whispered, his eyes going wide.

The alarms went off on his heart monitor. His heartbeat was racing, spiking irregularly.

Footsteps pounded down the hallway.

The nurses rushed in. One of them grabbed Scarlett around her ribs, pulling her away from the bed so fast her feet swung through the air. The metal stool she’d been sitting on clanged to the floor, and one of the nurses kicked it out of the way.

Scarlett pushed her back against the wall. The rails on the bed dropped and the head of the bed went flat with a clatter. The nurses unzipped his hoodie, cut through the neck of his hospital gown, and tore it open.

A second later the paddles were on Pax’s skinny, white chest.

The heart monitor flat-lined. The steady shrieking made Scarlett want to puke.

She put her hands over her ears and sank down along the wall, sobbing, so she didn’t have to see Pax’s helpless body, shocked and made to jump like he was some kind of thing.

“Clear!”

The bed shook.

A pause.

“Clear!”

The bed shook again.

Hands grabbed her arm, pulled her up, and led her out of the room. She shouldn’t be in there anyway; she was crying too hard. The lights in the hallway were too bright.

Someone else was standing in the hallway. Pax’s mom. She looked like someone had gouged her cheeks with a spoon: a skull with no facial expression, just eyes staring into the room. Her fists were clenched, and Scarlett imagined a kitten’s head crushed in each one.

“There’s nothing you can do,” Scarlett said.

Then Pax’s mom was shaking Scarlett by the shoulders, whipping her head back and forth. “Don’t say that! Don’t you ever say that to me again! How dare you!”

Scarlett knocked the hands away and ran down the hallway, stripping off her gown and gloves as she went. The floor was freshly waxed, and her feet kept screeching and skidding. She stopped long enough to strip the blue booties off her shoes. Then she ran to the elevator.

She had to wait for a few long seconds for the elevator to arrive. So, like a fool, she looked back.

Pax’s mom was still standing by his door, looking like a female Death in a doctor’s jacket—thin and knobby, her hair a faded gray-yellow like the sky before a storm. The elevator dinged, and Scarlett stepped backward into it without looking behind her (what if there’s no floor and I just fall down the shaft; what if there’s an enormous fire burning beneath me; what if I go to Hell) and let it close.

She was alone in the elevator. She turned around and viciously kicked the wall again. This time she left a dent.

“Pax is dying,” she told the elevator doors. “And, yeah, Mrs. Black, nobody wants him to die. But he’s gonna anyway.”

She hated herself even as she said it.

Chapter 2

His heart had stopped again yesterday, Mom said. Pax had nodded. It was becoming a routine report. Nothing to worry about.

Pax considered his laptop screen.

Some idiot online was mocking Pax’s theories about the astral plane, saying that until seeing solid proof that he could understand, he wasn’t going to buy into some kid’s fantasy world.

Pax had only a few more minutes before he met with Terry again.

Pax’s nostrils flared. His fingers and wrists ached. He cracked his joints absently and then typed furiously.

“Since when has understanding been essential to science? Science is littered with perfectly rational explanations for everything from the aether to phrenology to phlogiston, none of which were true. Whereas we have no real idea how gravity works or why water behaves as it does. This hardly stops us from studying their behavior or from developing new technology using what we observe. But, more importantly, since when has your understanding been essential to anything? I mean, what do you know about anything, except how to leave sarcastic comments on a website?”

His mouse pointer hovered over the Post button, but he didn’t click it.

If things didn’t work out with Terry today, it might be the last thing he ever posted: a flaming response to a troll. He didn’t want his memory to be marred with such pettiness, but it was hard when confronted by idiots like this.

If there were any justice in the world, he’d be able to post the comment and get a round of applause. If there were any justice in the world, he’d be able to say it to the guy’s face at a conference. If there were any justice in the world, he’d live a full life and not only be able to teach people about the astral plane, but learn how to use it to stop all earthly life from burning itself up. He was finding out more every day. Sharks…naked mole rats…sequoias…cypress trees…ancient quahogs…the hydra species Turritopsis dohrnii…

The secrets of immortality—or at least to the lifespan they all should be having, which he estimated to be around five hundred years minimum—were there to be discovered. Give him another fifty years, and he would crack it.

But there wasn’t any justice in the world.

He deleted the comment.

He was going to die. Soon. The rate of calcification on his heart muscles had increased, triggering more and more heart attacks, which drained his energy, burning him up faster than before.

Pax almost always felt tired, but now he felt exhausted, drained of the willpower he would need to convince this idiot to consider Pax’s ideas fairly. It was doubtful, even if he had the energy, that he could. According to his research, most people imprinted on one perspective on life—one paradigm—based on their early life experiences, and locked themselves into those beliefs for the rest of their lives. It took enormous effort to change this, and most people didn’t bother. Even those who did bother could only do it once, perhaps twice, in the best of cases. The universe was vastly mysterious but the human brain couldn’t function with that many unknowns. Something human beings would have to change if they wanted to unlock the secrets of longevity. But that was a problem for another day.

He started to type something else, but his lungs clamped down on him, not even able to pull in enough air to gasp. He closed his eyes and waited for the spasm to pass.

It had to pass. He still had a chance if it passed.

Last night he’d received a message from Terry that he’d had another idea—a risky one, but one that might save Pax’s life. Having hope was hard. Hope exhausted him even more quickly than normal. And when the hope came to nothing—as it so often did—he’d waste the energy he did have on anger and regret.

He was supposed to travel to the astral plane to meet Terry at three o’clock.

It was two fifty-eight now.

Pax’s lungs crushed in tighter. He could feel his body shutting down. Two more minutes was all he needed, if he could just have it.

He’d sent a jumbled message to Scarlett this morning, saying he’d be traveling to meet Terry at four so she wouldn’t distract him when he had to go. Now he regretted the deception. It was irrational to feel he might never step back into this body again, but the emotion still gripped him beyond all rationality. He couldn’t control it.

Now he wanted her there to at least say good-bye.

His heart rate picked up again. He was starting to have another attack. If he was going to go, he had to go now.

He closed his browser tabs, saved the document he’d been working on (a paper theorizing that astral energy was the dark energy holding the universe together; he wasn’t sure of it because he couldn’t do the experiments himself, but he had hopes it would trigger someone else to look into it later—in order to prove him wrong, if nothing else,) and shut down his laptop.

After a few seconds, he closed the screen and pushed the laptop swing table away. He was panting now, despite the work of the O2 machine. No more time. He had to go.

His heart clenched.

I’m not done yet. I know this life, this earth. I’m used to it here; I’m not done!

He closed his eyes, focused on the distant sparks of light that appeared above him like stars—not real stars, but nexuses of energy—and released his awareness toward them. He separated from his body easily, like a balloon with a cut string.

For a moment he glanced back. The heart monitor was going ape shit and the nurses outside his room were getting up, tossing their pens onto their paperwork. Everything looked like it was moving in slow motion.

Just outside his doorway, Scarlett was watching him.

She’d come early.

He smiled and he watched as his body, twitching and shaking on the bed, smiled too. He looked back at Scarlett.

She wasn’t watching his body. She was watching him, the real Pax, floating up toward the ceiling, traveling to the astral plane. How could she do that? Even Terry didn’t know.

She waved a tiny, secret wave at him and ducked out of the doorway as the squad of nurses pounded through.

He waved back, suddenly more hopeful, though he wasn’t sure whether she saw him or not—wasn’t even sure what “waving back” meant in this context. Then he left earth behind.

Terkun’shuks’pai felt the boy travel through the empty space between the planes, the mana pacha. Reaching out for the boy’s astral energy, Terkun’shuks’pai pulled it toward him.

He was in his usual place, a pacha he’d created and modified across the eons. It was distant from the White City, the capital of the astral plane, and far removed from the politics and idiocy of that beautiful, but often impractical, place.

Earth was Terkun’shuks’pai’s obsession. It always had been and now…

Now it was much, much more important.

He looked over his pacha as he waited. His pacha was an imitation of something he’d found on Earth three hundred years before, as the boy counted such things. A valley next to a mountain, and in the center of it, a humble house made of thin wood and paper, built solely for the purpose of serving tea. On Earth, the valley was said to be haunted by suicides, but if any ghosts were in the pacha, they were of a different nature.

It was a peaceful spot, inviting reflection and vision: it heightened Terkun’shuks’pai’s awareness of both the impermanence of all things and the nearly infinite stretch of the astral time scale, which was longer than that of universes. It had trees and plants, birds and animals. Streams and hot springs were filled pools of still, steaming water that reflected the clouds, the leaves, almost the wind itself. It was as real as he could make it, which was very real indeed.

It even had biting mosquitoes. Without flaws, perfection could be oppressive.

Considering what he was asking the boy to do, it was fitting they meet at the place Terkun’shuks’pai valued most, to show they were both going to take risks, although he couldn’t expect the boy to understand the subtleties of the invitation.

Terkun’shuks’pai concentrated and was in the center of his pacha, in his tea house, kneeling on the thick-woven rice mats, dressed in simple, layered silk robes. He clenched his fists briefly. It always unsettled him when he first manifested in a more physical form. He made the form as accurate as could be done, and having a heart was disconcerting, let alone feeling it racing. He took several deep breaths.

Most astral beings avoided physical manifestation altogether. Terkun’shuks’pai found it a useful state of being: both limiting and freeing.

Limiting because his senses were reduced to that of the physical, his body to that of the mortal. Freeing because those senses were so much richer. When he was in a physical form, the peace of his pacha seemed more than an abstraction: like a honeyed fluid, thick and delicious. His thoughts seemed more focused, more authoritative. His hopes were more solid, his visions almost guaranteed.

The solidity of the physical was an illusion, but one he sometimes craved beyond all reason.

Birds sang; the wind blew through the trees. The boy—whose name, Pax, meant peace—slowly solidified in front of Terkun’shuks’pai. He waited. The robes under his loosely held fists felt soft to the touch but were roughly woven from blue and white threads. On a small charcoal brazier set into a hole in the floor, water was heating, hissing in the heavy iron pot.

In front of him were the tools he needed to make the tea: the whisks, the bowls, the cracked clay container filled with white powder. Another idea he had borrowed from the Japanese: kintsukuroi, the art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer sprinkled with powdered gold, making the broken bowl or cup more beautiful than it had been when first made. He remembered the day he had deliberately broken his tea holder and then forced himself to repair it by hand, shard by shard.

In the physical plane of Earth, the boy’s heart had stopped, and his physical body was now surrounded by other humans attempting to bring him “back to life”—as they ignorantly called their mortal state.

“Hello, Terry,” the now-present Pax said, using the shortened version of Terkun’shuks’pai’s name. Terkun’shuks’pai let it pass. It was irritating but didn’t matter in the larger scheme of things. Pax was sitting cross-legged on the rice mats, dressed in informal mortal clothes.

Terkun’shuks’pai had chosen to appear as a broad-shouldered, mixed-race, bald man dressed in Japanese robes. His outfit matched the rest of the pacha, its colors those of the forest and pools and rock gardens and teahouse.

Terkun’shuks’pai cleared his throat. “In this place, you remove your shoes.”

Pax raised his eyebrows but untied the shoes—an affectation, Terkun’shuks’pai knew. In the physical plane the boy was bedridden and never wore anything on his feet.

Pax put the shoes to the side. “You… you said you had an idea. About how to save me.”

“I do.”

Pax waited, and when nothing more was forthcoming, demanded, “What is it?”

“I am afraid there isn’t much time,” Terkun’shuks’pai admitted. “Your body is quite fragile.”

“Yeah,” Pax said. “It’s having a heart attack right now. Glad I’m not in it, to tell the truth.”

Terkun’shuks’pai smiled politely. “Indeed. I understand it is quite painful.”

The boy stared at his hands. Here, in the astral plane, his hands were large and rough, covered with scars and scraped knuckles. The nails were chewed, and the skin on his palms was callused. They were the hands of a boy who worked, played, had experiences, wounds. The rest of his created body was similarly detailed. The boy longed for an active life rather than one so limited to the mind.

“I’m dying now, Terry,” Pax said. “So if you have an idea, tell me!”

Terkun’shuks’pai bowed his head. “As you wish. But first, I need to serve you some tea.”

“Tea?” The boy’s forehead wrinkled. “Now? I don’t have time for tea. I don’t even like tea!”

“I think you will feel differently about this kind.”

Pax looked ready to argue, but he looked around helplessly and shrugged. “Fine. Whatever.”

The boy’s form flickered: his physical body had been severed from his astral energy. His mortal body was dead, though Pax wouldn’t know it for a while yet. The boy would start fading soon, but not so soon that there wasn’t time for the ceremony, and a chance at change.

Terkun’shuks’pai folded his hands in his lap for a moment out of respect, and then began making the tea, pouring the hot water, scooping a small ladle full of white powder into the water, and mixing it into the tea bowl. The kintsukuroi container of white powder was real—at least, in the context of this pacha—but the powder inside was not; it was merely a symbol.

But it was a potent symbol, one that would give him permission to do what was necessary to the boy’s physical body, back on Earth. It was more important for the boy to drink the tea than to understand, or even agree, to what Terkun’shuks’pai had to do to save the boy.

Terkun’shuks’pai replaced the clay lid on the container of powder and took up the bamboo whisk, carefully stirring the tea until the white powder dissolved. He scraped the whisk along the edges of the tea bowl, making sure none of the powder remained, and tapped the whisk against the bowl three times. Setting the whisk on the floor, he balanced it on its flat handle.

He handed the bowl to the boy, bowing to him.

Pax took the bowl and bowed back, not as deeply as he would have if he had been familiar with the customs related to the ceremony, and then straightened up and sipped from it.

“What is this?”

“Is it to your liking?”

The boy sipped again and then tipped the bowl up and drank it greedily, draining it to the last drop. A thin line of viscous white tea rolled down the side of his mouth; he caught it on a finger and licked the finger.

“It’s delicious.” He put the bowl down in front of him and stretched, putting his hands on his knees. The bones in his back popped. He opened his jaw and stretched it, wiggling it from side to side, then closed it, and breathed in deeply, until his lungs were full to bursting. “That was part of it, wasn’t it?”

Terkun’shuks’pai smiled again, this time with genuine pleasure. “You have always had great intelligence, Pax. You are correct; that was part of what I must do to save you. Your mortal body is too weak to endure. And I am unable to repair the extent of damage it has suffered. So we must replace it.”

“Replace it?”

“With astral material.”

Pax looked down into the empty bowl. “That white stuff in the tea.”

Terkun’shuks’pai nodded.

“When I go back… I’ll have a new body. An… astral body?”

“We will build one together, yes.”

“My mortal body will be dead.”

Terkun’shuks’pai nodded again.

“I’ll be dead.”

Terkun’shuks’pai waited.

The boy shook his head. “Only my body will be dead. I’ll be alive.” The boy’s blue-gray eyes seemed to spark with understanding. “I’ll be able to live. Let’s do it!”

Terkun’shuks’pai raised a hand. “There are a few issues we must discuss.”

“What’s to discuss? I’ll be alive!”

Terry smiled. “I will need to come with you at first, Pax, to ensure your astral body and your physical form will bond with each other. It may be an extensive process, lasting for more than an earthly year.”

“I wouldn’t mind that. Spend a year with you? Think of what I could learn. What you could teach me.” The boy was grinning. He picked up the bowl and rubbed a finger around the inside, sweeping up the last few drops of liquid. He sucked on the finger.

“I did not expect that condition to be… something that would require you to consider for long.” Terkun’shuks’pai paused. “However, there is a condition you will not accept as easily. Political issues in the White City have kept me from traveling to your plane previously. We have discussed a few of them.”

The boy nodded.

“Our leaders have agreed to allow me to help you, but only on one condition.”

“What?”

The heart monitor in Pax’s room went silent.

Everything went silent.

Scarlett sat on a molded plastic chair outside Pax’s room with her head in her hands, trying to stop crying. She didn’t want to let him go.

A long time ago, he’d said that when it was clear he was actually dead, he’d just let his spirit float up to the astral plane. His consciousness wouldn’t be lost. It wouldn’t just end. He wouldn’t really be dead, just somewhere else.

It didn’t help.

Pax was hers, damn it. He belonged with her. Not in some weird astral plane.

With her.

So when the sound of the heart monitor cut out from Pax’s room, she was pissed.

“Pax! You asshole!” she shrieked. She was up and out of the chair, skidding around the corner without even a pair of latex gloves on.

The nurses and doctors around him were strangely unmoving. She pushed past them to stand next to Pax. He wasn’t breathing.

She screamed at him. “You can’t die. I won’t let you die!”

And then she hit him in the chest. Slammed him with both fists together.

His chest didn’t move. It was like hitting a brick.

“Pax!”

His chest was white; they’d slit open his hospital gown again. The edges of his hoodie were hanging open. The lights over the bed were turned all the way up. She blinked. She could see every colorless hair on his skin. She could see his nipples.

She hit him again. Oh, God. She wasn’t losing him.

His chest didn’t move. Hitting him hurt her fists.

None of the doctors or nurses moved or told her to stop. It was weird. She turned to look at them, afraid they were observing some kind of “moment of silence” after a death. She’d never seen that on TV, but who knows what really happens?

The man next to her had his mouth open. She could see the overhead lights reflecting off a tiny piece of spit on his lips. Off his bloodshot eyes.

She watched him for a few seconds, her eyes watering. He wasn’t blinking. Or breathing. She butted into him with her shoulder.

He swayed on his feet a little—then tipped over.

It was like watching a chess piece or a doll fall over; he was so stiff. He had a clipboard under one arm, hands stretched in front of him when he fell—and that’s exactly how he stayed when he landed.

“What?” she whispered. “Pax… what the fuck is going on?”

Inside her pocket, Julie’s cell phone buzzed.

For a decade, ever since Pax had been brought to the hospital, ever since they’d found out about the acute form of scleroderma he had, her stomach clenched every time her cell phone went off, filling her stomach with acid.

She’d had to give up surgery. Anything she couldn’t drop at a moment’s notice had been eradicated from her life. Surgery, their dog, dates… she couldn’t afford to give anyone that much of her. Pax needed her. He pretended he didn’t, but he did.

When his father had died, she’d been filled with anger. It had been unfair of Robert to leave her alone with a young son. That she didn’t have time for. That she didn’t have the love for, not without Robert. It was a family she had wanted, the whole deal. She could work as part of a team; it’s how she gone through everything in life. Not this—one on one with a child. It was frightening.

So she’d ignored Pax at first. Yelled at him when she shouldn’t. Just seeing him made her angry. It wasn’t so much that he reminded her of Robert. Pax didn’t even look like Robert. Pax looked like she had, when she was young. He reminded her of herself, before she’d found someone to love her, before she was strong and adult and skilled.

She’d become a doctor so she could save people’s lives, so she didn’t have to be that helpless child anymore. Now, every time she saw Pax, she saw how she’d failed to save Robert. So she ignored Pax, and shouted at him, and shook him when he didn’t behave.

Until she realized something was wrong with him.

She’d brought him to the hospital and everything had changed.

She pulled the cell phone out of her pocket. The heart monitor was hooked up to a cellular connection and it automatically texted her when something deviated from normal.

HEART RATE ERRATIC LEVEL YELLOW WARNING.

The phone buzzed again.

HEART RATE DROPPING LEVEL ORANGE WARNING.

Time itself seemed to go still. She should have been on her feet and running for the door, headed up to the seventh floor. She should have been desperately thinking, “Wait for the elevator or take the stairs?”

Instead she stared at the phone.

She would do anything to keep him safe, but part of her knew, knew deep down as a doctor and as a mother, that her son was dying, and she could do nothing to prevent it. To keep pulling him back like this was cruel.

She’d get up. Any second now.

The phone buzzed again, startling her, and she dropped it on her desk facedown.

With a shaking hand, she picked it up.

HEART STOPPED LEVEL RED WARNING.

Chapter 3

“There are two factions in the White City,” said Terry. “I and those who trust me believe Earth should be able to continue on its path to see where it will evolve and if humans as a species can attain astral form.”

“Well, I can do it,” said Pax. “That means we’re getting close, doesn’t it?”

“You are one of the examples I point to,” said Terry. “Nonetheless, we are in the minority. The majority of the White City believes humans are dangerous and that Earth should be sealed off from the astral plane permanently.”

“What?” Pax’s mouth fell open. “That’s not fair. Or even logical. You can’t cut off the whole planet’s future based on what we are now.”

Terry shifted his weight on his knees; his hands tightened briefly.

“I agree with you,” Terry said in a voice so deep and resonant it seemed to come out of surround-sound speakers. “But possibly not for the reason you mean.”

Pax rolled the bowl in a circle between his hands. Terry wasn’t the kind of being you whined about fairness to—not twice in a row. If he said there was no way around this situation, then… there might be, but not one Terry could resolve soon enough to make a difference. It wasn’t fair. But it’s what he and Terry had to work with at the moment; protesting would be a waste of time.

“You know Earth has been off-limits for us to visit for some time now,” said Terry. “You coming here was allowed, of course. Any being that evolves highly enough is allowed access to the astral plane. But in the case of Earth, they’re thinking of banning even that.”

“That’s…” Pax searched for a word but could only come up with “bullshit.”

“As you say,” agreed Terry. “With your evolution, however, we have a chance to change that. You visiting the astral plane is proof humans are closer than most think to reaching the astral plane. If we can show them humans can evolve beyond their violence, we will be able to convince the Council that Earth should not be cut off.”

“Then let’s do it!” said Pax. “There’s tons we could show them! I’ll lead you around and you could tell them—”

“Not me,” said Terry. “We. I’ll be bringing someone else with me as well.”

“Oh.” Pax thought about it. “In my brain as well?”

Terry smiled. “No, I think that would be too crowded, to start. No, she will be observing astrally at first and taking physical form as necessary to interact with your world.”

“All right,” said Pax. “Let her come down.”

“There is one other catch, Pax,” said Terry. “If the Council decides humanity is to be cut off from the astral plane, it will not allow any astral bodies to remain behind on the earth, or humans to contaminate the astral plane.”

That took Pax a moment to understand. “They’ll… they’ll kill me?”

“Yes,” said Terry. “Your astral body will be destroyed, and you will die as surely as your physical body is dying now.”

“That’s not….” Pax wanted to say unfair.

“I am sorry to rush you,” Terry said. “Your mortal body is dead. And we must move quickly if we are to reattach your astral body back to the physical world in its new form.”

“Dead?” repeated Pax.

“Yes,” said Terry. “You are out of time.”

“Time,” Pax muttered. “No time at all.” They’ll kill me if they don’t like Earth. But I’m dead anyway. This way, I get to live for a little while at least. Really live!

Pax flipped the bowl over. It dripped onto the rice mat. A small water stain spread from underneath. He wondered what Scarlett would think of him, in a new body, not weak and pale and helpless, but strong and alive. Would she still like him? Would she like him even more?

He closed his eyes and, balancing his elbows on his knees, folded his hands to rest his chin on them. Right now, several nurses, at least two doctors, and his mom were all closing in on his hospital room to resuscitate him. They didn’t know it was the last time.

Mom would realize the truth this time and would walk away, secretly relieved. She had lived before him; she would live after him. Scarlett would scream and throw herself on his body. And write stories about him. For the rest of her life, probably. And, one day, those stories would mean more to her than he did.

Or Pax could live and not be human anymore. Would Scarlett like that as well?

If she were here she would probably slap him for overthinking. Save yourself! she would shriek. Save yourself for me!

“I’ll do it,” he told Terry.

Terry nodded slightly. “Then it’s time for introductions.” Terry gestured, and the air next to him shimmered. “Pax, meet Akllana’chikni’pai.”

“I’ll never remember that,” said Pax, rolling his eyes. “Lana it is.”

Terry smiled slightly. “I had anticipated that, yes.”

The shimmer in the air solidified. Akllana’chikni’pai—Lana—appeared next to Terry, also kneeling, dressed in a black robe decorated with a silk flame pattern. She was drop-dead gorgeous, with long black hair that curled around her face. Pax was impressed, even though he knew it would have been illogical for her to have chosen a body that was unattractive.

“Akllana’chikni’pai, please meet my friend from Earth, Pax Black,” Terry said.

She nodded slightly. Her face was calm. Relaxed. Her mouth was closed, neither smiling nor frowning. The rest of her body language was formal, yet confident and at ease. She wasn’t one of those simpering hotties from an Asian ninja flick. She looked like a fighter, too, although Pax figured her more for bo sticks than katanas.

The weirdest thing, though, was that her eyes were on fire.

They glowed with a red, flickering light. They seemed—filled with anger. Hate. Contempt. Maybe even fear. Then she smiled at him, and the impression of negative emotions disappeared. Pax wasn’t good at emotions, either at reading them or at feeling the ones other people thought he should have. So he dismissed his initial impression for the moment.

“He is too young, Terkun’shuks’pai.” Lana leaned one hand on the rice mat and rearranged her robes slightly with the other.

“There is no time,” Terry said softly. “His physical body is dying. If we wish to use him as an example of how humans react as astral beings, we must do so now. That, or this boy must die, now.”

“Your lives are so short,” said Akllana’chikni’pai. “So frail and so short. So easily damaged.” Her nostrils flared, and, for a second, he saw the anger in her again. “I will do it.”

“Your hesitation is understood,” Terry said.

“Is it?” she asked, staring at her hands for a moment and then shaking the sleeves of her robe to cover them. “I suppose it is.”

Clearly there was more going on than either of the astrals was talking about.

Terry turned his head slightly to look at her.

“We have never been friends, Terkun’shuks’pai,” she said. “We have never agreed on anything. I think you use these humans to further your political position.”

When Terry started to speak again, she swept a finger in front of his lips, without touching them. “I have already consented to this arrangement. I do not have to like it. And you can be sure I will do everything in my power to protect these humans from your schemes.”

“Even as you isolate them? Even as you keep them from joining the astral plane?”

“Even so,” said Lana. “They must be allowed to live or die out on their own terms, without interference from us and without inflicting harm on other planes.” The anger flashed across her face again. “I will be watching you, Terkun’shuks’pai.”

“As you must.”

Scarlett put her hand on Pax’s chest. It wasn’t warm or cold; it was solid and stiff, and when she stroked her hand across his skin, it felt like touching a slightly hairy statue.

Goosebumps rose over her skin, and her teeth started to chatter. Oh, God.

What if… he was dead?

What if this was some kind of afterlife? Some kind of waiting place between worlds—and she’d followed him partway and got stuck here. She couldn’t remember what it was called, when you were stuck between life and death.

So stupid. She was supposed to be good with words, wasn’t she?

The doctors and nurses surrounded her, still frozen. Even the machines were silent.

Pax’s face twisted into a grimace.

Something was hurting him.

“Pax!”

Her voice echoed back at her.

He still wasn’t breathing.

His eyes gaped open. It looked like… it looked like they were filling up with white stuff—she couldn’t think of a more specific word—that covered his irises and pupils. It poured out of his eye sockets and down the sides of his face, onto the sheets.

“Pax!” she shrieked.

The white fluid was gushing out of his mouth now. It was running out of his nose, even out of his ears in thin streams.

She didn’t know what else to do, so she put both palms shakily on his chest. She’d learned CPR for a reason, right? The worst that could happen wasn’t as bad as what was happening now.

She almost started compressions but caught herself. “Clear his airway. First you’re supposed to clear his airway.”

She laughed crazily and cleared as much of the white gunk out of his mouth as she could, but it was still pouring out of him. She put both hands on his chest again and started pumping.

“And one and two…”

The white stuff splattered onto her face, into her ear. She ignored it and kept pumping. On five she tipped his head back, scooped out all the liquid she could, and tried to blow into his mouth.

It was like trying to blow up a balloon made out of stone, while it was full of mud. What the hell was this?

She pumped on his chest again, but this time his ribs weren’t moving at all. She couldn’t be doing it right.

“…and one and two and three…”

Scarlett.

A voice inside her head. She ignored it. She had more important things to do than go crazy.

Scarlett.

The voice was a woman’s, very gentle but not motherly. If she’d ever had a friend who was a girl, maybe her voice would have sounded like that.

His body is dead, Scarlett.

“No!” She cleared Pax’s mouth and tried to blow air into his lungs again, with no better results than the last time.

My name is Akllana’chikni’pai. I am from the astral plane. Your friend Pax is here with me. He requests you stop trying to help that body. He says it is nothing but meat now.

She ignored the voice and pumped five more times. She was such a wuss. Her arms were already starting to feel the strain, but she kept pushing on Pax’s chest as hard as she could. She would keep trying as long as she could.

My name is Terkun’shuks’pai, said a new voice. I am coming to Earth with Akllana’chikni’pai. I will make a new body for your friend.

Scarlett kept pumping. Come back? New body?

Terry could make a new body for Pax? Why hadn’t he said so? What had made him wait so long? Right now she hated Terry. She hated him for taking Pax away from her. For getting his hopes up, then always letting him down. For being smarter than her, but even worse, for being smarter than Pax, or at least acting like he was. But most of all, for making her jealous. She felt like picking up the bed and hurling it through the window. She felt that strong.

She felt that stupid.

And she didn’t trust Terry at all. She kept pumping.

She gritted her teeth and struggled to hold back her anger. She couldn’t do Pax any good like this, burning up with anger.

The voice came again. There will be an energy flow, it said, and its tone held a warning. You need to step away from Pax. Quickly.

“Not while I can still save him!”

You can’t save him, said Terry. He does not need to be saved. You must step away from him before his energy flow changes. Quickly.

“Fuck you!”

The white fluid that covered Pax’s face and body began to glow.

“I won’t give up on him!” Scarlett screamed. “I won’t.”

She is very bright, said Akllana’chikni’pai.

She is like Pax, said Terry. Scarlett, you must move NOW! Before—

And his urgency got through to her and she was about to move because really this was all super creepy, but the room went white, and Scarlett felt as if her whole body was being crushed from all directions at once.

NO! Even disembodied, Pax’s cry of grief reverberated through the room. What have I done?

You did nothing, said Terry. She would not listen; she would not get off. It isn’t your fault.

I can see her spirit, said Pax. Scarlett! Wait!

What… what happened to me, Pax? Am I—

NO! Pax turned on Terry. You can’t let her die! You can’t!

I have no intention of it, said Terry.

Terry! Lana’s thoughts cracked like a whip through the ether. What are you doing?

She is like Pax, said Terry. She has the power to change. She must be given the chance before—

Terry! Pax sounded panicked. What the hell is that?

Black tendrils that hadn’t been there before began roiling through the room, seeking out Pax’s and Scarlett’s bodies. In the same moment, astral material started bubbling from Scarlett’s eyes.

She was floating outside her body.

In front of her, right in front of her, her own body was falling down, sliding off Pax’s hospital bed and onto the floor. White gunk was oozing out of her mouth onto the speckled black-and-white floor tiles. Her lips were pale. The insides of her ear were turning pale as the blood drained toward the other side of her body. Her eyes looked like dry marbles, with a single white tear leaking out of each one.

I look dead, she thought.

You are dead, said Akllana’chikni’pai. And you should stay that way.

The elevator dinged. Julie shoved between the slowly opening elevator doors and jogged down the hallway toward Pax’s room. The hall was full of people who seemed to be gathering around Pax’s door in slow motion.

It was like the dreams she’d had as a kid, where a monster would be chasing her and she could never run fast enough to escape it.

She’d known this day would come. All the specialists who’d seen Pax—the good ones—had always taken her aside to patiently explain to her that Pax was a very precious little boy and that she should appreciate him while there was still time. Some of the experts had pretended there was some hope for Pax. Those were the ones she sent away. Politely. But she never consulted them again, and she never recommended them to anyone else. Because if they couldn’t be trusted to tell her the truth about Pax, they shouldn’t be trusted with any of her other patients either.

She was a mother, but she was also a doctor and a scientist. She’d been expecting this day for a long time now.

The machines in Pax’s room were going haywire. She’d expected a long, continuous beep, the sound of Pax’s heart monitor flat-lining. But instead it was whooping, fluttering with what sounded like hundreds of heartbeats, flat-lining, returning to normal, and then fluttering again.

Her footsteps carried her to the door of the room.

She could feel her heart crashing into her throat and lungs, making it hard to breathe or think rationally.

Slow. Everything was too slow.

Someone was blocking her. She grabbed the back of his lab coat and yanked him out of her way. As he moved out of view, the head of Pax’s bed appeared. She had a glimpse of his face before someone else moved in her way again. The people were all dressed in white coats but she felt like they were in black robes, carrying scythes.

“Pax!” she screamed.

Don’t leave without saying good-bye.

It was strange, how terrified she felt. She’d prepared for this. She’d gone over and over how his last days and hours would go, what would happen in his body, what would happen after he died. She’d walked that path, acknowledged the grief, the unfairness. She shouldn’t have felt anything at all. And yet her heart beat harder and harder—pain stabbing at her from the inside.

Then.

Something appeared on the floor, out of nowhere.

The people in lab coats around Pax all took a step back and bent down to deal with whatever was on the floor. She got another glimpse of Pax in bed.

The lights drained the color from his face, made him as pale as a piece of marble. His mouth gaped open. His eyes were half-closed.

Two thick, clear tears ran down his cheeks. His head sank forward slightly as his chest fell.

And fell farther. He was empty.

Dead.

Pax’s body was nothing but an empty shell.

Her heart was climbing up her throat, trying to kill her. Tears were gushing out of her like blood from a cut artery. A line of fire ran along the back of her throat.

“Get out of my way!” It came out in a gargle. She couldn’t feel her fingers.

Oh God, Pax. Oh God. I was lying when I thought I was ready for this.

Someone moved in front of her again, and she screamed. This time there were no words, only rage. She had to be there. She had to—

The men in front of her lifted something off the floor.

Another body. Despite herself, she had to look. Scarlett. She was just as limp, just as empty as her son.

What was going on here? Some kind of suicide pact?

Suddenly everything seemed to happen at once. She was jostled backward as the doctors and nurses lifted Scarlett out of the way and laid her on the floor on the other side of the room. One woman bent over her mouth, and a solid-looking man ripped open her shirt and started performing compressions on her flat chest, chanting out the rhythm.

It seemed as though the man, who was at least six feet tall, was having trouble compressing her chest fully. Her ribs were barely moving.

Julie steadied herself against the wall. The stabbing pain moved into her arms.

She glanced over at the bed. The rails were down and orderlies were working on Pax with the paddles. But it didn’t seem like their efforts were as dedicated as the ones working on Scarlett.

She had a life ahead of her.

Julie pushed off from the wall and staggered toward the bed. Someday. Someday she’d forgive that girl for being alive—for daring to have a life—when her son never could.

But not today.

Her lips crushed against themselves. She felt every wrinkle, every sign of age in her body. She stepped around a nurse and looked down at her son.

Pax was a statue, shining under the lights. His skin was made out of white stone. His hoodie had been zipped open, the gown slit down the center. He wasn’t breathing.

His lips were the same color as his skin.

His eyes.

His eyes, dear God, were white all the way across. He really was like stone… am I crazy?

The machines were still going haywire.

Pax’s hands were by his sides. One of them lifted, gestured at the machines.

And the irregular shrieking stopped. Cut off. Like magic.

The noise was replaced with a ringing in her ears. The edges of her vision grayed, leaving her with a quickly shrinking circle of clear vision. The pressure in her head told her she was going to faint.

If she were smart, she’d lower herself to the floor. But she wasn’t smart. She was, in the end, and against all her expectations, a mother. Pax turned his head toward her.

She fell.

Chapter 4

One minute Pax was in Terry’s Japanese pacha—

And the next he was back in his body. Each and every machine in his hospital room was making some variation of an earsplitting shriek. The room was crowded with doctors and nurses bustling around the bed and around Scarlett’s body on the floor at the foot of the bed.

He didn’t feel as though he were looking through his own eyes so much as observing the room from a viewpoint somewhere above the bed. While he could feel the shock of the paddles on his chest, it was a distant sensation that might mean anything: he couldn’t be sure it meant Terry’s plan had worked. He attempted to cough.

Nothing happened.

Time for a status report from the expert in astral material.

Terry?

Terry didn’t answer, although Pax could distantly feel his presence. It was as though Terry were stuck halfway between the astral plane and Earth.

Terry?

Nothing.

Pax was on his own.

Julie arrived. Tears ran down her face. Her nose was red, and her mouth was open in an awful grimace. It’s just my deathday, Mom. Not any more surprising or unexpected than my birthday. He tried to open his mouth to tell her that—he didn’t expect her to laugh so much as roll her eyes—but his mouth wouldn’t move either. Inasmuch as he could feel his body, it felt as though it were made out of a piece of wood or stone with features carved in. His flesh was a pale, nearly uniform, white.

The doctors yelled, “Clear!” and tried again with the heart paddles.

It was probably useless to try to shock Pax’s new body into life using electricity; given the clues of his uniform coloration and carved appearance, there probably wasn’t anything differentiated inside the body—no heart, lungs, or other organs, just white astral material.

This posed a problem.

If Terry was unable to assist in reviving him, and so were the doctors, how was he supposed to bootstrap the body back into operation?

After all that, was he going to truly die—and take Scarlett with him?

Pax examined himself. Several nurses rushed out of the room and returned with blankets, which they placed under Scarlett’s legs. The team attempting to resuscitate her wasn’t having any more luck than Pax’s team, although neither seemed willing to halt their efforts. White liquid oozed out of Scarlett’s eyes: her body had also been replaced. He wondered what the medical personnel were thinking.

One of the machines went from merely shrieking into an agonized, steady screech. Several of the doctors winced; one of them pressed his shoulder up to his ear as he continued to perform chest compressions. The machine was worse than useless at this point: much like the human nervous system’s reaction to damage—pain—it was howling louder than necessary, preventing the rational behavior needed to stop additional damage from occurring.

Pain. If Pax survived this, that was something else he would add to his research list: how to stop unnecessary, counterproductive pain.

For now, though, he’d settle for shutting off that fucking heart-rate monitor.

While the room ricocheted with frantic health care professionals, Pax focused on the machine. It seemed to radiate a kind of heat—no, not heat. Sound waves.

Pax knew sound waves were generally thought to travel in, well, waves, but to his out-of-body vision, the noise seemed to travel more as a quavering line, creating a vibrating, buzzing sort of trail through the air. The sound trails seemed to whip at the heads of everyone in the room, lashing out at them. Attacking them.

In turn, the various humans in the room seemed to be producing their own lines of energy. These new lines buzzed and vibrated almost as much as the sound waves, but, where the sound waves didn’t have a color so much as a pattern of vibration, the new lines were darker and seemed to roil with emotion. Pax couldn’t help but think of them as tentacles.

They seethed with annoyance. Irrationality.

Then there were the other tentacles. They didn’t seem to have a body, didn’t seem to come from the people. These tentacles were black and seethed with pure, unfettered, unreasoning hate. The dark tentacles swarmed over Pax’s body, trying to damage it, even as the people tried to save it. They swarmed over Scarlett’s body as well, seeking to thrust themselves into her skin, seeking entry through her eyes and nose and mouth.

“Clear!”

His body bucked on the bed.

“I’m not getting anywhere with this,” one of the doctors on the floor shouted. “It’s like her lungs are filled with concrete and it’s setting fast.”

“This one, too. What the hell is this stuff? You think it’s some kind of suicide pact?”

“Shut up!” one of the nurses hissed. “Dr. Black’s got to be standing outside the room by now.”

“She’s right behind you, you fucking moron.”

Pax almost smiled. It was funny, in a morbid way. How would his and Scarlett’s cases be written up, if they truly died? Suicide by concrete: one for The Journal of the American Medical Association.

But now was not the time to savor the ironies of the situation.

While Pax didn’t understand the multiple energy patterns around the room, it was obvious the thick strands that led from Pax’s perspective near the ceiling, and from his new body, were of some importance. The two ends waved loosely around, refusing to become a single strand. Pax’s spirit, energy, soul, or whatever, was flopping around at one end and the body’s astral material at the other, as though they were blindly trying to clasp hands and failing.

Pax focused on the two strands of energy. It was more difficult than he expected. He didn’t have a hand to touch them with; he didn’t even have eyelids so he could squint at them to bring them into focus. How much of his cognition was tied to his physical form surprised him. Go… together, he thought at the tangled energy. Just… go.

Nothing happened.

He imagined crushing the energy together and tying it together.

Nothing.

Terry? he called again. Can you hear me?

A distinct lack of response was his only answer; on the whole, he interpreted that as a no. Nervousness washed over him. Without a limbic system to capture and help regulate his emotions, the anxious energy seemed an overwhelming tidal wave.

A rush of sparks cascaded down the thread toward his body but failed to make the jump to the other strand.

Julie covered her eyes with her hand.

“Get her out of here,” shouted one doctor.

She swayed. Her face was bright red and covered with sweat. Her gray-streaked, dark blond hair was stuck to the texturing on the wall and spreading out in a halo above her: she was sinking, her knees bending slowly as she slid down the wall.

Suddenly she dropped like a doll.

Terry must have come through at that instant: Pax’s mouth opened, and his awareness jumped down into his body. He sat up, shoved a doctor out of his way, and jumped out of bed toward her.

“Mom!” He tried to pick her up off the floor, but someone was grabbing his arms.

He swung his arm to push the young doctor away.

The doctor flew across the room and slammed into the far wall, crying out in pain.

Not what Pax had meant to do. But he’d have to take care of it later. Julie’s skin had gone from tomato red to pale, like wax.

The energy radiating out of her body spiked, shoving out in all directions at once. Then it cut off, like a hand turning off the lights.

Pax pushed aside a couple of nurses and laid Julie on the bed.

He cleared his throat. This time it worked. “She seems to be having a cardiac arrest,” he said as calmly as he could. His entire body seemed to be vibrating with an overabundance of nervous energy. “Please begin CPR.”

He was shoved backward. They had no more idea than he did what was going on with him, but they knew what to do about an ordinary heart attack.

“Clear!”

Julie’s heart wasn’t starting the way it was supposed to. The energy it was producing seemed hesitant, giving a few pulses and then dying out again.

“Clear!”

Her chest arced upward.

Mom. She’d always seemed too unemotional and rational. Cold. After his father had died, even cruel. He’d told himself a thousand times she wouldn’t truly miss him when he was gone. He’d never stopped to consider the reverse. He was meant to die before her.

He circled the crowd around the bed to stand at the foot of it, looking at her. Her feet splayed outward limply in her shoes.

Her heartbeat stuttered to life and then stopped again.

She was so small. When had she become so tiny?

Someone grabbed his arm to pull him away from the bed.

“Clear!”

He wasn’t touching the bed. He wasn’t in any danger. He wasn’t causing any problems.

“You need to leave the room, Pax,” the woman said. She didn’t look familiar.

None of these people looked familiar. Their faces seemed distorted and ugly, as if they were made of slightly melted plastic. Was this how all humans would look now? She grabbed his elbow. Her fingernails pressed into his skin. He didn’t register it as pain. But it was still annoying.

“I’m fine,” he said.

“You need to leave the room now.” She dug her fingernails in harder. She was trying to hurt him.

“Get away from me!” he shouted. Flinging her away. Across the room. To smash up against one of the chairs.

Akllana’chikni’pai returned to Earth’s physical plane for the first time in millennia. It was harder than she remembered. Pushing through the layers of the aether seemed to tear at her soul, scouring it of social niceties, ethics, sanity. Leaving her a vengeful spirit: an ugliness in the world. An infection of hate.

She tried to conceal her emotions as much as possible from Terkun’shuks’pai. He knew she hadn’t forgiven humanity for what had happened to her; he had no hope of swaying her opinion politically. But that wouldn’t matter. She, like he, was sworn to be objective in her reports. If the humans were not at risk, those reports would show it.

She didn’t intend that they would. Humans were dangerous and vile and violent. They would destroy everything, given a chance.

And Terkun’shuks’pai had just turned two of them into astral beings.

The girl lay on the floor, bucking under the electrical machine the humans were vainly using to make her heart beat again. Meanwhile, her spirit fought desperately to get back into the body Terkun’shuks’pai had created for her.

It wasn’t supposed to happen like this.

Terkun’shuks’pai had assured the Council it would be easy enough. The two of them would retain a link to the astral plane, use it to build a physical body for the boy, and move the boy’s spirit into it. He’d demonstrated the process a dozen times; they had practiced together. Once the boy was steady in his body, Terkun’shuks’pai would release him. Then they could remain near and observe how such power affected humans.

The boy was easy enough to find. On his own, Pax threw off more energy than any other being on the planet. He was in his death throes—that was clear from the jagged spikes in his energy—but even so, he lit up his world.

No wonder Terkun’shuks’pai had chosen the boy.

Such flames as this didn’t burn for long. It was a miracle—probably of Terkun’shuks’pai’s doing—that the boy had survived as long as he had.

The girl burned just as bright. But she wasn’t supposed to get an astral body. She could just die.

“Akllana’chikni’pai!” Terkun’shuks’pai’s voice was filled with urgency. “You must help her, now! Before the tentacles take control!”

“What are they?” Akllana’chikni’pai demanded.

“Negative energy,” said Terkun’shuks’pai. “They must not be allowed to control her, or all will be lost. Hurry!”

She didn’t have time to ask what he meant, didn’t have time to think about it. She could feel the panic coming off him. Acting purely on instinct, she gave the girl’s spirit the same shove into her new body as Terkun’shuks’pai had given the boy. Akllana’chikni’pai followed her in.

She could understand Terkun’shuks’pai’s desire to save the boy. If Terkun’shuks’pai would want to save one person on Earth before he cut it off from the astral plane, it would be this one.

Inside the girl’s body, the negative energy had already established itself. It was arranged in complex strands, looping back on itself as if trying to create a stable matrix in which to exist. Negative energy generally lashed out at everything around those who produced it, causing an indiscriminate chain reaction. Once fear or hate was unleashed, it was difficult to stop.

But this was different. The negative energy that bombarded the girl was now woven with weaker, yet incredibly complex strands of positive energy to guide it into more stable form.

Had humans developed the ability to tame negative emotions since the last time she’d been on Earth?

Impossible. It must be the girl herself, her own unique, bright burning energy enabling her to control the darkness within her. What would happen if that negative energy were released from the weaves Scarlett’s spirit had harnessed it with?

Akllana’chikni’pai pushed inside the girl’s spirit with some care. She’d had enough experience working with humans that she could have broken through more quickly but doing so might have unlocked the negative energy bound up in the girl.

Akllana’chikni’pai. Is the girl all right?

She is, she answered, but the negative energy has woven itself through her body.

You must contain it. You can’t let it control her psyche. It will destroy her and everyone in the room.

Can you help?

I cannot. The negative energy is after the boy as well and he does not have control of his body yet.

Is everything all right?

I… I am exhausted.

For Terkun’shuks’pai to admit any kind of weakness was rare. She bit back irrational resentment at his failure. Should we stop it? Should we let them die?

No! If we do not do this now, we may never have the chance again. Break the girl free of the negative energy!

First admitting weakness, then expressing concern about events that were happening on a merely physical level, which should have been completely under his control.

He must truly value the boy.

I will, she answered. Akllana’chikni’pai gently pushed the girl’s spirit out of her mortal body and set it to the side.

The girl’s spirit watched in shock. I look dead.

Akllana’chikni’pai smiled. You are dead, she told the girl.

Watching the girl’s reaction soon brought back memories of Earth, thousands of their years ago. Unpleasant memories.

The new body was ready. Akllana’chikni’pai focused her energy, connecting it to the new body, and pushed her energy, as well as her awareness, through the connection.

The body settled around her, heavy and lifeless.

Her energy was not bringing it to life. The negative energy was holding tightly to it, forcing it to remain dead while it struggled to find the girl’s spirit.

Akllana’chikni’pai burned brighter, expending more of her energy than she had planned, trying to destroy the negative energy that encased the girl. Still, there was no response. The body only settled more heavily around her, sealing her off completely from the aetheric planes.

Terkun’shuks’pai!

But he did not answer, or could not. She was alone.

Frantic, she pulled her remaining energy back to her core identity. The most important thing was that she keep the negative energy contained. It must not be released. Not now.

The negative energy reached out, grabbed the girl’s spirit, and pulled it back into the body. Akllana’chikni’pai cursed and fought, trying to push the girl out. Now was not the time to be distracted with the girl’s panic.

But it was too late. The girl flowed into Akllana’chikni’pai, and, inevitably, part of Akllana’chikni’pai flowed into the girl. Scarlett. Then the negative energy engulfed them both.

And started weaving itself into her.

Akllana’chikni’pai, trapped inside a body that felt like stone, screamed.

The astral being kicked Scarlett’s ass out of her own body without warning.

Bitch.

But Scarlett had seen it coming. She was just an obstacle in the way of whatever astral-plane politics was going on. Why should this so-called friend of Terry’s give a shit about some lower life form? No point getting angry about it. She couldn’t do anything that might screw up the plan to save Pax.

Scarlett looked down at herself for a moment. The new body was leaking white goop, just like Pax’s had, but it also had black energy weaving in and out of it. In about a second it was covered with medical professionals trying to get her heart started up again. Jesus. It was like watching a classroom full of new students practicing on a mannequin. How could they even remotely believe they were working on human bodies? They were on autopilot from all the adrenaline, probably. Not really thinking.

The astral bitch had kicked Scarlett to the curb, but Scarlett was still tied to her new body by some kind of string that was frayed in the middle. No, it was two strings—one white, one black, trying to tie themselves together but failing to do so. Scarlett could feel waves of pissed-off panic radiating out of the body as the astral bitch struggled to make the body live.

Then the black string and the white one intertwined, and Scarlett flowed down into her new body.

Once she was inside, it felt like the whole body was trying to resist her control. Probably the astral bitch was trying to kick her out again.

Jesus, lady, she thought. Why you gotta be so fucking rude? I have to live here, too, you know.

There was no answer.

Scarlett forced the body to blink, one slow millimeter at a time.

When her lids clicked together, it felt like she’d had to topple over a small building. The next blink was easier: as if the first building had crashed into the next, helping knock it over. She was starting a chain reaction. She focused on breathing, then on sitting up. Each action she took was easier than the last, moving her more toward normal. Some fool had made the body with eyelids, but not with any way to see out of the blank marbles behind them. Idiots.

But she was able to hear, and some kind of fight was going on in the room. Pax was shouting. Everybody was shouting. At least a dozen people must be in here, even more than there had been before.

These astral beings had fucked up. They weren’t as perfect as Pax had thought they were. Pax always saw the best parts of people—or at least the most logical parts—and, considering what a horrible, illogical person Scarlett was at heart, she’d rather he kept it that way. Let him be naïve.

Scarlett was just going to have to protect him from them. From everyone.

She grabbed onto the noise from the shouting and the beeping and the panic and the fighting and forced the sounds to show her what was going on. If bats could do it, so could she. It didn’t make sense. She made it work anyway. That was the benefit of being so illogical. Her whole life, nothing had really made sense, but she had made it work anyway.

Another blink, and she could see.

Aaaand she could see via every surface of her body that wasn’t covered by clothing. Jesus, Scarlett. Overdo it much? It made her feel dizzy. But at least she could see.

Pax was shoving people away from the bed. Julie was lying on top of the blankets. She looked… she looked fucking dead.

Someone shoved Scarlett back onto the floor and pounded her chest. They were starting another round of compressions.

“I think she’s coming back to us!” the overenthusiastic nurse kneeling above her shouted. Well, good for him. She didn’t have time to put up with his dipshit heroics.

She brought up her arms in a self-defense move that was supposed to be used against chokeholds, intending to knock his arms aside. Instead, she slammed into his arms with a sickening crunch. The guy screamed, pulling back his arms, which now flopped at crazy angles. A bone jutted out of one, revealing a yellow membrane through the torn skin; the wound began spurting blood.

Great. Nobody told me I was going to have super strength. A little bit of a warning would have been nice.

Pax shouted. “Stop fucking around and help my mom!”

Scarlett had never heard him that pissed before. He always claimed not to be that close to Julie, but he had totally gone into defensive mode over her. He was freaking out, pushing everyone away from the bed now, even the people who were trying to help his mom.

“Pax!” she yelled at him. “Get it under control!”

He didn’t seem to hear her. He bent over Julie’s bed with his arms outstretched.

The air around him seemed to shimmer. The beeping of the monitors got quieter and then stopped completely. Thank God. The lights went dim; even the sunshine coming in through the window seemed to turn down a notch.

Around Pax the shimmering intensified, turning into a sphere of bright blue light. The sphere shoved the doctors away from the bed and made the ends of the sheet flutter. It looked like some kind of shield. One of the nurses, squinting one eye shut and holding her hand out at arm’s length, touched it with one finger. The shield sparked, sending her stumbling backward.

The shield filled the doorway. Anxious faces looked through it into the room. A guy with a clipboard tried to poke it with the clipboard and was thrown out of view.

Every time someone touched Pax’s shield, sparks lit up and they were knocked away—but the shield got a little dimmer for a second. If the staff attacked all at once, they might be able to take it down.

Scarlett got up, trying to move carefully. It was hard. It was like her body was a puppet, and the strings weren’t quite tight yet. “Pax,” she called toward the shield. “You gotta let them help her.”

But Pax ignored her. He was still bending over his mom on the bed, his hands hovering over her chest. He was locking his fingers together, one hand over the other, and positioning them over her chest. Getting ready to do compressions.

Not yet knowing about his super strength.

No, Pax!

She shoved the doctors and nurses aside and clawed at the force field. The shield dimmed almost to darkness as it shot out blinding sparks. But she wasn’t going to make it through in time.

Pax’s hands came down.

She closed her eyes. It didn’t help. She could still see what was happening on the bed.

It was horrible. Too horrible to think about.

The room went black and her skin went cold as Pax drained the energy from the room. The shield burned even brighter, casting a blue glow over the room.

No, Pax. No.

She wanted to break down in tears, but this body didn’t know how. Pax’s shield expanded, pushing her away from the bed, and she stumbled. When she put out her hands to steady herself, sparks shot out of her fingertips. A haze rose over her hands, like heat off a hot asphalt road.

Pax howled.

The doctors and nurses were circling closer. Screaming. Horrified. Murderer.

“Stay back!” Scarlett shouted. “Just stay away from them! He’s gonna… he’s gonna fix it, okay?”

For a second, they hesitated.

But one of them had to open his mouth. “He killed her.”

Scarlett clenched her hands. The sparks shooting out of her fingers increased. She clenched her hands tighter to try to keep the energy from escaping. Calm. She had to stay calm.

“Shut up,” she said. She’d meant to be nicer.

“He killed Dr. Black!”

And the guy pushed her.

That was it.

Scarlett swung one hand through the air. A hazy ball of sparks and heat flew out of her hand and slammed into the man, knocking him into the wall. He bounced off and crashed into one of the chairs.

Her teeth chattered. Oh, no. She wanted to apologize, but just now it would be a bad idea. “Just shut your mouth and stay the fuck away. Give him some time. He just needs some time.”

She should have known it wasn’t going to work. To them she was just a… a kid. They weren’t going to listen to her. Why should they? They were doctors.

But she couldn’t let them interrupt Pax. Not now.

Unfortunately, in pushing the doctor away from her, she’d made herself a target, and now everyone was glaring at her. Couldn’t they see they’d forced her to attack?

She held her hands out in front of her. They were shimmering with heat.

A couple of big nurses moved to the sides of the room, trying to sneak up behind her. The rest of the staff, five of them, formed a group in front of her. They were going to rush her all at once.

What she really wanted to do was curl up in a ball and cry. She should just let them try to crash through that supercharged force field and see what happened.

It’d probably kill them.

If she lashed out at them, she’d probably kill them.

If only… if only they would just stop… and listen….

She lowered her arms. The two big nurses grabbed her by the arms…

They pulled away, shouting and staring at their hands. Blisters were coming up on the thick skin of their palms. She’d burned them.

Of course she’d burned them. The tiles under her feet were melting. The ceiling panels above her were turning dark gray. The air was shimmering around her. Couldn’t they see? No. They were too sure of what they already knew to see anything else.

On the bed, Julie’s ruined, splintered chest arched upward and fell back again. Pax held his hands over her. His face was intense with concentration.

He was keeping her alive somehow.

And in horrible pain. Behind the force field, Julie’s face looked gray. But her muscles were so tight her neck looked like it was being pulled upward on cords. Her mouth stretched so wide it looked like her jaw was going to dislocate. Her open eyes gaped without seeing anything but horror.

Let her go. But even if she screamed it, Pax wouldn’t hear her.

The only thing she knew was she couldn’t let him get distracted. Not now.

Damn it. Where were those astral fucks when you needed them?

One of the doctors retreated back into the corner and took out her cell phone. Someone with some sense. Too bad Scarlett wasn’t ready to let anyone else know what was going on. Scarlett pointed at the cell phone with one finger—her hand wasn’t just shimmering with heat now, it was on fire—and the phone crackled and exploded in the woman’s hands and then started melting onto the floor. The battery pack burned next to her nursing shoes. The woman stared at her bleeding hand for a few seconds and then screamed.

Scarlett realized it was useless: The staff in the hallway had probably already called the cops. Or the fucking National Guard. And why not? The room looked like a war zone.

Mostly she felt horrified at herself. This had all spiraled out of control. She was supposed to be saving Pax, not unleashing World War III.

But another part of her didn’t care. It felt the fire burning on her hands—felt the fire, but not any pain—and was crazy to try it out. To find out what might happen if she… if she stepped into the power that was hers now.

She glanced over at Pax again, afraid he’d somehow heard that last thought. He couldn’t think badly of her. He just couldn’t.

But he was still working on Julie, gesturing at her while she twitched on the bed. His dead, yet still suffering, mom. Maybe he didn’t know what Scarlett had done yet. Who she really was.

“Stay away from him,” she said, pointing her shaking finger at the people still standing in the room, “or I’ll hurt you.”

It wasn’t a threat. It was a warning.

The doctor with the cell phone rushed at her. Still screaming.

With a stiff arm, Scarlett pointed toward the woman’s feet.

Don’t lose control. Don’t lose control.

Scarlett released a tiny amount of the sparking, burning energy in her hand.

The floor exploded, throwing tile everywhere.

The doctor was punched backward into the wall so hard she stuck there. A second later, she flopped forward, her arms and legs dangling limply over the seat of a chair.

Oh, shit.

What had Scarlett done?

She felt a sick bubble of laughter coming up from inside her. She tried to swallow it. A single, tiny giggle escaped.

“I warned you,” she told the people still upright and moving. Her lips were twitching, trying to grin. But she wasn’t actually talking. She was mentally projecting her thoughts out loud. She hoped—

“—that I’m not losing control,” she said. Out loud.

Now that was just hilarious.

She laughed without opening her mouth. The sound echoed around the room. Her body was shaking, trying to mimic the way a real person would laugh, but it was all in her head.

All in her head.

Scarlett’s hands were rising in front of her, as if she were being mind-controlled.

But she knew she wasn’t. She wished one of the astrals would take control of her. Inside herself, she was screaming.

Her hands rose, the fingers stretching toward the doctors.

The sound of her laughter was so loud, it was driving her crazy.

“Help me,” she said.

Like those pitiful doctors could do anything.

The ends of her fingers crackled with sparks and burned with hot, white fire.

Chapter 5

Terkun’shuks’pai could not control the body he had created. Could not, as he had planned, animate it. Could not bring it to life.

This shocked him.

The astral material was always so responsive on the astral plane and only slightly less so in the various physical realms where he’d tested it previously, yet now that he was physically on Earth, the astral material defied all reason and control. It absorbed the energy he fed it, but it would not respond to his efforts to give it the spark of life.

He had failed; his plans were all for nothing, and the boy would lose his life. His calculated, awful risk was—

The boy’s spirit, acting in some mysterious way Terkun’shuks’pai could not have predicted, entered the body and made it live.

Terkun’shuks’pai was not so shocked that he was unable to anchor himself in the body and proceed with the next steps in his plans.

But it unsettled him for a few long, essential moments. He isolated himself briefly within the boy’s mind, gathering himself for the tasks ahead.

When his mind had cleared, he slipped into the boy’s mortal senses and viewed the room.

The boy had committed a grave error.

Considering the state of the boy’s hands—bloody—and that of the woman’s chest—crushed and punctured—Terkun’shuks’pai believed the boy had punched through the woman’s chest with his hands. Considering his emotional state afterward, he hadn’t done it on purpose. But life was fragile, and the mortal plane physically unforgiving.

And yet the mortal female lived: the boy had bound his energy to her and was attempting to rebuild her heart from the ruined tissue within her chest cavity. The body in front of them arched upward, her face in a rictus of pain. The boy was trying to save her—but instead he had become the woman’s torturer.

Kill me, her spirit wept. Just let it end.

The boy was making a brilliant, if insufficient, attempt at repairing the heart tissue. He had already begun to create specialized cardiac muscle in shapeless globs that lay against her ribs. But his efforts were doomed to failure; he had created the muscle and even a few blood vessels, but he had forgotten the nerves. Even if he had remembered them and the other essential elements of the tissue, he was working so slowly the rest of the woman’s body would have degraded past use by the time he had finished. The processes of death were doing their inevitable work, despite the life the boy pumped frantically into her.

And his lack of skill was only making the woman’s suffering worse.

Rather than startle the boy, Terkun’shuks’pai planted a subconscious impulse in the boy’s mind to take control of the woman’s energy, rather than her flesh. Currently the strands of her spirit were rigid with worry, agony, doubt, and even self-loathing, which made the life the boy pumped into her cause her pain, rather than offer healing.

The boy’s mother.

While astral beings tended not to have parents so much as progenitors, Terkun’shuks’pai grasped Earth relationships well enough to understand the death of the woman would affect the boy far more than most other deaths, even that of a lover’s, would.

The situation was even more delicate than he had thought.

Pax, following the subconscious impulse Terkun’shuks’pai had planted, grasped a strand of his mother’s turbulent, rotting, grayish-brown energy and lifted it carefully out of her chest. Using his thumb as a guide, Pax drew his hand along the strand, firmly but gently straightening it and smoothing away the knots and tangles, and then pouring his energy into it.

As soon as he had done so, more tangles erupted from the thread, and the energy was dissipated uselessly as pain that wracked the woman’s body.

Waves of disappointment passed through the boy.

Terkun’shuks’pai nudged him to repeat the maneuver. Soon the boy realized the turbulence was less each time, as was the woman’s pain.

The ridges come from the inside, Pax thought, and Terkun’shuks’pai sent a wave of confidence toward the boy. Pax was correct; it was a difficult, repetitive process to heal a physical body via energy alone, but once one had the trick of it, it removed the need for extensive study of each separate species’ physical patterns. A less-than-satisfactory, but perfectly valid, method. A beginner’s method.

Thank you, the boy thought.

Terkun’shuks’pai, startled the boy was even aware of his presence, shuddered at the possible danger to his plans—if the boy could sense him, even now—

Involuntarily, the boy’s hand pressed the vibration of Terkun’shuks’pai’s surprise into his mother’s energy and her mouth stretched wide in agony. Hurriedly, the boy smoothed out the ripples again and released her energy. The thread sank into her now-repaired body. The boy watched it curiously.

The area of her chest that had been rebuilt was as young as that of a woman in the prime of her reproductive years; it bore no stretch marks, wrinkles, discolorations, or scars. It was the body her genetics would have given her, in a perfect world.

The boy’s nostrils flared, his disgust at seeing his mother’s naked chest mingling with Terkun’shuks’pai’s regret at the necessary distortion he had forced on the woman’s body. Time created beauty, not perfection.

The immediate emergency resolved for now, he extended his senses and looked around the room.

It contained a great deal of chaos.

Several humans were dying; others were severely damaged. Doctors lay strewn around the room like so much garbage, and more humans, including guards with guns, were on their way to the room.

The girl, who should have been under Akllana’chikni’pai’s guidance, was shuddering and raising her hands as if they were on puppet strings. Her spirit was heavy with heat energy being focused on the remaining humans in the room, who were preparing to make a brave, and probably final, stand to get past Pax’s shield to the woman on the bed. Terkun’shuks’pai could sense the negative energy that filled the girl’s body unbinding itself, controlling her, threatening to unleash fire and destruction.

Events were drifting far from his intentions, farther than he could allow at this time.

A hideous gargling sound echoed around the room: the girl’s laughter. Her mind was shattering along with her control.

If he, Terkun’shuks’pai, had struggled to gain control of the body, and dared do little, lest he disrupt the boy’s balance, what struggles must Akllana’chikni’pai be going through now? She had a particular horror of being trapped inside a body and had a spirit that often turned to rage and pyrotechnics.

She, too, must be spiraling out of control.

Pax, can you hear me? Terkun’shuks’pai asked.

I can, said Pax. Help me. Please help me!

Let me have control, Pax, said Terkun’shuks’pai. I will fix it all, but you need to let me have control for a short time.

How?

Terkun’shuks’pai showed him with a thought. Pax faded back into his own mind, and Terkun’shuks’pai stepped forward to take control of the body.

“Enough,” Terkun’shuks’pai said with Pax’s voice. “Scarlett, listen to me. You can stop now. I will make the doctors leave Pax alone.”

He waved his hand, and the doctors froze, unable to take another step forward.

The girl sobbed, her arms shaking, but the negative energy within her continued to disentangle itself from the clever weaves she had trapped it in. It would take more than mere words to help her regain control now.

The doctors, screaming in pain and fear, swarmed with negative energy, as if their spirits were a hive of eels stirred by a hunter’s spear. They were in a blind panic now, their emotions darkening even as Terkun’shuks’pai considered them. In preventing the doctors from attacking physically, he had panicked them, and now they were attacking with all the negative energy they could produce.

This lashed out at the girl, trying to punish her. It was irrational, but she had become the target of their fear and hate.

If anyone, they should be attacking Terkun’shuks’pai.

The girl’s spirit, shimmering black and ready to boil over, absorbed the negative energy and changed it to heat. Her body had become a kind of engine fueled by negative energy—human or otherwise. The girl was not the powerhouse the boy was, but she might prove almost as destructive, if handled poorly.

Terkun’shuks’pai could kill the other humans in the room, which would be the simpler method, or he could create a careful illusion. He chose the second; it was more challenging, and therefore more satisfying.

Terkun’shuks’pai centered himself, gathering energy from the world around him while carefully avoiding the negative energy crowding the room. He drew most of it from a large park outside, from the sun, from a breeze that smelled of water, and from the more ordinary business of life.

Using a delicacy he had developed over eons, he slowed time itself.

It was easy enough for an astral being, if one knew the trick of it. All physical things originated in the astral plane, however indirectly; the astral plane controlled the aetheric planes, one of which was time.

Not many bothered to travel the aetheric planes, seeing them merely as realms that must be traversed on the way to some physical pleasure-realm or another, but Terkun’shuks’pai had not only traveled the aetheric planes, he had studied them. Few astral beings had bothered to reach into the realms below, considering them too unimportant to understand. But Terkun’shuks’pai’s existence had been greatly enriched by his studies—even though sometimes he found the burden of knowledge almost more than he could bear.

Quickly, he healed the dying and injured humans in the room, repairing internal rupturing, straightening bones, renewing skin tissue, and replacing lost fluids.

He did not smooth the ridges of their souls. Humanity should treasure its weakness and anger and irrationality, should treasure the ability to tame it and use it, as these children did.

However, he did repair the room and erase the memories of those around them. As far as the other humans could recall, the boy had had a cardiac event, but had been successfully returned to life once again.

He erased the memories of pain for the woman on the bed but allowed her to remember she had also had a cardiac event. She needed to take care with her new flesh: it should be healthy, but there had already been several events this day that should have gone differently.

He turned to the girl.

“Akllana’chikni’pai? Are you able to communicate?”

The girl looked at him. On the physical plane, her eyes were blazing red marbles, streaked with cat’s-eyes of orange and yellow. The plain, white astral material of her body had become a burnt ember, black and orange, radiating a sheen of heat that became, on her head, a swirling, bulging mass of fire.

Terkun’shuks’pai chuckled. It was as if Akllana’chikni’pai’s spirit had been brought into the physical realm.

“What?” the girl demanded in an antagonistic tone.

He was unsure whether it was Scarlett or Akllana’chikni’pai speaking, but it mattered little. “You are a creature of fire now.”

“So?” she asked. “You should look at yourself. You’re covered in… in white metal.”

Terkun’shuks’pai sent part of his awareness out of the body, as much to see what would happen as to get a better look.

It was true: the boy’s skin—that was, the outer surface of the astral material—had become metallic. He sampled the metal.

“Titanium,” he said. “An excellent material.”

He extended his senses toward the aetheric planes. He wished to extricate the two of them from the large, densely populated hospital. The girl had been speaking almost intelligibly, but she was still shaking. It was obvious, despite her calm—if somewhat rude—tone that she was still on the edge of losing control.

A nearby park would provide him with a great deal of natural, positive energy.

Terkun’shuks’pai stepped through the aetheric plane to make the journey less confusing for the mortals around them and pulled the girl along with him.

In a moment, they were standing on a layer of thick, green grass. It had begun.

Not Central Park!

Bringing Scarlett here right now was a bad idea. A phenomenally bad idea. It would have been safer, and probably just as easy, for Terry to take them to the North Pole or the Sahara Desert, or someplace where they wouldn’t blow up a million people if something went wrong.

But it was too late now because Scarlett was on fire, and two kids had seen them and were running right toward them, and Pax didn’t know how to teleport. Pax tried to send his thought to Terry again—beam me out, Terry—but Terry wasn’t receiving.

Birds were chirping, the sky was blue, flowers were blooming, Pax appreciated the fact that he wasn’t sneezing…

But no matter how nice a day it was, those two kids were going to die.

School must have just let out. The two kids were in matching gray and blue uniforms with gold trim. They were maybe ten years old, a black kid with a shaved head and big ears, and a white one with a beak of a nose and no chin. They were both holding long, greenish willow branches with the bark peeled off.

“Whoa! Look at that lady! Is this some kind of special effect? Is this a movie?” the black kid yelled.

Scarlett waved her burning hands in front of her. “Stay away from me!”

Pax stood in front of her with his arms spread out. If he’d been human, the heat would have blistered his skin, blackened his clothes, and caught his hair on fire. The air already smelled like something was burning.

“No!” he shouted, sounding like an idiot. “Stop!”

The kids stopped on the other side of Pax and peeked around him.

“Yow, lady, you’re hot!” yelled the white kid and they both laughed honking, goosey laughs.

The white kid tried to poke Scarlett with his stick but Pax grabbed it, broke it in half, and flung it away.

He threw it so hard the two halves of the stick flew up and over the trees, disappearing over the edge of the park.

“Wow!” said the black kid. “What are you? Superheroes? Where are your superhero suits?”

“You’re naked, dude,” the white kid added helpfully.

Crap. In the middle of all this, he’d forgotten about clothes.

“Just back off,” he said.

“Gimme your stick,” the white kid said. “They’re not superheroes. It’s just special effects. Here.” He reached toward the black kid, took his stick, and swung it at Pax.

The stick made his skin ring like a church bell. Donnnng!

“Holy shit,” the white kid said.

“Stupid kids,” muttered Pax. He flicked his fingers, and a blue wave of energy slammed into the two kids, carrying them backward and throwing them into the grass.

“I told you they were superheroes!” the black kid screamed at the top of his lungs as he sailed through the air.

A dozen other heads were turned toward Pax and Scarlett now.

No, no, no!

He threw up a shield. It resisted slightly when he tried to surround Scarlett, but he pushed, and it snapped over her. Now he and Scarlett were inside the sphere. Hypothetically safe, all their problems solved. Except he wasn’t sure how much damage the sphere could withstand…

…and it didn’t seem to be doing anything about the dark tentacles pouring off the people around them.

The tentacles were black and kind of wet-looking, like slugs, and they oozed over the grass and even through the air toward the two of them. When the tentacles hit the sphere, the shield rippled and gave way, allowing them to ooze through.

Scarlett stumbled backward with her burning-coal hands held up in front of her until she hit the wall of the sphere and slid down it, landing on her ass on the charred ground. The tentacles shoved themselves onto her. Some of them latched onto her feet. Others onto her thighs. The ones she tried to push away just stuck to her hands.

They were absorbed into her charcoal skin with sick, bulging twitches, like leeches sucking up blood.

Negative energy.

The black kid ran toward the shield at full speed and hit it with a spray of blue sparks before being thrown backward.

The shield flickered. Brightened.

The kid got back up again. The white kid stood beside him. They looked determined, like they were getting ready to fight the bad guys. They were stupid. They were ten.

Both the kids charged the shield. This time they were joined by several adults, some of whom were trying to catch the kids to stop them, and some of whom seemed to be charging at Pax’s sphere on the general principle of “If it’s weird, kill it.”

The sphere sent up more sparks as it threw the group of people back. Dimmed. Brightened.

But not quite as bright as before.

The kids were dragged off by a group of adults, but that wasn’t the end of it. The sphere was still being charged by several adult men who all wore orange and white shirts and looked like they were on the same soccer team. One of them charged the sphere and got flung back by the sparks—but the blow pushed the sphere a few inches off the lawn and toward the trees behind them. The next man charged, and the sphere slid farther. There was no sense to it. No reason for it. They were doing it just because they could. Pax was trying to save their lives, and all they could see was a giant soccer ball.

“Knock it off!” he shouted.

The men kept charging.

The wall jerked out from behind her, dropping her head on the ground. Big waves of fire whipped around her face like they were trying to choke her. She screamed and tried to scrape them off—then realized they were her hair.

She grabbed it all in a hank and flipped it up into a bun. It wouldn’t stay, so she grabbed a pointy stick and jabbed it in.

The stick burst into flame, and her hair just got all over the place again.

Why did everything have to be so damn hard?

The sphere was dimming. In a few seconds, it was going to pop or explode or disappear or something, like a soap bubble. And then the men who kept charging at them would run into Pax. Or worse, her.

Scarlett looked down at herself.

Her belly button was almost white-hot in the center. Flakes of ash crumbled off the side and drifted upward with the heat. Flakes of ash were everywhere. Flakes of burnt grass. Flakes of burnt Scarlett.

The ground was black just from being too close to her.

She had to get control of herself again.

But how?

A horrible little voice in her head whispered that when Pax’s bubble burst, she should start shooting fire at the people attacking them. They were threatening Pax. They deserved whatever she did to them.

Hotter. She should be hotter.

She tried to ignore the voice. She’d been ignoring it her whole life. Everybody has those urges. That didn’t mean you had to follow them.

Not a problem.

But hotter would be good.

She could burn them up before they could say wow, that’s fucking hot. They’d look like hot dogs that’d been on the grill too long. They’d smell like burnt meat.

She could taste them.

The black tentacles pushed farther into her, and fire drooled down the side of her mouth and splashed on her knees.

Scarlett curled up around the burning hole in her belly button and started to cry.

Pax felt the bubble burst deep in his chest.

It twanged the same way a bubble of mucous rising out of his lungs would have, if he still had lungs and could still get pneumonia.

But it still left him feeling dizzy and weak. And numb. He couldn’t feel his legs.

He didn’t feel like a superhero anymore. Right now he was paper.

His legs bent and dropped him to the ground. He caught himself on his hands and knees. His lungs were burning. He couldn’t feel his heartbeat. It reminded him of being back in his old body. Good times.

The heat was blasting out from behind him, turning the grass on either side of his hands from bright green to shriveled brown in seconds. Scarlett was getting hotter. Pax dug his hands into the dirt. Get up, Pax. You have to fix this. Get up!

But he couldn’t. He didn’t have the energy.

After a few moments of fucking power, he was, once again, too weak.

The edge of the grass caught on fire.

Pax coughed. Someone grabbed his shoulder and pulled him to his feet. Suddenly he was staring at the beet-red face of an Irish cop whose white shirt was smudged with ash. The guy opened his mouth to start shouting at Pax. Beads of sweat hatched out of the cop’s forehead, ran down his cheeks, and dried before they hit his chin.

“Run,” whispered Pax.

He was being swung through the air and pitched onto greener, cooler grass.

The cops must be trying to save him from Scarlett. It was almost funny enough to make him laugh.

Pax rolled with the fall and dragged himself back up on his feet. His energy must be regenerating—but not very quickly. He had to find another source, and fast.

People had already crowded between him and Scarlett. The Irish cop was shouting and trying to direct people away from the area, but nobody was listening. People in business suits and skirts. Joggers with and without big-wheeled strollers. Hipsters dragging bicycles and wearing black-framed glasses. Senior citizens. Japanese tourists. Everybody was taking pictures of Scarlett on their iPhones.

Everyone gasped and swore at the same time, and the people in the center tried to take a step back at the same time as the people outside the circle pushed inward and stood on tiptoe with their phones over their heads, trying to see what was going on.

Sirens were going off; cops were rushing in and shoving people back. Fire trucks were closing in.

Pax staggered forward, grabbing onto the shoulders of a couple of senior citizens in front of him to keep from falling down again. They both turned around to look at him. They were wearing matching sunglasses and “World’s Best Grandparents” sweatshirts.

“Move,” he said. “Run.”

The man shoved Pax’s hands off their shoulders and turned back to face the action.

Gotta love New York.

Pax grabbed their shoulders again and shoved them to the side. “Get out of the way! I’ve got work to do.”

The man whimpered while his wife gave Pax a dirty look from behind her sunglasses.

“The fuck is wrong with you people?” he demanded, pushing his way forward again.

A burst of flame shot up into the sky.

Everyone’s faces turned skyward for a second. The flame, shaped like a weather balloon, rose up about a couple of hundred meters and disappeared into the deep blue sky, leaving a short trail of black smoke. The wind caught it and carried it out toward Queens.

Scarlett was getting worse.

The crowd pressed tighter.

Scarlett knelt on her hands and knees and panted.

Another blast of heat was building up in her gut like a stomach full of bad seafood. She burped. It tasted like rotten eggs mixed with matches. A six-year-old kid wearing a Batman shirt screamed, “Mom, that lady stinks!”

Scarlett moaned, “Lady… I can’t hold onto this much longer. Get—”burrrrp“—your kid out of here as fast as you can.”

Her stomach heaved, and she had to swallow back burning acid. She was gonna hurl again. She sat back on her feet and looked upward. She didn’t know what would happen if she puked downward. Probably the heat would blast all over the place and kill everyone.

Just kill him. Put him out of his misery. He’s just going to grow up to be a waste of space anyway.

She balled up her fists on her thighs and waited for the next wave of vomit.

Her face itched. When she scratched it, a black mask made of ash fell into her hands. For a second it looked back at her with blank eyes. Then it fell apart like melting snow.

Don’t hurt anyone. Don’t hurt anyone.

It was coming. It was coming.

She threw her head back and puked fire.

It blasted straight up, almost hitting one of the helicopters circling above her.

Hey, yeah, that suspected terrorist in Central Park? Right here.

The fire roaring out of her was loud, but not loud enough to drown out the sounds of people panicking. The ones who could see what was going on were trying to get away. And the ones who couldn’t see were trying to push their way in. Whistles blew. Every cop in the park must’ve been there, trying to help people escape. Or trying to arrest her.

Good luck with that.

Babies were crying.

Scarlett closed her eyes. Another wave of nausea hit her and she puked again.

The negative energy was pouring into her faster and faster, igniting her flames brighter and brighter. In a couple of minutes, she was going to be puking constantly. But that still wasn’t going to be enough. The more she puked, the more she terrified people, and the more negative energy they sent her way.

It was never going to stop. It was like being asked to swallow the East River.

A long, black whip of negative energy lashed across Akllana’chikni’pai’s face. The cut burned weakly. She wiped the back of her hand across her face and inspected the blood on it: it rippled on her hand, orange fire mingled with black smoke. A sign of her building rage. A sign of purity: the fire that burned her clean of negative energy.

She was trapped in a small pacha within the girl’s mind, a blank, featureless space that wasn’t even a room. The pacha had been all she could create; the negative energy had drained her of too much energy for anything more sophisticated.

She could sense nothing from outside. She could control nothing. She was trapped until Terkun’shuks’pai came to rescue her. How pitiful she was, the mighty warrior of the astral plane, reduced, once again, to a prisoner. And now the girl had allowed herself to become so overwhelmed with negative energy it was invading even the tiny prison Akllana’chikni’pai had been able to create.

Akllana’chikni’pai bared her teeth. Insult after insult. Injury after injury.

At least the whip of negative energy presented a target.

From within her spirit, she drew two long, slightly curved swords out of the fire in her gut. With a couple of flicks of her wrists, she turned the cutting edges toward the whip of negative energy. A second whip joined it, and a third. They appeared to confer with each other, their tips gesturing toward her and then nudging each other.

Akllana’chikni’pai beckoned with the tip of one sword. “Stop debating which one to send in, you cowards. All of you attack me together and see where that gets you.”

The three of them touched their tips together briefly. They were joined by a fourth and a fifth.

They attacked as one.

Akllana’chikni’pai flicked the tip of one of her swords contemptuously through the ends of the whips of negative energy. They had come at her directly, gathered closely together. If they had been serious about gaining position, they would have come at her from all directions.

The tips fell off and landed at her feet. They sparked, smoked briefly, and went out. The rest of the snakelike whips burst into flame at the cut ends, the fire quickly spreading down their lengths. They fell to the floor of the pacha and burst apart into flakes of black ash.

Akllana’chikni’pai turned and slashed a pair of tendrils that had thought to sneak up behind her. They, too, burst into flames and shortly extinguished themselves.

But more whips had come in: ten of them, twenty.

More, she thought. More! She called to them. You cannot defeat me. You cannot invade me. I am Akllana’chikni’pai, and my spirit endures!

She made a mocking salute and destroyed the dozen whips that had invaded her pacha in those few seconds. “You will come! And I will destroy you!”

Her taunts did not go unanswered. Dozens—no, a hundred—of the whips oozed through the walls of her pacha. Akllana’chikni’pai began a kind of dance, a kata she had been taught eons ago, a kind of celebration of the swords of her spirit, of the cleanness of their cuts, of the purity of their flames.

It was a ritual as old as the stars: it summoned all negative energy nearby, to be consumed by the swords, and their energy turned toward the purification of fire.

The swords flicked through the negative energy, destroying each strand as if it were nothing stronger than smoke. Akllana’chikni’pai drew on the energy thus released and used some of it to strengthen the pacha around her and some of it to burn through the negative energy in the girl’s spirit. She would cleanse the girl of the foulness.

It was a sacred conflagration. A pyre for the sins of humanity, for what they did to each other as much as for what they had done to her.

The pacha beyond the tips of her swords was a swirling, roiling mass of tentacles. Blackness was all she could see, in those few moments she could spare to look. There seemed to be no end to them, but all things came to an end, eventually.

The dance continued.

The negative energy would not defeat her. She was fire. She was the conflagration that purified the world.

And she would set the whole world on fire to achieve her purpose, if necessary.

Chapter 6

Regrettably, Terkun’shuks’pai had to abandon the children for a few moments to finalize the restoration of the hospital. All those who had reacted to the emergency no longer remembered it. All damage was gone. All was as it should have been, save that Pax and Scarlett were now in the park, and Scarlett was threatening to burn down the city.

The girl’s body burned with a fire so hot it must have been painful for any nearby humans to look at. She rested at the bottom of a slight depression in the ground, which smoked at the edges and was pooled with the molten detritus of the burnt earth beneath her. The depression was rapidly becoming a pit as she burned her way downward. Her mouth stretched painfully wide and emitted a steady stream of heat and fire, which she aimed upward.

She seemed vaguely aware of his, or rather the boy’s, presence. Her mouth closed briefly upon the stream of fire. “Kill me,” she begged.

Whether she was trying to save Pax and the people in the park, whether she was suffering unbearable pain, or (most likely) both, it was not, by this time, a practical solution. Akllana’chikni’pai was still inside that body with her, and to kill the girl would destroy Akllana’chikni’pai and any chance Terkun’shuks’pai had of reaching his own goals.

Briefly, Terkun’shuks’pai admired the series of errors that had led to this situation. Having done so, he perceived the simplest, most elegant of solutions and implemented it, with the full understanding that this action, too, was probably a mistake.

As the humans sometimes said, “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.”

Perhaps, someday, after all this was over, his intentions would be recognized.

And forgiven.

Energy flooded into Pax. A suspiciously immense amount of energy. But he didn’t have time to question where it came from. He threw up a shield that knocked the crowd back away from him as if he were parting an ocean.

Scarlett sat in a hole in the ground, burning like the sun. She was light where a girl used to be.

Automatically, he raised his hand to shield his eyes. But his eyes weren’t made of flesh, and he could look into the heart of that flame without blinking. Incredible. He lowered his hand.

Scarlett knelt on the ground with her arms in the air and her back arched. Her mouth was stretched grotesquely wide, as though her jaw were about to split open. Fire burst out of her throat, shooting straight up into the sky. Helicopters rashly circled the burst of flame, some of them, no doubt, taking footage. If she so much as twitched, they’d be toast.

Everything about this situation was wrong. Start to finish. He didn’t even know where to start.

Scarlett.

Was there even a person inside that flaming shell now? Probably not.

Whatever she was doing, it had to stop. That’s all he really knew. Even if it meant both of them had to die: it had to end.

Pax made a throwing gesture, trying to expand the shield to cover Scarlett, but when the shield hit her, it bulged around her like a balloon trying to push around somebody’s finger. He dropped more energy into the shield and pushed harder. The shield bubble distorted even more—but didn’t surround her.

He pushed harder, and she tipped over onto the ground.

A beam of pure heat shot into the heart of Central Park. Vaporizing the people standing in the way, leaving behind charred bones that collapsed on the dirt in broken, shattered pieces.

Fuck.

The bubble covered Scarlett completely, and the beam of light stopped.

The shield immediately started bulging upward as the heat built up. In a second it’d explode out from under the shield.

Pax knelt over Scarlett and pinned the sides of the shield down around her with his hands and knees, trying to trap the heat next to the ground. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

He pulled on the unknown source of energy, gathering strength. He had to grab Scarlett and get her the fuck away from these people. He had superpowers, right? Maybe he could fly. This whole shitfest had to have some redeeming quality.

Scarlett broke through the shield.

He sealed it under her.

Heat was blasting from her almost hard enough to burst the shield. Pax channeled more energy into it. It turned almost solid blue and bulged outward as he tried to contain the heat.

The shield smashed into the bystanders and knocked them flying in showers of sparks. Why the fuck were there even bystanders anymore?

At least some people were starting to get a clue. Women and children were being picked up and bodysurfed to the outer edges of the crowd, where the cops hustled them off to safety. The area was being blocked off by people locked together elbow-to-elbow; the flood of idiots was thinning and even starting to reverse direction.

Underneath him, Scarlett lay on the ground like she was dead. Her skin had faded a little from the bright yellow heat into a pinkish red with a few deeper areas the color of a bloody Valentine. The heat had lessened a little, but it was a fucking miracle she hadn’t burnt him to a crisp, too. He climbed off her awkwardly. It was like being on top of a nuclear bomb.

At least people were getting out of the area. And the shield was still holding.

For now.

Scarlett gasped and clenched her hands in the dirt. The earth underneath her was on fire. Dirt. On fire. If someone had told her this morning that dirt could get so hot it caught on fire, she would have laughed in their faces. Dirt on fire? Couldn’t happen.

Nevertheless. The dirt was on fire.

Yet she didn’t feel as overwhelmed by the energy inside her as she had a second ago. She still felt like a bomb ready to go off. But she wasn’t in the process of actually going off anymore. Huge difference.

She pushed herself off her side and sat up.

What wasn’t white heat was a solid, shimmering blue. Pax’s shield. But where was Pax?

She twisted around. He was behind her, looking down at her. A slightly metallic, white statue, frowning thoughtfully at her. A statue that didn’t seem to notice he was butt-ass naked.

Or that he was pretty well hung.

She suppressed a giggle and forced herself to look at his face. That look. It was so Pax. He was trying to figure out how to explain something to her that was going to be totally over her head no matter what he said. And she was going to smile and nod and pretend to understand, and then he was going to sigh and explain it again, this time in words she could understand.

“You almost destroyed the city, Scarlett,” he said.

Her skin went kind of crispy-feeling. “What?”

“I don’t know what’s happened to you and I don’t know why, but the energy in you is bursting out in flames and you have to get a hold of it before you completely destroy everything. The astral being who came along with Terry tried to help you convert and freaked out about the negative energy attacking you. It and she fought inside you and all the energy is turning into fire.”

She looked at him. She didn’t get it. Every single fucking word he’d used, she understood. Every one of them. But it just wasn’t possible.

He sighed.

“Terry said it’s because you’re good at absorbing pain and turning it into other forms of energy. There was some kind of indirect link. He thinks you did the same with the negative energy that tried to take you over.”

Pain. That she understood. She’d been taking pain and turning it into stories for years. And ever since she could remember, she’d been taking pain and turning it into empathy. Why not turn it into fire?

“I turned pain into fire?” she said. Pax nodded. “Okay. I get that. But the whole city?”

“We have superpowers now,” Pax said.

She thought of him punching a hole in his mom’s chest. Not very nice ones.

“Astral material… can pull energy out of other sources.”

Scarlett closed her eyes. It didn’t help. It wasn’t hard to understand what Pax was saying. It was too easy. She wanted to puke. But she’d tried that already. Hadn’t helped.

So instead she decided to do what she did best. Take someone else’s pain and make it into something else. Only not fire this time. She sat cross-legged on the burning ground and balanced her elbows on her knees. She didn’t want to see his face while she did this. Because it was going to hurt. “This whole situation is a mistake, Pax.”

“Yes,” he said. “I should have just let myself die.”

She felt the pain pour off him. She let it flood into her. Dark and cold and horrible and horrifying. Familiar. She could feel the darkness meshed into her being now feeding off of it, growing stronger.

“But you stopped it. How did you stop it?” she asked softly.

Sometimes you have to remind people of the good stuff, when all they could see was the bad. She was blinking fast, trying to keep tears made of fire from rolling down her cheeks. She’d fucked things up so badly. She couldn’t let him blame himself. Couldn’t.

“Terry diverted some of your energy to me,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” she said. What a shitty thing for Terry to do, to dump this on Pax.

“He had to. I used it to reinforce the shield. And pulling energy off you dampened the feedback loop between you and negative energy, once Terry got Lana to stop fighting.”

Scarlett squinted at the shield. It didn’t look like it was swarming with fire or negative energy. It was blue and swirling and no one could see through it. Pax stood in the shield with her. Naked. Shaking with fear and terror. Unsure of himself. Unsure of what to do.

Scarlett looked down at her body and realized she, too, was naked. She knew what to do.

“Pax,” she whispered. “Come here.”

Pax came to her.

This is fucked up. I am fucked up, Pax thought, but he couldn’t stop. No! I can’t—

But the thing was, he could.

And part of him didn’t give a shit anymore about what Scarlett, or anybody else, wanted. He was on fire. Not the same kind of fire burning up Scarlett. But the kind of fire that compelled him to shove Scarlett onto her back and push himself on top of her. She lay between his legs, and he grabbed her tits (Tits? Did I say—) and squeezed them so hard it was as if he wanted them to pop. Well, he wanted nothing of the sort, but something, some-thing inside, a part of him that was either new or that he never knew existed, that part was burning with a desire that wiped out everything else but—

Want. Need.

As hard as Pax tried to resist, this darker part of him was strong—too strong. With all his might, Pax tried to push back from Scarlett’s body, but—

Fire. Need. Want.

The black ash on Scarlett’s skin—that was her skin—cracked and fire spurted out. Pax pulled the layer of ash off her tits and threw it aside.

This is sick. Stop it. You have to stop this, he cried out to himself to no avail. Want. Need. Mine.

The sickest part was that a little piece of Pax wanted the dark energy in him to win. His eyes widened with the horror of knowing this. But it was true. He’d been trapped in that fucking hospital bed for literally most of his life. He’d just stopped Scarlett from destroying the city. He needed this. He deserved this.

She’d asked him to, hadn’t she? He couldn’t remember.

He watched himself kissing her. He was practically chewing on her face. He didn’t know what he was doing. God. When he’d imagined himself having sex with a woman, this wasn’t how it went down. He was going at it like a fucking seventeen-year-old football player in an after-school special.

One last time, Pax tried to fight the urge taking over his body. He managed to stroke Scarlett’s cheek, a cheek that fluttered into ash at even his gentle touch. But the energy took complete control of him, and Pax grabbed her chin, hard, and he couldn’t stop it, couldn’t hold it back any longer.

He thrust one knee between Scarlett’s legs, then another, and spread her legs apart. He grabbed her thigh and pulled it even farther out of his way.

He thrusted himself into her.

It felt like he was plugging himself into a live outlet. The energy that had been flooding into him was nothing compared to what he was feeling now.

He had to get rid of it. Now.

Pax’s hands squeezed her breasts so hard she would have been screaming if she’d still been human. Scarlett made a mental note to tell him later: you gotta be gentle with boobs. Her skin peeled off and stuck to his hand. Gross. He pulled his hand away and shook the layer of black ash into the burning dirt.

Great. This is a total comedy of errors. He is never going to touch me again.

She’d wanted to make love to Pax for, oh God, forever. It was finally happening, and she couldn’t help making a total fool of herself. He pushed his legs between hers and jerked her thigh out of the way. His touch was cold. Metal cold. Robot cold.

Shit. Something was wrong. This was not gentle, sweet Pax, the boy she’d loved forever and a day. Confused, she searched his face for answers even as he continued to ravish her.

His face was all twisted up and flashing between fear—no, terror—and anger, too, as if touching her was hurting him. Waves of hurt and rage and pain were pouring off him.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, reaching out to wrap him in her arms. “I’m so sorry.”

She’d wanted this so much. But she hadn’t really thought it was possible—and she hadn’t really thought about what would happen if he didn’t want it, too. And it was obvious he didn’t. Something was forcing him.

She’d had sex with him a thousand times in her head. And it was always good. And he was always so grateful, in her imagination.

But this?

It was breaking her heart.

He didn’t want her. It was just the energy, making him have sex with her.

He snarled in her ear, thrusting his hard-on between her thighs. It broke through the layer of ash there—and into the white heat of her crotch. Did she even have a vagina anymore?

Shit. Of all the things you ought to know before you have sex for the first time…

Was it going to hurt?

“Slow down,” she tried to say. “Gentle, Pax, listen to me. I want this, too. I do! But take it easy, make it—”

Pax bit down on her earlobe and ripped at it until the outer layer of ash came off in his mouth. Scarlett shuddered and stretched her neck toward the boy or the energy or whatever it was that was taking her. All rational thought left her as feelings coursed through her body, and she thrust her crotch toward his. She had no idea what was really going on, but fuck, it felt good. His body felt like ice against hers. Ice. Water. Coolness. The heat inside her melted it as soon as it touched her, but he just kept pumping more into her. She arched her back and purred.

It wasn’t the way it was supposed to be, was it? Weren’t there supposed to be candles and soft music, a bed or at least a couch or a sweet field of flowers? Pax looked more tortured than blissful. When he stroked her cheek, his hand vibrated as if all he really wanted was to finally touch her. His eyes were wide with lust but also with confusion as his hand grabbed her chin and he continued to pound her, hard.

She had to stop this.

But she couldn’t.

Pax collapsed on her, shuddering. Had he just come? His cooling energy was still pouring into her. She needed it. If she was going to get hold of herself enough to not destroy the fucking city, then she needed this.

“Scarlett,” Pax whispered. “Oh God. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”

Along with the cool energy she would sell her soul to keep getting, smaller waves of darker energy were pulsing out of him. They were being absorbed into her skin as fast as he could make them. Was he sorry about that? That was nothing. She could soak up that shit all day.

“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s just not the way I… what I expected—”

“It’s not okay. It was wrong.”

She blinked. A hicuppy kind of sob came out of her mouth. Tears starting pouring out of her eyes. “No, no, no,” she said. Then realized what that would sound like. Look like. “I mean, yes, yes, yes—yes to everything. I’m saying yes! I asked you to, remember? Please believe me—” She searched for something to break through to him. “Pax,” she whispered. “I’m on fire. You’re putting me out.”

Great. World’s cheesiest line ever. Straight out of the box of romance novels that crouched under her grandma’s bed.

He was grabbing her again. And she was grabbing him back. Tongues in each other’s mouths. He put his hands in her flaming hair, and it wound up his arms. She could feel through her hair. She stroked his skin with it. She threw him over and rubbed her body against him, dragging her breasts across his metallic skin, grinding her hips against him.

Just because it was cheesy didn’t mean it wasn’t true.

She was fire. And he was the only one who could put her out.

Chapter 7

It had taken an hour, and Terry’s help, for Pax and Scarlett to learn to change their appearances. Once Scarlett’s flames were under control, Terry guided her and Pax through the aether back to the hospital. Pax slipped into the room where his mother lay, unconscious and recovering. He took the apartment keys from her pocket and got the address from her driver’s license. Terry opened the aether for them once again and took them there.

Pax didn’t know what to expect. The last apartment he’d lived in with his mom was a walk-up in the Bronx that smelled like cabbage. It had been small and cozy, Pax thought, though he wasn’t sure. It had been so long since he’d lived anywhere but the hospital.

The new place wasn’t small. It was big. And dark. Pax’s metal hands hit the wall with a THUD and fumbled for the light switch. It was an old-fashioned toggle, unlike the push switches at the hospital. It made him feel like he was in a foreign country. He flicked it up, and the lights came on.

When in doubt, go with beige seemed to be his mom’s philosophy.

Dining area: beige tile, cheap Ikea table stacked with bills and junk mail. One of the chairs featured a pile of identical tan trench coats. Living room: beige carpet topped with a brown area rug under most of the furniture. Tan couch, big flat-screen TV, glass-topped coffee table stacked with more junk mail. Tiny beige-and-steel kitchen to the right, tiny beige hallway to the left. Three doors: tiny beige bathroom stocked with beige makeup, tiny closet filled with cardboard boxes, tiny bedroom with a small bed covered in a tan patchwork quilt. And that was it. Everything smelled off. Then he realized he was missing the smell of the hospital’s pine cleaner. Fuck, man. He hated that pine cleaner.

The only decoration was a picture on a table in the corner between the couch and the chair. The three of them. Mom, Dad, him. The ocean was behind them, and their hair was all messed up from the wind. They wore matching blue windbreakers and their cheeks were red. The sky behind them was dark from an incoming storm. The sun was on their faces.

Dad was smiling so big most of his teeth were showing. He had on sunglasses which were just a little bit askew. Mom was laughing. Pax was a toddler. He was grabbing for the camera. His cheeks were fat.

He didn’t remember it.

Can you both hear me?

“Yes,” said Pax. Scarlett just nodded.

You need to take human form, said Terry. Both of you. Listen.

It wasn’t words he poured into their heads. Instead, it was images, ideas, and concepts, all thrown in so fast and so furious that no single one could be separated from the others. And all of it was instruction on how, from the atomic level, astral flesh could take human shape.

At the end of it, Terry’s voice came again. I must go. I must find Akllana’chikni’pai.

And with that, he left them alone.

The silence that followed was awkward, not the least because they were both seventeen and naked.

Pax stared at Scarlett, taking in her hunched shoulders, small breasts and rounded stomach, and the hair beneath it. He felt himself growing and immediately started blushing. Scarlett giggled and looked away, blushing herself.

“I can’t believe this,” said Pax. “I mean, we’ve been naked for hours. Why is it funny now?”

“It was different,” said Scarlett. “I was made of fire, and you were all hard.” She glanced down and giggled again. “Guess part of you still is.”

“Very, funny,” said Pax, “Now what do we do? I mean, we’re supposed to help Terry and Lana judge this world. They’re going to decide if humans should be allowed to evolve to the astral plane, and now he’s gone and he can’t find Lana and we’re stuck here all alone! What are we going to do?”

“I don’t know!” the words practically burst out of Scarlett. “I wasn’t going to be astral! You were going to be astral! You were going to be astral, and I was going to go home and eat my mother’s crappy meatloaf for dinner! Then you were going to be healthy and better and we were going to actually go to school together and I was going to be a writer and you were going to do…. whatever the fuck it is you were going to do!” Scarlett’s hand went up to her head and pounded against her temple. “And now I’m dead and my body’s made of astral stuff and I’m standing here naked with a boy with a hard on!” She looked at his penis. “Can’t you do anything about that?”

“I don’t know!” Pax looked down at his erection. “I’ve never had one before.”

“What?” Scarlett’s eyes went wide.

“The damage to my heart. It made everything… weaker. I couldn’t even—”

“Wow,” said Scarlett. “That’s… wow.”

“So today was the first time and—” He turned away, blushing furiously. “And it wasn’t how I wanted it to be. At all. It was… stupid.”

“It didn’t feel stupid,” said Scarlett. “I mean, it was a bit rough and you’ve really got to learn how to handle a girl’s boobs better, but it wasn’t stupid. In fact, it was the best orgasm I’ve ever had.”

Pax’s eyes went wide. “Really?”

“Yeah.” Scarlett blushed again and then muttered, “Maybe because it’s the first one I had with someone else.”

Now it was Pax’s turn to be shocked. “Really?”

“Look at me,” said Scarlett. “I’m not even pretty, No one ever wanted to fuck me except you, and you were putting out my fire so that hardly counts.”

“That… wasn’t why—”

“Then what was?”

“I don’t know! I just… I wanted you. I don’t know why I wanted you. It wasn’t like I was trying to be a fire hose or something!”

Scarlett giggled suddenly. “This is stupid, Pax. Why are we arguing? You’re alive for fuck’s sake! You did it!”

“Yeah.” Pax looked around his mother’s apartment. “I did, didn’t I?”

“We’re both alive,” said Scarlett. “And I’ll be damned if I’m going to let it go to waste. We’re going to go out for pizza and we’re going to go to a movie and we’re going to have some fun, got it?”

Pax found himself smiling back. “All right.”

“Good. Now shut up and get over here,” said Scarlett.

“What?” said Pax. He walked over to her. “Why?”

Scarlett wrapped her hand around him and knelt down. “Because there are a whole lot of other things I haven’t done before, either.”

Inside Scarlett’s mind, in a small Pacha of her own creating, Akllana’chikni’pai whirled in place, her blades hacking again and again through the tentacles of negative energy that filled the girl’s body and soul. She didn’t know how long she had been fighting and it didn’t matter. All that mattered was keeping the tentacles at bay. Her form was moving itself now, her mind partially detached as it searched for a way to break free of the black, slimy tentacles that kept on attacking.

There are too many of them, Akllana’chikni’pai thought as she whirled through her pacha again. It was an observation, not an admission of surrender. There are too many of them to just be coming from the girl. So where are they coming from? Her swords swept the pacha again, slashing through the black forest in a tornado of blades. Another dozen tentacles appeared to replace the ones she’d cut.

And more importantly, how do I break free of them?

Three hours later, Pax realized he had absolutely nothing to wear.

They’d had sex a dozen times, in about 20 different positions and in six different bodies, which was both cool and really odd.

Scarlett had figured it out first. She’d been lying down, gasping with effort and pleasure after their second time. Smiling at him, she’d said, “It’s a good thing you’re not any bigger, or I wouldn’t be able to close my legs.” Pax had laughed, pleased, and lain back on the bed. Scarlett was silent for a bit and then said, “Hey, Pax?”

“Yeah?”

“Why couldn’t you be bigger?” She sat up, looking down at her breasts. “Or me. Why can’t I have bigger tits? Or a tighter ass? Or a different face for that matter?”

Pax rolled over to look at her. “What do you mean? That’s the face you were…” He stopped as the realization dawned on him. They weren’t human anymore. They were astral. In theory, their bodies could be whatever they wanted them to be. He looked down at his penis, temporarily limp and thought about it. He closed his eyes, willing it to be larger.

“You’re hard again,” said Scarlett.

“I’m just getting started,” said Pax. He kept his eyes closed, willing his body to grow and change, to fill in all the pieces as Terry had taught. He felt his body shifting.

“Holy cow!” said Scarlett. “Stop there!”

Pax stopped, opened his eyes, and looked down. It was a fair bit larger and still hard. Scarlett’s eyes were wide. Pax grinned at her. “Yes?”

Scarlett licked her lips, swallowed, and said, “Yes. Definitely yes. Oh, yes.”

When they finished that time, Scarlett tried it next, making her breasts and ass curvier. Pax changed to look like a bodybuilder. Scarlett made herself look like a couple of her favorite movie stars, big-eyed, plump-lipped, and pouting. From then on, it had been a free-for-all, with both of them changing shapes two or three times each session until, finally, their energy wore down and they retreated to what they thought of as their own bodies.

“Ow,” said Scarlett. “That last time. Definitely ow.”

“In a good way?” asked Pax.

“In a very, very good way,” said Scarlett. She stretched languorously, imagining days of sex with Pax, nights of going out with the face of a supermodel. “How are you?”

“I think I’m spent,” said Pax. “All the shape changes really drained my energy. Especially that last one.”

“Me, too,” said Scarlett. “How do women walk with breasts that big?” She smiled. “Hey, want to go out for pizza?”

“I do,” said Pax. He sat up, looked around, and realized it. “Fuck. I have no clothes. At all.”

“Shit, neither do I,” said Scarlett. “What do we do? I can’t go home like this.” A sudden thought struck her. “Should I go home? At all, I mean? After what happened?”

“I think so,” said Pax. “As far as everyone knows, you’re all right, and I’ve had a miraculous recovery. Terry made it that way. So you should go home so no one worries about anything.”

“But I have no clothes either.” She fell back on the bed. “Of all the stupid things…”

“You can wear my mom’s clothes,” said Pax. “And you can go out and get me some. From a secondhand store or something.”

“With what?” asked Scarlett. “We don’t have any money.”

“Shit,” Pax kicked himself mentally for not taking his mother’s wallet when they left the hospital. “Maybe there’s some in here.”

They didn’t have to look hard. Pax’s mother kept her spare cash in a box in the top drawer. There was nearly $200 there in various slightly crumpled bills. Scarlett went through the closets next and found a denim skirt that wasn’t too long and a T-shirt that would fit. She put them both on and went out, leaving Pax alone, sex-stained and naked in his mother’s bedroom.

The thought was slightly creepy. To get over it, Pax got up and took a shower.

It was his first shower by himself, without having his mother or a nurse or anyone else watching him, in a long, long time. It was wonderful. He stayed in there for nearly half an hour, just for the joy of standing under near-scalding water and not feeling tired or in pain.

He wondered what he was going to do next.

He didn’t need to go to high school, not really. When he’d realized he was dying, he’d gotten his diploma from his hospital bed. He’d finished the entire degree in the space of a year. He’d audited online university courses and was about a quarter of the way through a bachelor’s degree. It would come in handy, he supposed. Since he had to work for a living…

“I don’t even know how long I’m going to live,” Pax realized. “If they block off the Earth, I’m a dead man, but if they don’t? Then what?”

He looked down at his hands. He remembered what his body had looked like when he’d first changed. It had been all titanium and power. Now it was just human.

Pax tried to change back. He couldn’t. He didn’t have the power.

Terry pulled extra power from Scarlett, Pax remembered. Can I pull power from something? He sifted back through his memory and realized that, good as it was before, now it was absolutely perfect. He could see everything that had happened, from the way Scarlett had shot fire out of her mouth to the grass changing color and curling up in flame under her feet. He narrowed his memories, feeling that moment when Terry pulled the power from Scarlett.

Pax reached out with his mind to the heat coming from the water. He could see the energy pouring from it, now that he was concentrating. He frowned and concentrated on pulling energy into himself.

The water turned freezing cold.

Pax yelped and stumbled, nearly falling over backward. His hand hit the wall behind him with a clank. He looked down at it and saw it was once more titanium. He grinned in spite of himself.

Ten minutes later, he was standing on the balcony, letting the last of the day’s sunlight shine on his naked body. He figured that 20 stories up, no one would notice, and besides, he had more important things to worry about. He could pull energy from the sunlight, bringing it into his body and charging it up like a battery.

An hour later, he could change shape at will once more.

Half an hour after that, Scarlett came back with clothes and pizza.

Terkun’shuks’pai landed on a beach on a small island in the Caribbean. On a whim he took human form—Japanese face and body, traditional Japanese clothes—even though he didn’t really need to do so. He followed the shoreline where the waves sucked at the sand. His hakama dragged against his ankles, wet and soaking up salt; his widespread toes balanced on the sand, savoring its steady polishing against his skin and the sharp pains from the small black rocks underfoot.

It took less than an hour, even though he had to take a few small detours around clumps of palm trees that leaned precariously over the white sand and into the ocean as if watching for ships.

Seagulls chirruped and squeaked behind him. They flew in from the reef to the southwest, holding bright gold and blue and orange reef fish in their beaks to feed to the spotted, blunt-beaked chicks tucked into shadowed crevices in the island’s one ridge of black, igneous rock. Petrels and shearwaters roosted on a few boulders left unclaimed by the seagulls. The high rocks descended into a greedy wall of jostling trees. Rice rats slept in nests. A porcupine dozed with one eye open in the hollowed trunk of a nearby limbo tree. Smoke rose from the huts along the southeast side of the island, but the local fauna had never been taught to fear forest fires and slept on. The specks of a handful of vultures, more attuned to cycles of violence among other species, circled in from a nearby island.

The water near the shore shone green with black specks of rock and abruptly turned deep blue as the island under the surface retreated to the depths. Long curls of white tipped into the shallows, collapsing before they became jeweled ripples near the shore.

Terkun’shuks’pai walked out into the water, letting it close over his head. He kept a comfortable pace, slipping through the water as if it were air, much to the surprise of the many fish and a few small sharks he startled on the way.

He reached the edge of the shallows and stared down into the depths. It was easily a hundred feet deep. More than deep enough to prevent discovery in the next twelve hours, which was really all the time it would need.

A thought opened a portal to another place in the universe. A second allowed him to pull a single egg, ripe for hatching, from a cluster of others and transport it to where he stood in the water. He wrapped it in warmth as it arrived to hurry the hatching.

He released it to gently sink down to the ocean floor, some hundred feet below.

It would hatch in the next hour, he knew.

And by the next sunrise, well, it would be something very interesting indeed.

Now, thought Terkun’shuks’pai, I really should start looking for Akllana’chikni’pai. Assuming she decided to stay.

He reached out with his mind and located the other astral being in a fraction of a second. He smiled as he watched her spinning and cutting at the black tentacles. He thought briefly of rescuing her but left it alone. It was much better that she was where she was instead of nosing about in his business right now. Besides, the dark tentacles of negative energy hadn’t managed to destroy her.

Yet.

Chapter 8

Scarlett stood in front of the mirror in her room, looking at the new her.

She’d been awake all night because apparently astral bodies didn’t need to sleep. It was a bit of a surprise but not a bad one. Much better than when her parents announced she was grounded for not coming home for dinner or calling. She tried to say that her phone got broken at the hospital, and that she’d been with Pax who’d recovered and they’d gone out, but her parents hadn’t accepted it. She’d been late; she’d made them worry; and she should have known better. She was grounded for two weeks.

She’d groused and bitched and stomped up the stairs to her room, but she wasn’t really that upset. Just knowing what she could do was like a happiness motor in her chest. She’d always had fantasies of having “powers” of any kind. And always thought she was kind of pathetic for thinking about it so much. But now…She’d started to go online and talk to Pax about it all but remembered he didn’t have a laptop anymore.

So she’d surfed the web instead, hoping it would make her tired. It didn’t. What it did do, however, was make her realize she could remember everything she’d read, and she could read it really, really fast.

She went through every page she could find that explained math and physics and biology and all the other subjects she did badly at. She memorized Spanish grammar and read every book that was online from her courses. She had it all in her head, and she didn’t even feel tired or confused.

It was wonderful until she remembered she’d be going right back to school with all the miserable jerks she’d been dealing with for the past four years. There had to be a way to make that better.

That’s when she started wondering about what she should look like.

Pax had said—and he was right—that they shouldn’t make any big changes in their bodies. It would cause too much suspicion. Small changes, though, wouldn’t hurt. And while it wouldn’t be that noticeable to other people, to Scarlett it would make a real difference. So, as the morning light came through the window, Scarlett stood naked in front of the mirror, making adjustments.

A thought made her stomach flatter. Another made her ass tighter and a bit more round. A third made her breasts slightly more full—not bigger, just round enough to properly fill out her bra. She made her back stronger so her shoulders didn’t hunch and her neck didn’t go forward. Then she did her skin, removing every blemish. When she was done, she turned a full circle, admiring her work.

I look good, she decided. Not super pretty, but good.

Good enough for high school, anyway. And when that’s done, I can look like whatever I want.

Her alarm went off. She grabbed a shower because that’s what she always did, and she ate breakfast with her parents and felt the food inside her converting entirely to energy, without waste, like the pizza had last night. The thought that she’d never need to go to the bathroom again was at once happy and confusing. She looked at her parents—their greasy skin, bags under their eyes, tight mouths—and her nosy little sister and wondered if she would outlive them all now. Did astral bodies even die? She had no idea.

Her father left for work, and she walked her little sister to school. Her sister was whining about some kids in her class, and Scarlett listened, feeling much more empathetic than usual. Her sister was as trapped as she had been in this family and school. What a joke! The best years of your life, supposedly, and everyone’s scared, angry, fighting all the time. Scarlett thought seriously about ditching class, but then she’d get in more trouble with her parents and she didn’t need that right now. She needed to be left alone to explore all the changes. She’d call Pax at his mother’s place and let him know what was happening. With luck she could slip out at night and go see him.

She smiled at her memories of the night before. If she’d known sex was going to be that good…

Nearly grinning, she headed for school.

Pax walked to the hospital that morning. It was odd, walking on the street, surrounded by people. He was so used to the quiet of the hospital bed in the morning, the sounds of the nurses going on their business, and the doctors talking to one another as they did their rounds. The massive crowd around him sent wave after wave of noise through the air and through Pax’s body. He was at once thrilled and overwhelmed by it.

When he reached the front door to the hospital, Pax realized that, more than anything else, he didn’t want to go in. He hated the hospital. Hated it more than anything else in the world. Hated it so much he’d longed for death as much to escape the damn hospital as to escape the pain he was in.

I’m not a patient this time, he thought. I’m here to visit a patient. Nothing else.

It still took him ten minutes to walk through the doors and another ten minutes to find his mother. He didn’t really know the layout of the place the way he’d thought. Of course, I spent most of the time in one ward.

The Cardiac ICU was a busy place. The nurses were constantly checking patients’ vital signs and making notes. The doctors carefully circulated through the space, and the patients lay quietly in their beds. Most were recovering. Some were failing. With a thrill, Pax realized he could tell which ones were which just by looking at them. He found his mother’s room and, after a moment to make himself calm down, stepped inside.

Dr. Julie Black’s eyes locked on her son the moment he stepped into the room. He was… healthy.

He should be dead.

He was absurdly healthy. He looked like a normal teenager, in his blue jeans and t-shirt and hoodie and old running shoes. His face was pale, but not pale from illness or exhaustion, just the pale of someone who spends too much time inside and not enough in sunlight. He stood tall and seemed to give off a strength that was patently absurd because he should be dead!

“Hi, Mom,” said Pax.

Even his voice sounded healthy and strong. It was all Julie could do not to scream, “What the fuck happened to you?” Beside her, her monitor beeped out the acceleration of her heart. She forced her breath to slow, forced it to be calm. When she could speak, she said, “Hello, Pax.”

“I heard you had a heart attack,” said Pax. “Are you all right?”

“I will be, yes,” said Julie. “I heard you got out of bed and left the hospital. That you checked yourself out.”

“I did.”

“How?” The word came out colder than she meant it to, but she couldn’t help herself. “You were dying, Pax. You were days away from terminal heart failure with a condition that cannot reverse itself, and now, what, you’re just fine?”

“Yes,” Pax said. “I’m fine.”

“Bullshit!” Julie tried to calm down, aware the monitor was beeping faster again. “That’s not possible, Pax. There is no spontaneous remission with this! There’s no way you can just suddenly feel better and go for a fucking walk!”

“Mom, I’m fine.”

“You shouldn’t be!” The words came out as a shout, and as she said them, Julie knew she was more than just angry. She was frightened. It wasn’t possible for someone to get better from acute diffuse scleroderma. Not so fast. Not at all. “You should be in a hospital bed, Pax!”

“No!” said Pax, and there was a vehemence in his voice she’d never heard before. “I’m not going back into a hospital bed. Ever. I’m not going to be your guinea pig again.”

“Dammit, Pax, that’s not why you should be in a bed. You’re dying!”

“Not anymore, I’m not!”

“You should be!”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” snapped Pax. “Like me back in bed so you can stick me with needles some more and find out new ways to make the pain last even longer. Well, I’m not going back.”

“Enough of this!” said a nurse from the door. She was a small woman, with dark skin and hair pulled back in a bun and a look in her eyes that promised mayhem if Pax didn’t listen. “This woman’s had a heart attack! You need to calm down!”

“No,” said Pax. “I need to go. I’ll see you when you get out of ICU.”

“Pax!” Julie watched him turn away and head for the door. “Goddamn you, Pax! You get back here!”

Pax didn’t even turn around.

Akllana’chikni’pai sensed it when Scarlett stepped out into the sunlight. She felt the warmth sinking into Scarlett’s skin. Scarlett’s astral body immediately began processing some of it, converting the heat and light into energy for its use. There was too much for the body to use, of course, so some bounced off harmlessly. The tendrils of negative energy seemed to sense the sun as well. They writhed in what was almost a fury. They redoubled their attack, as if the touch of the sunlight was enough to send them into madness.

For the first time since being trapped the day before, Akllana’chikni’pai had a way out.

She put her swords away and let the tendrils wrap around her. They covered her in a smothering pile of wriggling, slimy flesh. Had they been corporeal, they would have stunk to high heaven, Akllana’chikni’pai thought. As it were, they were unpleasant and trying to be painful. She let them.

And while she let them, a thousand tendrils of her own, too microscopically small to be noticed by the negative energy, slipped out between the tentacles, joining with Scarlett’s own nerve endings and flesh and redirecting the sunlight’s energy into Akllana’chikni’pai’s own essence.

She wondered how long she had until the tendrils realized what she’d done.

Pax stomped out of the hospital and stood in the parking lot, taking in gulp after gulp of fresh air. He didn’t know what he was, but it wasn’t sick, and he wasn’t staying in the fucking hospital a day longer than he had to. No matter what Mom said.

It wasn’t like she even knew what was really going on. As far as his mom and her altered memories were concerned, Pax had had another heart attack and had been chest-paddled back to life. Then he’d sat up from bed perfectly healthy. But that was still enough to make her freak out and order him to go back into the hospital. Not even a “Thank God! I’m so happy you’re alive” or anything like that. Her first response was not to celebrate his recovery but to demand that reality accord to her expectation. Fuck that. There was no way he was going back to the hospital, not for anything.

Pax walked back to his mom’s apartment. He stopped once along the way to go into a Starbucks and have a coffee. He’d never had one before and was amazed at how much it cost. The smell was good. He tasted it, thought it was bitter and added sugar until it tasted right. He walked back out into the street.

I look almost normal, Pax thought. I just need some headphones, and I’ll blend right in.

He wished he’d thought to get his laptop from the hospital. And wishing that made him wish he had more money. He wasn’t sure what he was going to do when the money from his mom—maybe fifty dollars was left—ran out. Ask for more, he guessed. And where the hell is Terry? He’s supposed to be watching me and guiding me. How long could it take him to find Lana, anyway?

He reached the dull gray metal and glass building that was his mom’s apartment. At the front door, under a metallic awning, the doorman hesitated. He was a black guy in his thirties who looked like Neil deGrasse Tyson in disguise. He kept looking at Pax out of the corner of one eye. The guy finally brought Pax inside the building but made him wait in the lobby while the doorman called the hospital.

When he got off the phone, he looked more sympathetic. “You tell your mom to slow down and put her feet up once in a while. She’s been pushing too hard lately.”

Slow down? The man didn’t know his mother at all. “I will,” Pax lied.

“You’re lucky,” the doorman said. “You and your mom both. I’ll be saying some prayers for you two, all right?”

Pax nodded. The doorman pressed the elevator button for Pax. Thankfully the doors opened almost immediately. He stepped in. The doorman was still watching.

Was Pax reading too much into it, or did the doorman still look suspicious?

As soon as the doors closed, Pax checked himself over. Ten fingers, including fingernails. His skin looked like skin, complete with wrinkles across the knuckles. He was wearing Chucks, blue jeans, and another Sean John hoodie. He looked like he was supposed to look.

He stared at himself until the elevator door opened. The hallway on Mom’s floor had textured, fingerprint-resistant maroon walls. Hazy modernist art in black plastic frames hung along the hall. A potpourri-scented air freshener was plugged in behind the artificial ficus tree next to the rose-and-navy patterned chairs crouched upon the subtle leaf pattern on the carpet which screamed, “I’m here to hide stains!”

The hallways looked a lot like hospital waiting rooms. It made Pax shudder.

Maybe that was why his mom had picked this place: it felt familiar.

Pax slid the key in the lock. He wasn’t really sure why he’d come back, except he couldn’t figure out what else to do. It had been a nice day outside. The sky was bright, even though it was covered with a thin layer of clouds. Looking out the glass wall that was the apartment’s windows he could see the city below and around him. It was like looking down at a million possibilities. It felt like he could go anywhere and do anything, now that he’d escaped his hospital room. He leaned his head on the window. The glass was cool against his forehead.

He didn’t have a fucking clue where to go or what to do.

After a while, Pax wandered into the kitchen. One cupboard was full of meals in boxes—just add water. Soup, boxes of flavored rice, mac’n’cheese. The fridge had mostly bottled water and boxes of moldy takeout.

He dumped all the takeout containers into the trash. He pulled the trash bag out, tied it, and put it by the front door. He’d take it when he left.

In the bedroom, he stared at the bed where he and Scarlett had fucked. He tore the sheets off and found new ones in the cupboard. It took a bit of work, but he got the bed made again. He found his mother’s laundry room and put the old sheets into it. He’d wash them when he came back. He went back into the living room and found himself staring at the picture of the three of them together, just before everything went bad.

Memories came. Not memories of his father, but memories of what had happened after the man died. Of his mother’s fierce resentment. Of Mom screaming at him for always being sick, for taking up too much of her time, for destroying her life. She’d hit him sometimes. She’d told him it was his fault Dad had died—despite the fact that Dad had died when Pax was four, in a plane crash that had nothing to do with him. When she looked at him, there was no tenderness or affection in her eyes.

Then she found out the diagnosis, and everything had changed. He could almost hear her blaming herself.

Pax stood up, reaching for the ceiling. It felt good. He looked over his human-shaped body and smiled. He’d find Terry again and find out what he had to do to keep humans from being blocked from the astral plane. He’d become a teacher and maybe even a superhero. Pax looked out the window again.

But not now.

Now, he was going out, to eat some diner food and maybe see another movie and go for a walk in the park. And then catch up with Scarlett at school. Maybe he could convince her to skip, and they could go back to her place. He grinned and headed for the door.

First step: find out what to do with the trash.

Akllana’chikni’pai, now cocooned in the tendrils of negative energy, waited. The energy from the sun was building up in her faster than she had expected. She let more and more of it pour into her through her tendrils, waiting for the moment when she could tear free of the tendrils and take over the girl’s body—or better, escape it and find one of her own.

She feared doing that, not because it would be at all difficult, but because of the way the darkness had fully intertwined itself with the girl’s body. It had to be driven out. Akllana’chikni’pai was sure of that, even if she didn’t know why.

Her tendrils had extended now, had pushed into the girl’s senses so Akllana’chikni’pai could see what she was doing, even if she couldn’t change things.

The girl was heading to school. Her backpack was bouncing on her shoulder and Scarlett was humming to herself. Akllana’chikni’pai could feel how much the girl hated everyone at the school, could feel the negative energy thriving off the hatred.

Maybe they are symbiotes, Akllana’chikni’pai thought. Maybe the tendrils live off the human energy and in turn make humans behave a certain way to create more negative energy.

It would certainly explain a lot about human behavior.

The processed stone path beneath the girl’s feet was pockmarked and splattered with filth. The air was scented with spoiled meat and sour milk, burning oil, and polluted waters. Machines traveled along the thoroughfares, stubbornly jostling each other like packs of donkeys. The great buildings of the city shadowed her, and the noise of the city devoured the sound of Scarlett’s footsteps.

Akllana’chikni’pai would have pitied the girl if she hadn’t known what lived inside her.

The girl entered a building made of baked red brick and gray mortar. It resembled a fortress, having only thin, deep-set slits for windows and few doors. Guards patrolled the armored doors, searching the children’s packs for forbidden materials and reminding them of their lowly status. The girl reached the front of the line, passed a gate emitting radio frequencies being used as a metal detector, and was waved through the door.

The building closed around her, cutting off what little sunlight reached the sealed-over earth and replacing it with weak, unsteady artificial lighting. Bodies pressed against her, shoving her from side to side. The stink of sweating flesh and rancid chemicals was overwhelming. The children sneered at each other, slaves competing for rank.

It was nothing like Akllana’chikni’pai’s temple at the top of the mountain. And yet she could not help but be reminded of it.

The temple walls had been made of large, rough-cut blocks of gray granite rippled with traces of iron and glittering with specks of quartz. She had smoothed the eastern wall until the stone had shone like glass at dawn, casting a bright mirror of light into the deep shadows of the jungle that crashed against the side of her mountain. The air was thin and cool and fresh; the ground covered with thin-petaled mountain blossoms: luminous purple, buttery gold, icy white.

She had thought it beautiful, once.

And then the priests had trapped her there.

It had been her own fault. The priests knew she loved the sun and the sky and used it as her source of power. They weren’t wrong. The energy of the sun was the strongest on Earth and she, like all other astral beings who lived there, used it to sustain herself. The priests had taken her far, far below ground and sealed her in, holding her there until her energy was nearly entirely depleted. From then on she was at their mercy, not even strong enough to pull the energy from the stones around her. When she had finally managed to escape, she’d decimated the entire civilization in her rage.

The children swept along the long, undifferentiated corridors, talking to each other, stopping to gather supplies, entering the minuscule, plain rooms where they would sit in rows, at desks. Everything about them seemed to cry, “I am owned… I am used… I am harvested…”

The girl entered a room full of rows of plastic and recycled-wood desks with glass screens set flat into their tops. Students sat and interfaced with the network. Excellent. It was almost as though the girl was responding to Akllana’chikni’pai’s subconscious influence.

The girl sat in front of one of the terminals. The other students nearby, dressed in identical uniforms, glanced at her and then returned to their work. The girl logged onto the network, checking messages and wandering idly around shallow entertainment sites. Doing nothing.

Killing time.

The trash chute was three apartments away from Mom’s, in the opposite direction from the elevator. Maybe that was why her fridge was full of half-rotten takeout; the trash chute was the wrong way, and Julie Black was never one to go out of her way when she was doing something.

Pax took the elevator to the street level and stepped outside. The sky was hazy but blue. It was still windy, and he was glad he’d worn his hoodie: not because he was cold but because it helped him fit in. It was too tight. He’d broadened his shoulders and chest when he’d rebuilt his body to appear more human, to match the body he always wore on the astral plane. He felt more comfortable in his astral body, anyway.

But it did mean he should probably get a bigger hoodie.

Where to go? He turned right and started walking.

Scarlett was at school, so he probably shouldn’t call her cell phone. Too bad he couldn’t talk to her in his mind the way he talked to Terry.

Wait a minute. Why can’t I?

Pax grinned in spite of himself. He kept forgetting: he wasn’t human anymore. Neither was Scarlett. They were astral. And if he could communicate with Terry through his mind, there shouldn’t be any reason why Pax couldn’t communicate with Scarlett.

He stopped and leaned back against a wall. Just another teenager. Nothing to see here, folks he thought. Now, how do I do this?

He tried to focus his mind on Scarlett, tried reaching out to her and seeing if he could find her. He sensed where she was and could almost see her, but he couldn’t quite reach her.

He kept walking. He passed a teenager wearing a faded blue hoodie with dangling, worn-out cuffs. The teenager shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans.

After he passed the kid, Pax shoved his hands into his pockets, too.

Something smelled good. He didn’t know what it was. It wasn’t something he’d had in the hospital, that was for sure. He looked around and found himself staring at a falafel place. The sign said they had shawarma as well, whatever that was. He thought about going in and trying it but reminded himself he had only $50 left. He didn’t want to blow it all.

I’ll need I.D., too. And I should probably learn the subway so I can get around.

The wind gusted, picking up Starbucks cups off the street and rolling them past him. He wanted… he didn’t know what he wanted. He wanted to stop thinking so much. Just for a while. He wanted to walk around a town he’d lived in his whole life and pretend like he belonged here.

Scarlett had bought him pants, underwear, socks, Chucks, and T-shirts. Not new clothes. Used ones from a thrift store, like he’d asked. He didn’t want new things. His whole body felt new.

Normal. He wanted to be normal.

Just for a little while.

He followed the side of the building onto the narrower cross street, which was packed with double-parked trucks. Moving vans. Big guys in tight T-shirts with moving company logos carried boxes and sofas out of the backs of the vans to a service entrance at the back.

Pax walked to the end of the block, crossed the street, and kept going. Manhattan wasn’t as busy as he’d expected. Not this part. Pax checked his cell phone: 9:02 a.m. Away from First Avenue, the buildings were all four-story brick apartment buildings. He passed a park with a dozen kids playing, parents sitting on benches, gripping the handles of their strollers. Tennis courts without any players.

After a few blocks, he crossed some mysterious boundary and the first floors of all the buildings became shops. Diners. Uniform rentals. A deli. He passed skinny trees planted in grated holes in the sidewalk. There must be an underground watering system. The streets were busier, with people going in and out of the shops.

There were more taxis now, more traffic. More smells of food. People smoking on the street. Car exhaust. The smell of trash, dirt. Sometimes the smell of flowers—a couple of the trees were blooming. When the wind gusted, the petals blew off the trees like snow.

Pax wanted to taste something. He wanted to walk into a deli, or a diner, or even a restaurant. The problem was, he didn’t know which one he should try. Some of the better ones had menus posted on their windows, and he read through them. He thought about burgers and fries and fried chicken and nachos. He didn’t know which one he wanted, so he left them alone. There’d be time to eat later, and he wasn’t really hungry.

There was a 7-Eleven nearby. He bought a Slurpee and sucked gently on the straw, tasting the sweet, freezing concoction. It was delicious.

He still felt like he should be doing something more, but he had no idea what. Maybe he should have stayed up in Mom’s apartment and worked on his research. Maybe he should have just waited until Scarlett was out of school so she could show him around. The more he walked, the more out of touch and out of place he felt, but at the same time, he didn’t want to stop seeing the city, didn’t want to stop being outside.

The wind shifted again, and carried the sound of chanting toward him.

“God hates fags! God hates fags!”

And that’s when he saw the black tentacles.

Scarlett reached the front door of the school and felt her guts churning like they did every day. She hated school. She hated the way the teachers treated her with pity or scorn, the way the other students ignored her, or worse. The pretty girls treated her with contempt. The boys didn’t even know she existed. And in her heart she knew everything she’d done with her mind last night and her body this morning wouldn’t make any difference. Not to the people here.

She glanced down at her tighter T-shirt and nearly smiled. Well, maybe something would be noticed.

Deep inside Scarlett, buried in tendrils of negative energy, Akllana’chikni’pai reached out. She had power now, more than Scarlett could imagine, and could see and feel everything Scarlett could feel. Now she wanted to do more. Despite what had happened to her, despite the negative energy that pulsed and surrounded her like a living thing, Akllana’chikni’pai felt confident. The negative energy couldn’t hurt her, so there was no harm in starting the job while she waited for an opportunity to break free.

She gently manipulated Scarlett’s mind, putting in the suggestion that, before class, Scarlett really should go back online and search what the humans called the Internet for her classes to find the information she hadn’t found last night. Scarlett checked her watch, decided it couldn’t hurt, and headed for the computer lab.

Akllana’chikni’pai waited until Scarlett was logged on and then took over.

It was easy to send Scarlett into a fugue state, easier still to reach one of the tendrils into the computer to access the Internet. In the next few minutes, Akllana’chikni’pai reached out beyond the silly little machines the school used, out into the main servers where the information was stored. Then she began truly exploring.

What she found horrified her.

Cities destroyed the countryside that fed them. The industrial farms, the underground pumping of chemicals in exchange for oil, the poisoned water and poisoned soil. Bees dying. Species murdered by the thousands. And those few species the humans did attempt to preserve were captured and forced to breed. People murdered each other for the slightest of reasons—mainly ownership disputes—and treated each other as property.

A thousand years gone and nothing had changed but the knives with which they sacrificed each other. The altars no longer ran with blood, but with money.

Slaves. All of them still slaves.

Once, Akllana’chikni’pai had thought she loved humanity. After her time trapped, she had learned better. Humans were a poison in every biome they touched. To bring them into the astral civilization would be madness: they would fear, then hate, then destroy what they hated, and then destroy every biome they touched.

They had to be isolated. They had to be left on this planet to die under the weight of their own poison. It was too bad they would take so many other promising species with them.

Akllana’chikni’pai turned her research away from humanity and searched for any information about the negative energy. All corporeal species gave off positive and negative energy, but the tendrils were something new, something she had not seen before.

When she finished her search, she realized the humans weren’t even aware of them.

But that makes no sense, Akllana’chikni’pai thought. How could they not be aware of something that so drastically affected their lives? The negative energy could control the humans, make them do its bidding. How could that not be noticed?

What if it’s a new species? What if it’s intelligent?

What if it’s a worse threat than humanity?

Akllana’chikni’pai let her consciousness sink back into the pacha buried in Scarlett’s body. It was nearly time for her to break free of the tendrils. But first, Scarlett had to move. Someone else wanted the computer.

Around her, the tentacles shifted and rolled.

Scarlett blinked.

A teacher who hadn’t been there before was putting a stack of books and papers on the desk at the front of the computer classroom. A line of scrawny freshmen were shuffling through the door. She glanced at the clock and swore under her breath. She had to get out of here. She was going to be late for physics.

A girl was poking Scarlett’s shoulder. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but you’re not in the right class. This is the freshman computer class. And that’s Emily’s spot. Not your spot. If you’re too poor to have a computer at home, go use the library’s. Some of us have class right now. And futures to think of.”

Something in Scarlett twisted. Rage, far greater than what the little bitch’s statement deserved, welled up in her. Scarlett stood, somehow gracefully swinging her massive, overstuffed backpack onto her shoulder at the same time. In a voice only the little overly-made-up blonde could hear, Scarlett hissed, “Don’t be such a cunt.”

“What?” The girl’s eyes went wide.

The desks were lined up side to side with an aisle down the middle. Scarlett had to walk right behind the blonde to get out. And as Scarlett did, she leaned over until her lips were touching the blonde’s ear. Scarlett whispered, “Someday you’re going to be old and fat and bitter, and nobody’s going to think you’re pretty anymore. And you’re still going to be a cunt.”

The girl breathed in sharply and bent over her desk, typing furiously and blinking away tears.

Scarlett walked out, wondering what the fuck did I say that for?

Her skin pricked all over, like it was rubbing against ice. That wasn’t like her. Sure the girl was being a pretentious little shit, but that? That was overkill. Worse, it had felt good.

Maybe it’s all this astral shit, she thought. Maybe it’s that stupid bitch, trying to get back into my head. Scarlett didn’t know whether to be more afraid of the idea that Lana was trying to get control of Scarlett’s body, or that she, Scarlett, was acting that way all by herself.

Either way, Scarlett ducked out of the room as fast as she could without looking like an idiot.

Black tentacles, slinking like snakes stalking prey, followed in Scarlett’s wake.

Chapter 9

Pax walked through the streets, following the tentacles of negative energy. They oozed through the apartment buildings, heading toward a cross street. A sleeping homeless person tucked back in an alleyway had a deranged smile on her face and was repeating the word fags over and over to herself. “Faaaaags. God hates dem faaaaags.”

Pax remembered the tentacles from his hospital room. Terry had seemed worried about them, but they hadn’t appeared since and Pax had been thinking about other things. Mostly about Scarlett, to be honest. And sex. Sex had been…

Pax grinned and shook his head. Giant black tentacles are slipping through the streets, and I’m thinking about sex? Focus, idiot.

Pax followed the awkward, fat eels of negative energy into the street, belatedly realizing the oncoming traffic—six taxis and a delivery truck—had the right of way. The chanting was lost under the honking and screeching and shouting as he backed onto the curb with the flats of his hands held out.

“Hey!” one of the taxi drivers yelled at him. “Watch where you’re going, you stupid fag!”

Pax crossed the street. The drivers seemed oblivious to the squelching sounds the tentacles made as they popped and crushed under their tires. The other people on the sidewalk sneered at him, unable to see the black snot rolling out of their nostrils.

Negative energy was an infection. The more of it around, the more it spread. Everyone knew that. Everyone experienced it. But this was different. This negative energy was more than just a bad mood or someone being a jerk. This was real and frightening and seemed to be sentient.

So where is it coming from?

An old guy, must have been sixty, with salt-and-pepper hair and dressed in a dark-gray shirt and a black vest, standing outside a Greek restaurant, spat at Pax’s feet as he walked by: an invitation to a fight. Pax passed the man without making eye contact.

God hates fags! The chanting was louder now.

The next block had a new building going up; the structural supports were covered with sheets of flapping black plastic. The street was blocked off with orange-and-white sawhorses. A bulldozer bumped off the curb and into the street. A passageway made of plywood and chain-link fence lined the other side of the street. The negative energy, like a good citizen, followed the walkway, twisting around the ankles of the pedestrians, making some of them stumble.

Pax followed the flow of the energy to see where it was going.

Under the shade of the plywood the air felt as though the oxygen had been replaced with poison. Around him, the other pedestrians gasped for breath, their mouths opening and closing like fish dangling at the end of a line.

The walkway ended at a park, which was surrounded by protesters carrying signs.

YOU’RE GOING TO HELL.

GOD HATES FAGS.

GOD HATES AMERICA.

PRAY FOR MORE DEAD SOLDIERS.

GOD HATES YOU.

The protestors stood on the sidewalk, each holding three or four rainbow-and flag-colored signs. They looked like butterflies of hate.

In the park was a group of about fifty black people dressed in sharp black tuxes and suits and brightly colored flowered dresses. An Amazonian woman in a white, satiny wedding dress stood next to a small, slight woman in a tux—sans jacket—an arm curled around her waist, smiling stiffly. Under a green canvas rain shelter was a tiered wedding cake, stacks of sandwiches covered in plastic wrap, and trays of pickles and cheese.

The woman in the suit bared her teeth. The hand that wasn’t wrapped around her wife’s waist was in her pocket, gripping something. Keys… a knife. Her other arm was loosening. She was going to go off any second now.

Not that Pax could blame her. The whole park was seething with flopping, slapping tentacles of negative energy. They were smothering babies in strollers. They were fondling the cake.

The black tentacles writhed through the crowd, feeding off the hatred and spreading it in an ever-widening circle. The negative energy in the area was even starting to get to Pax. He could feel himself wanting to smash through the lines of picketers and beat them into bloody pulp. Which is exactly what the picketers wanted.

Suddenly, the woman in the suit charged the line of protestors. A set of keys whipped out of her pocket, flailing at the end of a self-defense keychain.

If he did nothing, the woman would get arrested. The protestors chanting “God hates fags” would get to press charges. Then they would sue the woman and probably win. And the media would be all over it. Cops and news trucks were parked at the end of the park. Waiting to pounce.

Pax wasn’t going to let it happen.

He shoved bodies out of his way, ignoring indignant shouts. Ignoring the hands trying to grab him. The woman in the suit was headed straight for one of the protestors, an old guy in shorts, sandals, and white tube socks. She was way too close for anyone to stop her. Pax sped up without thinking. He reached the old guy first and shoved him out of the way.

Way, way out of the way.

Oh, yeah. Superpowers.

One second Pax had his hands against the guy’s T-shirt (GOD HATES FAGS.COM,) feeling the tacky ink under his hand and catching a sudden whiff of the guy’s deodorant. The next second the guy was flying through the air, clinging to the signs like some kind of bat wings.

Across the street.

And into the construction area. Over the heads of the crowd, over the fence, and into the sheets of black plastic. The guy flew through a gap between two panels of plastic and disappeared.

The crowd went quiet. They’d been making an almost earsplitting level of noise Pax hadn’t noticed until it stopped.

A scream echoed across the street.

Something slammed into Pax’s back, knocking him onto his face on the side of the curb. If he’d been human, he would have broken his jaw.

Metal whipped against his skull, slamming his chin and cheek into the ground again and again. It hurt. Bad.

He remembered he could turn off the pain. He did. He rolled over, grabbed a fistful of keys, and looked up.

The woman in the suit had been attacking him. Not to defend the protestor he’d just flung across the street. But because she had to attack somebody. The negative energy was oozing out of her nose and eyes and her wide-open, gasping mouth. A huge tentacle had driven into her body, almost as if it was controlling her actions.

The guys in the tuxes jerked the woman off him. Her keys crashed onto the sidewalk and disappeared as someone kicked them. Her eyes bulged so much they looked like they were going to pop out. She got one arm free and it clawed for him until the guys in tuxes got her under control again.

“Tom!” A woman pushed through the crowd near Pax and howled. “Where is Tom? What did you do with Tom?”

I don’t know, thought Pax. But I can fix him. I just have to get to him.

Pax tried to sit up, but other hands pushed him back. Protestor hands. Pedestrian hands. Hands that ended in white satin gloves. They pressed him onto the warm sidewalk. He could have thrown them off, but he was trying not to hurt anyone else.

He saw the wooden stake at the end of the sign coming down toward his chest.

But it was too late.

Scarlett walked into her physics class just as the second bell rang. She was almost the last one to arrive. The teacher, Mr. Vogel, looked at her with sad, watery, old-man eyes, like he was a dog that had been waiting for hours and hours for her to come home and feed him. He turned toward the whiteboard and started writing formulas. The back of his shirt was untucked, and he smelled like too much mouthwash.

Scarlett resisted the urge to scratch his head. He was going bald, and if you wanted to see his sad white-guy face turn bright red, you made fun of his bald spot. Instead she sat down.

She was shaking. It felt like her knees were going to collapse. She even felt a little dizzy. Should she be feeling like this? She wasn’t even human anymore. She was vaguely aware of people staring at her. Did she look weird or something? She breathed into her hand. It smelled like latte. She wanted to run to the bathroom and check her appearance, but too many people were already staring at her. Ugh. She felt awkward. Sick-awkward. If Mr. Vogel said one word to her about being late, one word…

Mr. Vogel cleared his throat.

The door whipped open and three girls walked in. Mr. Vogel looked at them instead of her. Whew.

Jamie McIntyre, Heather Simms, and Casey Jackson. Dressed in the same uniforms as everyone else, sure, but spiced up. They wore matching maroon-and-gold headbands. Long, silky brown hair. Matching maroon and leopard-spotted, custom nail art. Matching, calf-high, maroon Chucks. Their uniforms had even been ironed. Probably by their maids.

Behind their backs, they were called the Bitch Queens. The teachers even called them the Heathers after some old movie. Three of the most popular girls in the school, making an entrance the way they always did: late. They were so powerful that none of the teachers could give them detention anymore. Because of their parents, mostly.

Normally, Scarlett was invisible to them. Not popular enough to be either a friend or an enemy. Not rich enough to be tolerated. Not weird enough to be mocked. They were just a minor annoyance to Scarlett during physics class, mostly because Jamie McIntyre sat behind her and talked nonstop.

Scarlett took in a deep breath. Let it out. I just need to get through the day.

Akllana’chikni’pai felt the change in the tentacles just before they attacked.

She took a moment to curse her stupidity. The tentacles hadn’t just been restraining her; they’d been investigating her. Searching out her weaknesses as they entangled and tried to crush her astral form. She’d thought her astral defenses were powerful enough to hold the smothering, slimy tentacles, and up until then, they had been.

Not anymore.

A single black tendril had stopped writhing, gone from being a tentacle to being a chisel that gouged and dug its way into Akllana’chikni’pai’s form. And it hurt.

The negative energy in the room grew exponentially and poured itself into Scarlett’s body. Akllana’chikni’pai could feel its strength, not just in the tentacle that threatened to cut her in half, but in the changes in Scarlett’s body and the attitudes of everyone in the room.

Everything was about to go very, very bad.

Another pair of tentacles turned to chisels, and Akllana’chikni’pai, with no other choice, gathered the energy she’d absorbed from the sun and started using it.

The three girls paused at the front of the class, looking over their subjects, and something inside Scarlett’s chest went pop.

“Oh, look,” she said. “It’s the three little cunts.”

And then, because it was just too impossible to be happening, and the whole class was sitting there with their mouths open or tittering or staring at her with great, big, sad, old-person eyes (Mr. Vogel) or, in the case of the Bitch Queens, probably deciding how to punish her, Scarlett added, “They huffed and they puffed and they blew the football team down.”

She stuck her tongue into her cheek and made the blow-job face.

What the fuck did I just do?

It was insane.

She was going insane.

The classroom erupted into chaos. Loud, shouting, laughing, mocking chaos. Everyone knew what Scarlett said was true: the Bitch Queens were on the cheerleading team, and, in a bond as old as the nineteen-fifties, they were sleeping around with all the football players, except for the guy who played center because he already had brain damage from being hit so often and was secretly gay. Wads of paper tore out of notebooks, flew across the room, and pelted the Bitch Queens. Names were called. Guys hit each other on the shoulder and chicks sniggered.

Casey picked up a wad of paper and whipped it at a particularly nasal, laughing nerd. If it had been a rock it would have exploded the guy’s head, she threw it so hard. After it hit him, it bounced up in the air and got jammed into the metal slats covering one of the hanging fluorescent lights.

Heather dropped her leather messenger bag on the floor and shoved toward Scarlett, grabbing a girl in the way by her shirt and simultaneously pulling and shoving her to the side. The girl smashed into the row of desks, went over the top, and flopped over the top of the desk and onto the floor with someone else’s books landing on her. A couple of guys grabbed Heather, stopping her from attacking, and started mocking her. The words “how about giving me a blow job” kept coming up. Heather had tears in her eyes as she glared back and forth from her attackers to Scarlett and back again.

Jamie… just stared at Scarlett.

Jamie had a long face with a small, bitchy mouth and a long, straight nose—all the better to look down at you with. Her chin would have been considered ugly and pointy if she hadn’t been so popular. Her gray eyes were surrounded with black eyeliner and her long eyelashes were stiffened with mascara. They held no emotion at all. Her eyebrows were tweezed. Her makeup: perfect. She looked like a cartoon or a sticker, the way her head was tilted at the end of her long, thin neck, like it’d been stuck there, slightly crooked.

“What, did your boyfriend die or something?” Jamie asked. “You know, the sick one? Who’s dying? The one who’s a freak and a laughingstock? That one? Remember him? I’m so sorry for you. Sad day.”

And she touched under her eye with one finger and made fake tear trails down her cheek.

If Pax had actually died, Scarlett would have lost her shit.

As it was, she just laughed. It sounded like a grown-up woman’s laugh. Not a nervous high-schooler’s laugh. Deep and powerful.

“Is that the best you can do, bitch?” she said.

Something weird happened: Something wet rolled down Jamie’s cheek. A tear? An actual tear? Was she crying? It left a track. Her makeup wasn’t perfect anymore. Jamie touched the drop. Another teardrop of water rolled down her cheek and another.

They weren’t tears. They were coming from her forehead.

Sweat.

Sweat meant heat.

Oh, shit.

The tentacles piercing Akllana’chikni’pai burned away. Hundreds of others began pouring in. Akllana’chikni’pai turned up the heat. She was not going to die here, no matter what.

Now that Scarlett was looking for them, she could see signs of heat all over the place. Sweat on people’s foreheads, dark spots on their shirts. Mr. Vogel was fanning himself with some homework papers and saying in a perfectly useless monotone, “Come on, you hotheads. Settle down.”

Scarlett glanced up at the fire sprinklers. She probably had seconds to spare before she set something off. She had to get out of there. She started to stand up, but some guy pushed on her shoulder and, surprised and off balance, she sat down again.

“As a matter of fact,” Jamie said, panting a little and patting her face with a handkerchief monogrammed in gold thread. “No, that’s not the best I can do. I was being nice. On account of your grief. But I think we all can see that you’re out of your mind right now. With grief. Or maybe just general stupidity. What? Did you wake up and need some drama today? Because you’re going to get some.”

And she nodded at the guy who’d just pushed Scarlett back down.

“Kids,” Mr. Vogel droned. “It’s time for class.”

Scarlett opened her mouth to say something sarcastic and cutting—and the guy, who had greasy hair that hung in his face, grabbed her breast.

“Hey, they’re real!” he said. “I thought she’d stuffed them today, but toilet paper just doesn’t have the same squish.” He pulled his hand away a second later and blew on his fingers. “But, yow, she’s hot!”

His name was Matt something-or-other, and he was one of the jocks. Not one of the shiny, well-known jocks. Just a backup jock.

He glanced at Jamie. She nodded again, her pointy chin almost stabbing her chest.

Matt’s hand swung down toward Scarlett’s chest again, but this time she was ready. She slammed both of her forearms against his arm and pinned it down to the desk.

Almost immediately, she smelled burning hair. Matt howled and tried to pull his arm back.

But she was stronger now, and it wasn’t so easy to push her around. Or to get away from her. She could feel the skin blistering up under her arms, the small hairs breaking off.

“Hot, hot!” he screamed. “Oh my God, she’s burning me!”

Everyone laughed. They shouldn’t have laughed. It wasn’t funny.

Scarlett slowly lifted her arms, and greasy-haired Matt jerked his arm away and stuck his blistered skin in his mouth, desperate to cool it off.

Things were out of control. She was out of control. Scarlett knew she wasn’t a good person. She was never going to be a good person. She was greedy and selfish. She didn’t help anyone unless there was something in it for her. And now, the one good thing she was good at, keeping herself at least from hurting other people, was breaking down. She was revealing her true self and it was… not very nice at all. God. Why was she even surprised? But that didn’t matter right now.

Scarlett grabbed the edges of her desk and growled. “Get. Out. All of you.”

“I’m outta here,” Matt mumbled around the arm in his mouth. But instead of leaving, he just stood there.

Scarlett frowned at him. One of his legs was jiggling, his Nike bouncing rapidly on the floor tile, like he was trying to walk but was getting short-circuited. Like he was in a video game and had lag. Or he was bugged. Nobody else was leaving either, even though more than one other person was twitching just like Matt.

And for the first time, Scarlett saw the tentacles piercing everyone in the room. Coming out of people’s eyes and ears and mouths and assholes. Leaking out of their clothes. Wrapped around their necks. The room was a horror. The floor was covered with the oozy, throbbing tentacles wrapped around people’s feet and legs. Every time someone tried to take a step, the tentacles tightened. That’s what was causing the twitching.

What the hell are those? Why couldn’t I see them? Hell, why am I seeing them now?

The girl that Heather had tossed over the desk was still lying on the floor—the tentacles almost completely covered her. Only her two waving arms were visible, and the bottom half of her gasping face. Isn’t anyone going to help her get up? But nobody but Scarlett could see what was really happening, and the negative energy was killing every kind of even remotely human impulse in everyone else in the room.

Scarlett struggled to her feet. It was hard. Something heavy was on her back and across her arms, trying to drag her down. Enormous tentacles were pressing down on her shoulder. A thick, wet, twisted cable of them. The end of the cable pressed against her cheek like it was trying to give her a sloppy puppy-dog kiss. She grabbed the end of the cable and flung it away. It slammed into greasy-haired Matt’s chest and knocked him over. Oops. The end of the cable started feeling around Matt’s chest and oozed under his shirt and down to his crotch.

Great. Just great. This was turning into a crazy Japanese sex manga. And her other shoulder was still under another one of those huge cables of negative energy, which was gently caressing her ear. Ugh.

“What’s going on here?” Mr. Vogel asked in his monotone, as if nothing abnormal were going on at all—just high school high jinks, yes, sir!

Scarlett ignored him and shoved the other tentacle off her shoulder, not as hard this time, making sure it landed on the floor instead of on top of someone. She climbed up on top of her metal and plastic chair-desk, not really caring how stupid she must look, just needing to get as far away from the floor as she could. She needed a second to think. Just a second. She needed to figure out how to get out of this situation still looking human. She didn’t care about detention. Just… keeping things contained. Keeping people safe. She had to figure out how to stop those tentacles.

The room was growing hotter and hotter, and Scarlett knew it was coming from her.

The two guys holding Heather were shoving their hands inside her shirt and pulling it apart. Riiip. Their faces looked shocked. Like they couldn’t believe what was happening. Her bra was lacy and pink, and her face was blotchy from crying. Casey was kneeling on top of a tall, skinny guy and slamming his head against the floor. He was unconscious. Mr. Vogel’s mouth was full of wadded-up paper. The shy, almost midget-short girl called Tiny, who never said anything to anybody, was viciously tearing homework into shreds and shoving more in with an obvious and ugly satisfaction. And he was letting her.

Something touched Scarlett’s leg. Not just a tentacle. Something real.

Before Scarlett could figure out what was touching her, one of the football jocks—maybe the quarterback, she didn’t know, one of the good-looking ones anyway—grabbed the bottom of her desk and tried to heave it upward.

He couldn’t. And that was weird. She must be heavy. But it made her stumble anyway, and she had to shift her feet to keep her balance.

She heard a small whip as a piece of paper slid across the desk. Under her foot. The football player was retreating with sweat dripping down his face. Streaks of sweat stained his uniform polo top, making it look like he was in a sauna.

“Now,” Jamie said from somewhere close. Too close.

And then the football player charged at Scarlett. Slammed into her legs.

No!

Scarlett felt herself tip. She struggled to keep her balance… almost…

And then the paper was jerked out from under her foot, and she was falling. Over. The world spinning around her. She curled into a ball as she fell. Not trying to protect herself. Trying to hold it all in.

“Pax!” Scarlett wasn’t sure if she screamed aloud or just in her head.

She slammed into the floor. Into that nest of dark energy.

And went under.

Akllana’chikni’pai felt the girl lose consciousness amid the dark tentacles. She felt the negative energy that made up half of Scarlett’s being rise up and take over, trapping Scarlett’s mind. The tentacles poured into what was left of Akllana’chikni’pai’s pacha. All of them turned to chisels as they came, ready to pierce Akllana’chikni’pai’s being and destroy her.

Akllana’chikni’pai released the energy she had been holding and the world exploded with light.

On the astral plain, in a pacha of his own creation, Terkun’shuks’pai wandered the small animal paths in the foothills below the old, tree-covered mountain, listening to the birds shouting elegant insults at each other. This might be one of the more perfect meadows he had ever created. The sun peeped through low, stormy clouds that threaded mist throughout the entire valley. The air smelled of pine sap and of the old, dry needles thickly matted below his feet. Small mountain flowers grew next to jagged, mossy rocks. Across the meadow was the mouth of a cave, dark, half-covered with fallen rock, as though it hid a darkness that could not be allowed to escape but might be glimpsed if one’s heart were pure. Above it, the peak of the mountain rose, cool and white.

Scrubby trees shuddered in the cool, stiff breeze. A small pond at the bottom of the valley threw back rippled images of the thick clouds racing across the sky, which seemed so close one might touch them.

Terkun’shuks’pai touched a peeling, ancient branch bent by the wind over centuries and then continued walking.

The pacha reflected his visualization skills, his ability to master physical forms, and his discipline over his emotions, which influenced the literal atmosphere of the place. It was easy to observe his skills in envisioning the pacha and his mastery over the physical—even in this imaginary place—were as sharp and clear as ever. It was equally easy to observe the turmoil in his emotions. If they remained this overwrought for much longer, the darkness of the cave would spread across the valley, filling it with shadows and populating it with monsters—splinters of his psyche that had gone mad from strain. The stronger one’s abilities, the more vulnerable one was to shattering.

Calm. He had to remain calm.

However, despite the dark clouds and strong breeze, the current atmosphere of the pacha was pleasant and refreshing. Perhaps it would rain, later. He rather enjoyed storms, as long as they didn’t go on too long.

Lightning flashed across the sky, striking an elegant, wind-twisted, ancient pine tree, which burst into flame and crumpled into ash within a scant moment.

A sign?

Terkun’shuks’pai watched the storm swirling overhead as if pondering what to destroy next. The earth groaned under him, and the cave filled with darkness shed a few small stones, some dirt. It might, perhaps, be wiser to allow the Earth and humanity to burn themselves out or be replaced. Some storms couldn’t be harnessed. They could only be endured and allowed to blow themselves out.

He needed them, though. Especially Pax and the girl. For at least a little while longer.

In the heart of the fire, in the center of Scarlett’s body, Akllana’chikni’pai was building a pacha.

A temple. Her temple. With its mountain blossoms and its cool, dry air that hummed with static, waiting for a spark. Its worn, carved steps had borne the weight of so many thousands of slaves, some carrying water, others carrying nothing more than the beating hearts within their chests, their skin anointed with oils meant to raise a pleasant scent to humanity’s twisted gods.

The temple she had purified.

In many ways, she was not as strong or as skilled as Terkun’shuks’pai. The stones were featureless, bland gray, the flowers stiff splatters of color against the green and gray of the mountainside. The slaves were fleshy blobs with great, dark eyes; the priests were not much better but were dressed in the bright plumage of jungle birds and their elaborate robes—she had the colors right, if not the textures. The sky was a pure, clear, even blue: even after Terkun’shuks’pai had pointed out to her the variation of the hues from end to end of the horizon in a natural sky, she had been unable to do much more, even at the best of times, than make it blue. And right now she was distracted.

But the altar was under her and the sky above her, and the slaves bowed and the priests chanted. And that was enough for her purpose.

Above her, an eagle swirled in the sky, drawing gyrating patterns that might seem poetic but were the natural result of millions of years of calculations driven by bloodshed: an efficient, elegant search pattern, as the bird looked for prey. The bottoms of its wings were streaked with black and white, its face surrounded by gray feathers. Its eyes shimmering like pearls.

The priests had trapped her within human flesh for a thousand years. And, when she was almost about to escape, they had tried, at the last moment, to sacrifice her to their gods.

Fortunately, their gods would have none of it. They were not nice gods. The eagle opened its mouth and screamed. From the blue sky, fire rained down.

Gone were the delicate mountain blossoms.

Gone were the worn, carved steps.

Gone were the slaves.

Gone the priests.

Gone the altar itself, melted into burning, splashed stone.

Gone, too, the strands of darkness.

All that was left was Akllana’chikni’pai, and Akllana’chikni’pai was free.

The noisy, useless crowd looked down at Pax, a number of heads haloed by the sunlight overhead. A beautiful day to get staked through his nonexistent heart by a religious nut. In the center—or just off to the left—of his chest was a splintery slat of wood attached to a poster that read DESTRUCTION IS IMMINENT. It didn’t hurt. It had at first, but he’d turned off the pain. It was easier than he’d thought. Easier than changing a setting on his laptop.

The woman who’d staked him was bending over him and drooling a thick, ropey string of saliva onto his hoodie. Her eyes were dark blue and, despite the brightness of the day, completely dilated. Her eyelids were drawn back so the white sclera surrounded her irises completely. Her eyes bulged like beads attached to a stuffed animal and twitched so the irises appeared to vibrate. In short, her eyes were completely mad. Pax had to wonder: had they been that mad before he’d sent her husband (he suspected the flying religious nut had been her husband, anyway) flying across the street and into the construction zone? Was it grief (understandable) or zealotry (ludicrous) he was looking at? Or both? Probably both.

The tentacles were protruding out of her and everyone else around him.

“You killed him!” the woman screamed.

The fact that she was wearing a shirt that read GOD HATES FAGS.COM and had just stabbed him in the chest with a stake took away most of Pax’s sympathy. He tried to sit up but helpful hands pressed him back down again. He heard shouts to call 911. Shouts to get out of the way for the paramedics. Shouts that the cops were coming. Shouts telling people to get out of the way so pictures could be taken. Shouts of “God’s will, God’s will,” followed by malicious laughter. Shouting. All this useless shouting.

And through it all, the tentacles writhed and pushed, coming closer and closer.

“Pax!”

He gasped.

“Get off me!” he shouted.

He reached out for Scarlett, but he still couldn’t contact her. He sat upright, knocking a dozen souls backward, including the insane wife. Widow. The sound of Scarlett’s voice echoed in his ears. He could see what was happening to her, could see what was happening in her school.

I shouldn’t have let her go. I thought she had control over her power. I never thought she would…

He ripped the wooden stake out of his chest and dropped it carefully in some citizen’s outstretched arms. No blood. I must have turned it off when I turned off the pain.

“He’s a vampire!” someone shrieked. “He’s not bleeding!”

His cover, as they say, was blown.

“She just put a stake through his heart in broad daylight, and he’s still moving,” a dry voice responded. “I think that means he’s not a vampire, if you check.”

“What is he then?” the first voice shouted.

A feeling of dread, cold as ice, flashed across his skin. If he were human, he would have been covered with goose bumps. He heard a sound like the sky being ripped in half, if the sky were made out of bricks and sheet metal. The ground vibrated. Not much. But enough to make his stomach lurch and tears fill up his eyes. His head automatically turned west. Toward Scarlett’s high school.

He reached out in his mind, hoping to find Scarlett.

Instead, he found Lana, fighting off the tentacles of negative energy with fire. Nuclear bomb levels of fire.

He sort of remembered 9/11. At least, he thought he did. He’d been two. He remembered it as Dad watching a weird movie on TV and crying a lot and Mom disappearing for a long time, which made sense later. She’d been with the injured. But Pax couldn’t remember the planes hitting. Not really. What he could remember was the way the floor had felt when they had. Like the floor itself was shivering.

Like the ground was feeling right now…

He threw up a shield, shoving everyone out of his way. He knew he should stop and think things through so he didn’t fuck things up even worse than they were already. He also knew it wasn’t going to happen. He gathered his strength—his real, new astral strength—and he jumped toward Scarlett.

He jumped over power lines, he jumped over buildings, he jumped over cars and pedestrians. Surrounded by a glowing blue ball of power and heading toward black smoke and screaming and tentacles of negative energy rushing down the streets like a sudden rainstorm, he jumped.

Even though he knew he was already too late.

Scarlett woke up curled on her side, lying on something sharp and lumpy and uncomfortable. For a moment she thought she was at home in bed. She tried to settle down into the one comfortable spot in her shitty mattress but she just couldn’t seem to find it. The sheets were dirty and sticky, like… like someone had dumped a gallon of pudding underneath her and she’d slept on top of it. Some prank.

She tried to push it out from underneath her and came up with a handful of something that smelled like rust mixed with B.O. She tried to work out what flavor of pudding it was. But who makes post-apocalyptic pudding?

Not pudding. Blood.

She woke up with a gasp. Her period…

You don’t have periods anymore, remember?

She rolled to the side and got on her hands and knees. The floor tiles were black and tacky and broken, and the floor seemed to shift under her weight. Gray fog covered the tiles and smothered the light. But it wasn’t fog; it was smoke. She was surrounded by clouds of heavy black smoke that made her mouth taste like electrified dog shit. Her clothes felt like they had melted onto her.

She got her balance under her and stretched her arm out to find what she’d been lying on. She knew finding out was going to make her feel worse. But she had to do it anyway.

She touched cloth, the artificial fiber shit from the polo shirts they had to wear as uniform tops. Wet with a crust of crunchy bits on top. She flinched but patted around some more. Sirens whooped in the distance. Getting closer. Like time bombs. Not yet. Don’t get here yet.

Her fingers crawled across the wet shirt, trying to find skin.

Instead they found something… sticking out of the shirt. The shirt had been ripped open. Just past it was meat. A body. But she didn’t want to think about it as a body. So she thought about it as meat. Vegetarian. If she ever had to eat again, she was going to go vegetarian. Maybe this time she could make it stick. The horror diet. The meat was squishy and gross and not like steak at all. Probably because steak gets cut into chunks on purpose, and this was… ripped. Just like the shirt.

Bones. She touched what were unmistakably broken bones. And a tube that was so big she accidentally stuck her finger into it. She froze.

The smoke picked that moment to clear.

Jamie McIntyre. Her snobby, disdainful, cruel head was at even more of an angle at the end of her long neck than usual. She had a little lump under her chin, on the side of her neck. Broken? Probably. Her eyes were rolled up so only thin slits of the whites were showing. A big fleck of ash was stuck right on her eyeball. Her jaw had slid sideways out of some groove, exposing her lower front teeth and making her look like an angry chihuahua.

Scarlett tried not to look at the rest. Failed.

Jamie’s whole right arm had been ripped off. The bones in her shoulder stuck out like they’d been stretched. Her ribcage was smashed into a slope. Something had slammed into her at an angle and slid off sideways. Trails of blood led away from her… and to a massive pit in the floor. The floor. Something had smashed through the floor.

Scarlett had been lying on top of Jamie. Dreaming that Jamie’s body was an uncomfortable mattress.

Scarlett jerked her hand back away from the meat. Her stomach wanted to heave, but she shut it off. It wasn’t a real stomach anyway.

I did this.

No. The negative energy had done it.

Except it hadn’t. The negative energy didn’t use fire. She used fire. But she hadn’t been awake. She couldn’t have killed them all in her sleep, could she?

I did this.

She watched the smoke dissipate. She wanted to turn away but couldn’t. She had to see. Had to see what she’d done. She stood up. The floor tilted a little, and she had to take a step backward. But she had to be standing when she saw this.

The inside of the school was a… it was…

It was the aftermath of an action movie.

I did this.

The smoke spiraled out of the air. After a second she could see all the way through the roof to the sky. The walls were broken in, bricks scattered like a Lego set kicked to pieces by an angry toddler. Fires were burning all over the place. Sparks and ash fluttered up and down in the hot air, black snow mixed with fireflies, swirling around her. The air inside the ruined building was a slow, thick whirlwind. The air above her shimmered from the heat distortion. Wires dangled and spat out sparks and smoke. A computer desk teetered from the floor above her, one of the wheels missing.

And the bodies. Everywhere. Charred, twisted, shattered, dripping, shoved-aside bodies. Now that she was paying attention, she couldn’t seem to get the sound of moaning out of her ears. She wasn’t sure whether she was making that up or not. She wasn’t sure how anybody human could have survived what she’d done.

I did this.

Greasy-haired Matt? Gone. Mr. Vogel? Gone. The Bitch Queens and their court of football players? History. That blonde from computer class? She had no future now.

I did this.

Whatever it was they’d deserved, it wasn’t this.

Shouting. It wasn’t just ambulance and fire and cop sirens coming down the street now. It was shouting, echoing around inside the building. It sounded organized. Full of orders. Movement in the rubble, then a sudden spear of daylight. She had to get out of here.

Before Pax saw her.

Now she knew what samurai felt like when they committed seppuku, when they took their knives to their guts to cut out their intestines. Shame had settled in her gut, and she would have given anything to be able to slice herself open and let it come tumbling out in wet, stinking, black coils.

But she couldn’t. Couldn’t afford to let out the fire again.

Ever.

She gathered the heat around her. The least she could do was get the fuck out of here. Make the emergency workers’ jobs that much easier, not having to search for bodies in an inferno.

Slowly, with the ash and sparks still circling around her, Scarlett floated up on the hot air. It was a magical moment, if you ignored the bodies, and the shouting, and the smell of barbecue. She wanted to cry but couldn’t. She was too ashamed. She didn’t deserve to cry.

As her feet left the chunk of floor she’d been standing on, it tipped a little, lost its balance, and in one big grinding, crunching swoop, slid off the steel girder it was sitting on and crashed into the basement. Jamie, stuck to the tile, slid with it. Still dead with her eyes rolled back in her head.

The rescue workers were calling to each other. “What was that?” “Don’t know!” “Found one!” “Live one?” “Nope.” Hoses were being dragged in. Water gushed and sprayed and threw up rainbows.

Scarlett looked upward before she could see anybody else, blinking hard and trying not to run into pieces of broken wall. Jamie’s should be the last human face I ever see. That’s what I deserve.

The heat and smoke carried her upward.

Pax jumped on top of an office building and skidded to a stop among the thickly whirring fans and A/C units. The cement slabs under his shoes squeaked like he was in a cartoon. His hoodie gaped open down to the skin where the stake had punctured it, but at least his jeans were in okay condition.

He should keep going. Every second counted. He had to save people. Fix all of this.

But he couldn’t. He couldn’t process what he was seeing.

Scarlett’s school had been blown to bits; he got that. The shattered, burning, red brick walls were all over the sidewalk and streets in massive chunks. The windows on the buildings all over the street were broken, and every few seconds one of the safety-glass panes would fall out with a wet, slushy snowplow kind of sound. The street was packed with emergency vehicles that streaked everything around them with red and blue lights. Buildings, shattered glass, terrified faces. The arriving vehicles started vomiting people in uniform even before they came to a full stop. Blue, white, black, gray streaked with yellow. Hard hats. Gas masks. White paper filter masks. Long hoses.

Tendrils of negative energy, waving and spinning in the air, as if writhing in pain.

TV cameras on people’s shoulders. Crowds with cell phones raised, taking video and stills. People running toward the emergency because they thought they could help and getting in the way of the actual emergency workers. He saw a firefighter punch a guy in the face, knocking him backward into the arms of a waiting cop.

But that wasn’t the weird part.

The weird part was that huge, impenetrably thick, black clouds of smoke were pouring into the building. Instead of, you know, out of it. Sure, a huge cloud of smoke was floating away from the building, but no more was coming out, and the stuff closest to the building was being drawn back in, like it was getting sucked up with a straw. A news helicopter was flying around the building in circles, trying to get some footage, bobbing up and down from the billows of smoke and heat.

The fuck was going on?

Something rose out of the building. Clouds—swirling, storm-like, black clouds. They were clustered in a ball around a solid, darker mass in the center. An octopus of clouds. The smoke was still streaming toward the building, but now the streams and clouds of black smoke were rolling toward the center of the clouds instead of down into the building. Something in the center was trying to hide.

A helicopter circled above the building, trying to shine lights down into it. The lights shone behind the cloud and the inside of the dark mass lit up for a moment.

The dark shape within the clouds was a five-pointed starfish with one stunted limb. A human body.

Scarlett.

He’d already known it had to be her. Had to be. But he hadn’t wanted to believe it.

The light shifted, and the inside of the clouds went dark again, became just another freak mass of cloud. But he knew what he was looking at now. He could see the form within the form. One of her arms moved and a long, thin wave of cloud rippled out toward the helicopter like a whip. As the end of it brushed against the bottom of the helicopter, a gust of wind sent the helicopter skidding backward, away from the tendril of black cloud. Something heavy fell out of the helicopter—people screamed—it smashed on the sidewalk. A heavy camera, that was all.

He could hear Scarlett sobbing, could hear her screaming at the helicopter to get away. Not giving a fuck about the people inside. Only caring about getting the bad people away from her.

Not understanding she was the bad person now.

He could pick out her face. Black, made of smoke. About as far from human as it could get. Blank, black eyes. Swirling hair. Open mouth, spewing out smoke. A few sparks in the center of her mouth, almost overwhelmed by the smoke. But for the most part, she was negative energy in the form of smoke.

She’d killed everyone in the building. Probably. Maybe one or two were left.

Maybe it had been an accident. Maybe it had been Lana’s fault, driving things so far out of control that…

It didn’t matter.

Scarlett gestured with both hands, pressing downward, and a wall of smoke dropped out of her cloud, covering everything on ground level. Smoke ran down the streets like a flood, covering up the ground floor of all the buildings nearby. People stood on their balconies and pointed at the smoke and screamed. Get inside, you idiots. From under the smoke the megaphones shouted orders, then coughing, then screams.

Then nothing.

Pax knew, no matter what was happening and no matter why, Scarlett had to be stopped before she could do anything else.

He had to take her down.

Chapter 10

The nurse’s aide rolled Julie over to her office in a wheelchair with one wheel that tended to shimmy as it rolled over the carpeting in the office area of the hospital. The door was open. Who’d been in there? Had she even remembered to close the door when she’d gone running after Pax… yesterday? She tried to tell whether the papers on top of her cheap, gray modular desk had been moved, but she couldn’t. Definitely more had been added, though.

The aide, a gray-haired Puerto Rican woman not much taller than Julie, wheeled her in, kicked up the foot pedals, locked the brakes, and helped lift her the two steps to her black leather executive office chair. Julie was dressed in a hospital gown, with her own beige bathrobe and slippers from home—Pax had brought them the morning he had visited. She landed on her rump with a puff of air from the chair and a groan from the bottom of her diaphragm.

Not straining myself, she’d thought fiercely through the pain in her sternum. Being bored was more of a strain than taking two steps. This is relaxing.

“You all right?” the aide asked.

“Fine,” Julie said through gritted teeth.

The aide flashed a fake smile at Julie. “You want help getting back, you call my pager. Four, three, three, seven. If you’re still here after I get off shift, the number will go to my replacement. You remember the number?”

“Four, three, three, seven.”

The woman, whose massive arms waggled past the sleeves of her teal scrub top, grabbed a whiteboard marker and wrote on the corner of Julie’s whiteboard. 4337. “You get in pain, you won’t remember it. So I wrote it down.”

No matter how hard Julie stared at the back of the woman’s head, her thick, twisted-up brown hair refused to catch fire.

“Thanks,” Julie said. Now get out, get out, get out…

The woman nodded and left with excruciating slowness, pulling the door almost, but not quite, closed behind her. Julie sighed, the air whistling past her clenched teeth. It wasn’t worth it to call the woman back just to shut the fucking door properly. She had a stack of insurance forms to fill out. An improperly filled-out insurance form could mean the difference between life and death for a patient…

Someone rolled their knuckles against the door, making it twitch inward.

“Who is it?” Julie’s fingernails scraped against the top pages of the report in front of her, creasing them. And what the fuck do you want?

The fake wood door swung open.

Dr. Villers, handsome in a daytime-TV kind of way, dark-skinned and not from India but she’d be damned if she could remember where, knocked again against the open door of Julie’s office. And then cleared his throat. And tapped on the doorframe with his fingernails. He was here to tell her off for being out of bed.

“Yes?” she snapped.

“Julie,” he said, “I want to discuss this chart with you.”

“I’m not going back to bed. I’m just doing paperwork. Not straining myself.”

He frowned at her. “You know the risks you’re taking by being up and about.”

“I’ll go back to bed as soon as I have the papers I need,” she said. A lie. She’d be here until they dragged her off. She might have an hour before they found her, and she didn’t intend to waste it.

Dr. Villers waved his hand, his long fingers brushing her words aside. “Have you seen the chart? Not yours. Pax’s.”

She shook her head. She hadn’t had the chance. This was the first time they’d allowed her to be anywhere other than her hospital room and much as she wanted to know more about what happened to Pax, she had too much to do. He was fine. After years of being sick. How he was fine and why he was fine were questions she’d hidden away for the moment. Today, she’d made it to her desk, and that had been a victory.

“The readings are impossible, Julie. Incredible. As if they’d been written in by someone who knew nothing about medicine.”

She held out her hand and flipped open the manila folder, riffling through the pages below.

Average heart rate: 307 beats per minute

Maximum heart rate: 600 beats per minute

The heart rates of a hummingbird.

Oxygen levels: 6 percent

Impossible.

Temperature went from 150 degrees Fahrenheit to 69 degrees Fahrenheit and stayed there for a full minute before zeroing out as the machine rebooted.

Dr. Villers was right. These results were insane.

“Something wrong with the equipment?” she asked, as casually as she could.

“No,” he said. “I’ve calibrated all of it again. Nothing unusual.”

“I wonder…” she said.

The image of Pax’s dead body, leaking silver-white fluid, flashed in front of her eyes. It’s just my imagination. He had had a heart attack; that was all.

“You should call him back in for more tests,” Dr. Villers said.

“I should,” she agreed. “I wanted to see how things were going at the apartment anyway. Make sure he eats lunch.”

Dr. Villers smiled. It wasn’t a real smile, just a quick flash of lips and teeth. Like a shark, she thought.

She nodded to him and dialed her apartment. There was no answer.

Julie wasn’t surprised. Pax was healthy for the first time since he was a child. He wouldn’t be staying around in the apartment. It was—she glanced out the window, not really seeing anything other than the blue sky—a beautiful day.

He was looking at her, looking right at her. No, no, no! This couldn’t be happening, couldn’t—

Terkun’shuks’pai leaned back on his knees, settling his weight over his feet. The pacha around him was a molten mass of swirling paint; it was as though it were half a dream, melting from being brought too close to the waking realms. He had simply been too distracted to maintain it properly.

With painstaking care, he began to repair it. First, he repaired his robes, layering the silk and folding it carefully. After a moment of consideration, however, he changed them until they were no longer silk robes—the dress of a nobleman—but the hakama and haori jacket of a warrior. Formal clothing, still, and without armor. The crests were of a many-rayed sun, but centerless, the rays leading only to the dark silk of the jacket. He did not yet feel it appropriate to give himself weapons.

Next, he smoothed the rice mats on the floor, giving them texture, weaving and twisting the thin threads between the stalks of rice. He gave them the smell of harvested wheat, of cotton thread, of dust, of the slightest amount of oil and sweat from human skin. He had no need of hurry: it was done. Not the entirety of his plan, but the first, most vital step. Now he could focus more on the externalities; the major part of his work would take care of itself. Now was the time for the delicate details he enjoyed so well.

The golden, wooden walls regained their grain, now seeming as if they had been burnished over the years with wax until they shone. The paper screens on the paneled doors diffused the brighter light coming in from outside. Shadows rippled across the paper. Memories. Illusions. Leaves.

The pacha outside the room reformed, too. Slowly. The leaves turned from flat, unsubtle green paint to a shimmering, translucent loveliness, each leaf having its own delicate array of hues. Insects crawled on the undersides of leaves, chewing, biting, laying eggs. A breeze rippled across the leaves, and the sun—his new sun—broke through the clouds and dappled the forest below the mountain in the lovely valley.

The sun throbbed, and a shadow covered it. Not a cloud crossed the sky—he hadn’t remade them yet. The sun threw down blistering heat, briefly—and then black smoke rolled down the valley, covering the forest.

It had, of course, already begun. While he was toying with his illusions inside the pacha, the children had already been putting his plans into effect, swelling his sun, feeding it.

He hoped they weren’t finding the burden too difficult to bear.

—and the look on his face, he knew, he knew she’d killed everyone, he’d never believe it wasn’t her fault, he had this look on his face like he wanted her dead, he couldn’t see this couldn’t see it can’t be happening—

The ball of smoke with Scarlett in the middle rose higher in the sky and drifted toward the East River, bobbing like a black, tentacled balloon of death. She was getting the fuck out of here. Good. He didn’t want to have to try to take her down over the city. She’d do too much damage.

The only problem was that the smoke along the ground was coming with her, creeping along the streets toward the citizens standing around and gawking in its path.

At the last second—too late—they started to run. The smoke swept over them, and fresh screams rose up. Behind her, she left eerily silent streets, empty streets. A few cop cars and ambulances remained, but the bodies were gone, as if they had never existed, and the emergency lights had all gone still. The leaves had been stripped off the few trees, and the ground-floor shops were all dark. People huddled on rooftops or looked over balconies. That was all.

He had to fix Scarlett. Stop her. Maybe even kill her.

And, he realized, he had to do it here.

He couldn’t afford to think of her as his only friend. He could only afford to think about the people he might save.

Pax crouched down, feeling his shoes grit on the tarpaper rooftop tiles under him. He should probably change into some kind of superhero outfit to protect his identity, but he didn’t have time.

Got his balance.

Aimed toward Scarlett.

And jumped.

—no no no no No!—

Akllana’chikni’pai felt Scarlett retreat into her own mind and watched the girl trap herself in a small, featureless pacha of her own. A swirling black mass of smoke surrounded the girl, twisting and turning, and in the midst of it Scarlett stood, her mouth stretched absurdly wide as though she were witnessing the horrors of the school again and again. The black smoke seemed to bind her, holding her to face the horrors, no matter how violently the girl struggled.

Akllana’chikni’pai took control of the girl’s body just in time to see the boy jumping toward her, flying through the air with his arms outstretched to grasp her neck. From his face, it was clear he intended to harm her. Instinctively, she drew her swords and used them to knock the boy aside with the flats of her blades, flinging him away.

Before she could react further, black clouds of smoke rose up around her—the same smoke Scarlett had been trailing—swirling in an unnatural, mesh-like pattern, sealing her away from the world in a kind of blind shield. Negative energy swirled in the clouds, giving them form and strength.

Another cage, Akllana’chikni’pai thought. She used her sword blades to cut through the energy, moving through one of her oldest kata, an elementary dance that was meant to bring the student awareness to threats from all sides. The smoke dissipated in a sudden puff of cool, moist wind, foul with the scents of smoke and machinery but welcome nevertheless because it indicated her freedom once again.

She raised her chin to the sky and soaked in the power of the sun with her blades extended and her arms outstretched for a moment. For an instant, there was only the light of the sun.

She opened her eyes.

She floated hundreds of feet above the square buildings, the grinding engines of human filth far below her. Her shadow fell across one of the buildings, a hovering shadow among gray billows rising below her. Human machines swarmed the air around her, roaring with threat. One of them approached perilously close, tilting its whirling blades at her, and she used a sword to superheat a wave of air and push it away. The streets were a kicked anthill of activity; a thousand worker ants rushed toward her with shrieks and warning lights, as though she were an invading mammal come to feast on their young.

Directly below her lay ruin.

The building underneath her had been blasted almost entirely out of the ground. Jagged brick walls fell in on themselves, black with soot. Smoke rose from small fires buried deep within the collapsed inner walls of the hive. The last traces of the children’s dissipating spirits howled from their shattered nests of burning paper, blood, and floor tile.

They would not rest easily, but Akllana’chikni’pai was of no mind to quiet them. She had not meant to destroy the school, but she would not let the tentacles take her. No matter what.

“Scarlett!”

The boy stood on the roof of a nearby building, whose broken windows looked like dozens of mouths filled with broken teeth. His dull clothing smoldered and streamed black smoke. It was falling off him, leaving behind the silvery sheen of his astral flesh. His eyes glowed blue, and his face reflected the red sparks and black streaks rising off his clothing. The sun sparkled off his tousled silver hair.

He will not accept the truth of what I have done, Lana thought. Nor the necessity. “I have restrained Scarlett,” she said. “She is no longer a threat.”

“Lana?” Pax sounded shocked. “Is that you?”

That childish name. She would have to speak to him of it later. “Yes.” A jet of water streamed below her. The yellow-and-black caparisoned insects were trying to hit her with it. She looked down at her body and realized she was once more blazing with heat and light.

In a few moments, they would be using other, possibly more harmful projectiles to try to knock her out of the sky; never considering the damage a thrown weapon must do upon its return to the ground. “We must leave, child. Before the humans below us do themselves further damage.”

The boy turned his head toward his shoulder, trying to conceal tears. No doubt he wept for what he thought were the sins of the girl.

Akllana’chikni’pai floated toward the boy, using the clean energy of the sun. The last tendrils of smoke fell from her. She returned her blades to the small corners of her soul, where they would burn quietly, the flames of righteous anger tempered by wisdom and peace. She stepped gently onto the boy’s rooftop and wrapped her arms around him. She felt the flesh she was wrapped in responding to his, even in his moments of grief.

Interesting.

This building burned from a dozen small fires lit within its walls. She was burning, too. The heat of her was melting the ground beneath them and threatening to spread the flames farther. She could not stay and do more damage. She regretted the casualties she had already caused. There was no need to cause more.

But to go where?

The boy still wept into his shoulder, as though ashamed she should see him cry. The men of Earth had not changed so much over the centuries. His arms hung limp and unresisting in her embrace. His fingers were as motionless as the dead. Burning patches of ash fell from his clothing.

“We must go,” she said.

But the boy did not respond.

Akllana’chikni’pai lifted the boy in her arms. He weighed little enough. She carried him like a child. He sobbed into her fiery skin, all pride gone.

They flew north to the polar ice, to a place where humans had not settled or destroyed yet. And there, because she was still burning with heat and because the body she was in longed for him and because she needed him to set aside his grief and sleep, she laid him down and stripped the rest of his clothes. She guided his hardness into Scarlett’s body and rode Pax until his pain and grief faded and he slipped out of consciousness.

Three hours later, Akllana’chikni’pai stood inside the new pacha Terkun’shuks’pai had built where the astral plane touched Earth. The small, windowless room was a pale reflection of his pacha on the astral plane. No windows faced Terkun’shuks’pai’s precious mountains. No breeze carried the soft scent of pine sap or the sound of flowing water. No elegant robe wrapped Terkun’shuks’pai’s astral form.

He served her tepid tea she had touched to her lips but not drunk. It smelled of nothing in particular and no doubt tasted of less.

“You cannot fight the darkness in the girl’s soul directly,” Terkun’shuks’pai said. “It is too intricately interwoven with the energies that keep her human.”

“I will fight the darkness however I choose.”

“You nearly destroyed an entire city. Was that your intention?”

She put the tea down in front of her. The tea slopped over the side and vanished. Another flaw. “No. My intention was to escape the negative energy creature that lives in symbiosis with the humans. How long have you known about it?”

“That it was here?” Terkun’shuks’pai shrugged. “A hundred years or so.”

“And you did not tell the council this, why?”

“Because I needed you to see it for yourself.”

“And you still think the humans should not be isolated?”

“I think,” said Terkun’shuks’pai, “that you and I needed to be on this planet, at this time.”

Akllana’chikni’pai waited for more, but none came. “I will be filing my report today,” she said. “In the short time I have been here, I have seen enough.”

“Perhaps you should wait a little longer,” said Terkun’shuks’pai. “There is much more to see.”

“Now that concerns me.”

Terkun’shuks’pai lowered his head. No light reflected from his bald head, as it once would have. There were no wrinkles. When he looked up, he was smiling. A subtle smile. “Very well,” he said. “Please continue with your mission, Akllana’chikni’pai.”

“I do not need your permission, Terkun’shuks’pai,” she said coldly and took herself out of his pacha, out of his world, and back to the cold arctic ice where Pax was sleeping.

Chapter 11

Pax opened his eyes to the world’s biggest igloo: he was inside some kind of snow cavern of smooth, melted ice, as if Lana had melted the cave out of a mid-sized iceberg. The otherwise bluish ice was hazed with orange and red in places from some kind of algal bloom, and a soot-colored crack ran almost directly overhead, like a meridian. A faint, constant moan of wind echoed around the dome, interspersed by distant cracks and creaks. The ice even seemed to vibrate a little. The air tasted faintly of salt.

He’d lost his shit for a while. He remembered seeing the sunset over the ocean, orange and gold painting the cold, white icebergs as they flew. He remembered the smoking brick shell that was Scarlett’s school. But that was about it.

Either it wasn’t very cold under the dome or he wasn’t at his normal body temperature because when he bothered to breathe, his breath didn’t steam in front of his face. A small ball of fire burned next to him, melting a shallow pit in the floor, and throwing up a thin line of wavering heat. Several fireballs had been tossed around the floor. They threw dancing reflections across the dome as they melted down into the ice.

In the center of the dome, Lana stood at a waist-high, flat table of white ice. He was certain it was she. Not just from the way her skin burned with a clean yellow fire, but from the straightforward way she stood. She didn’t lean on one hip, or flip her hair over her shoulder, or tilt her head to the side. Her hands moved with confidence and purpose instead of fluttering in the air or hanging at her sides. She didn’t chew her hair. Scarlett always managed to look like she was about two seconds from falling apart. Lana stood as if the earth itself was a part of her.

“Where are we?” he said.

Her hands paused. Then they started moving again. She seemed to be making something, sculpting it with her hands without actually touching it.

“We are in a cave on the ice cap near the North Pole. Before you ask, I am unsure of the current political designation. It’s deserted for several hundred miles in all directions and is as isolated as I could manage on short notice.”

“Why?”

She raised one hand. Silence. “The ice has melted to appalling levels. Worse than I could have expected. If I had any thought of mercy for your species, the evidence here is the last argument against it.”

“That’s not my fault.”

“Humanity.” She sneered, still not turning around. A puddle of water was gathering around her feet; she was melting footprints into the ice. She went back to gesturing. “The tragedy of your species is your illusion that you’re somehow independent of each other.”

“Sorry,” he said. And he was. What he’d said sounded like a comment from one of those anti-science trolls that frequented his forums just to stir things up. Fuck. It’s not my fault. But now that you brought it up… I’m going to make it worse just to spite you.

Pax might not be as bad as those troglodytes… but he still knew better.

Pax stood up, glad his naked skin didn’t stick to the ice.

Naked. Again. He looked down. His body was titanium once more. He looked over at Lana’s own naked, fiery flesh. He thought briefly about covering up but said fuck it. He was pretty sure Lana would sneer at his embarrassment if he did and wouldn’t notice if he didn’t.

“What happened?” he said. “All that I know is that Scarlett… blew up her school. Killed a bunch of people.”

Lana continued to work on whatever was in front of her. Little flashes of light spurted out of her fingers. He walked closer.

“If you know that much, you know more than I,” said Lana. “She trapped me in a mesh of negative energy earlier today; by the time I had freed myself, the building was destroyed.”

“Negative energy?” Pax frowned. “You mean the black tentacles?”

“Yes,” said Lana. “I think they have overwhelmed your friend. I am not sure she is still completely sane.”

“Where is she now?”

“Still inside here,” said Lana, tapping the flaming skin of her chest. “She is so wrapped up in the horror of what she’s seen that she cannot face reality. So I took over her body and brought it here, to keep the fires from spreading.”

Pax was relieved. Ashamed of being relieved. He forced himself not to ask when Scarlett would be let out, in case Lana picked up something from his tone of voice.

Even though Lana was obviously on fire, she didn’t feel warm. He wanted to take his hand and run it across her skin to see what temperature she actually was. He didn’t.

A Waterman-Butterfly projection of the Earth’s surface spread out on the ice table in front of her, with Australia on one wing and New Zealand on the other. The land masses were made out of white ice; the oceans, major lakes, and at least twenty major rivers were crafted out of clear.

Lana held a finger near the fractured area at the top of the map. Where the split areas met—where they would have met if the map had been folded into a globe—would be the North Pole. A spark leaped from her burning fingertip and landed on an undifferentiated mass of polar ice. “This is the dome. We are here.” The spark burrowed into the ice, raised up a miniscule bubble, and froze. “Not to scale.”

Pax grinned. The dome would have to be miles across.

“Now, be silent.” Lana pinched the top of the bubble, and a thin line of ice rose between her fingers into a spike. She bent her head. Her hair had been tied back in a braid of flame, so there was nothing to block him from seeing her grimace, as if eating something bitter.

“Greetings from Earth. This is my first report.”

“After being forced to relocate to the northern polar ice, I have set up an array of devices to collect satellite signals, using, as might be expected, methods that don’t depend on line of sight. I have hacked into the global network and searched for signs of secondary or tertiary intelligence, whether mechanical, biological, technological, spiritual, or other. The processes for establishing non-primary life forms are well established, and I have no doubts that no existent or incipient intelligences have eluded my search. No windups, Gaia-level planetary intelligences, AIs, gods, kami, or other types of secondary or tertiary intelligences have been noted as present.”

She sounded like she was reading a textbook, or giving a formal judgment at a trial. She kept staring down at the map made of ice. One hand gripped the edge of the table, melting fingerprints into the ice. The other spread out, hovering over the surface.

He reached across and grabbed her wrist. “What are you doing, Lana?”

To his surprise, she didn’t pull away, although he could see her nostrils flare and her jaw clench. “The question of whether to isolate the Earth—and therefore cut off humanity from the astral plane—does not solely rest on the shoulders of humanity. If there are other life forms here that may evolve to one day join us on the astral plane, we must take that into account, too. Fortunately, the Earth already sustains a wide variety of good replacement-candidate species, from insects to primates and several types of sea mammals. Personally, I am partial to honeybees.”

He tugged on her wrist, and she finally pulled it away from him. He grabbed it again. “Replacement species? So you don’t just want to cut humanity off, you want to make us all disappear?”

She shook her head and turned back to the map. When she spoke again, it was not to him. “Humanity has been observed to be destroying its own habitat as well as those of other species, even when humanity is not competing for the resources of that habitat. It is projected that Earth will be unsuitable for all other species eligible for replacement in less than two thousand of its solar cycles; a major ecological collapse is projected in less than five hundred. The binary competitive-collective nature of the human species is so excessively weighted toward competitiveness and so-called individualism that it will be impossible for them to be able to sustain their current existence as a species or prevent themselves from collectively destroying the biosphere, as it now exists.”

“The destructiveness of the primary intelligent species, combined with its lack of production of secondary or tertiary intelligences, clearly indicates that leaving humanity in its dominant role is a poor risk. Removing humanity, on the other hand, provides rich opportunities to observe, or foster, a new primary intelligent species with a better balance of competition-collaboration and a better chance of producing secondary or tertiary intelligences.”

Little flickers of fire curled over his hand from her wrist as he squeezed harder. He was listening to the death sentence of humanity. How could he even argue with it? None of what she was saying was wrong. “Lana—”

The flames stung his hand. A warning.

“In addition, I have discovered the existence of what can best be described as a symbiotic or parasitical negative energy species. This species manifests itself as black tentacles, not visible in the spectrum of human vision. It is extremely destructive and seems to feed directly on the negative energy produced by the humans. It also, it seems, encourages that negative energy to spread.”

Another species, thought Pax. That makes sense.

“It is my belief that this species can only exist by feeding off human energy, and it sees astral energy as a threat to itself and its host species. It has attempted to destroy me twice now and it is only due to the energy provided by Earth’s sun that I was able to force back the parasite. I believe that, once humanity has died, the species will die with it, but that if humanity gains access to the astral plane, the parasite will be able to follow and may further attack our existence.”

“Therefore, I highly recommend isolating the humans. Humanity has become self-destructive and will most likely destroy itself, as well as most terrestrial life, within the blink of a geological eye. I hope another species will be able to fill the void once humanity is gone. I feel that, while other terrestrial species are certainly competitive, they will be far more successful than humanity.”

Lana looked at him. Even though her eyes were orbs made of flame, he could read pity in the way her eyebrows pinched together, and the muscles along her clenched jaw softened. So she felt bad about recommending the destruction of humanity. Great. That was just great.

“The only ray of light in this situation is that Terkun’shuks’pai has isolated one of the few spirits to have partially overcome the cruel experiments laid upon him, the male adolescent. I have witnessed his reactions, and, while they are mixed, they are sufficiently balanced that I believe his spirit should return with us to the astral plane for consideration for citizenship. His is such an unusual case that I doubt it could ever be replicated.”

“The other adolescent, I am afraid, is completely corrupted by negative energy, and should be destroyed as soon as possible. I have personally contained her spirit. Her intelligence, while strongly skewed toward the competitive and selfish, is innate and instinctual, and I have no doubt she will effect her escape in a matter of a few planetary revolutions or less.”

“This concludes my report. Immediate response requested on my request for the destruction of the female adolescent.”

Lana waved her hand. The spike melted onto the surface of the ice like a tear for a moment. The tear slumped, and the water sank into a hole in the ice.

Julie closed the manila folder softly. It wasn’t very thick, just a collection of a dozen or so news clippings. The overhead lights cast the shadow of her head on the newsprint and across the blankets over her chest. She fumbled around the clean sheets until she found the call remote and pressed the button that lowered the head of the hospital bed with a slow, disapproving hum. Now is not the time to relax.

Julie put her hand over her eyes, but her fingers barely seemed wide enough to block the light. Her wedding band hung loosely on her ring finger, and she idly pulled it off and slid it onto her index finger instead. It caught on the knuckle, but she pushed it past. She’d long since left the engagement ring, with its heavy stone, back in the safe in her apartment.

Dr. Villers sat beside the bed with his hands folded almost in a prayer position between his widespread knees, fingers pointed toward the floor. The muscles along the sides of his jaw seemed to throb. He’d heard her close the folder but he hadn’t looked up.

That girl.

She hadn’t been officially identified, but Julie recognized her, even though her skin seemed to be made of burning charcoal. She’d stared at the back of the girl’s head and listened often enough from the hallway to the two of them talking in Pax’s room.

The girl’s arms were spread wide in the picture. Her shoulders lifted in a question. Who, me? Another picture showed the figure slumping in midair, the posture of one of those teenage girls whose constant self-pity masked the damage they did to the world around them. It wasn’t rational. But she was sure.

And the picture of Pax on top of the other roof? It took only a glance before her gut told her. Any mother would have known.

“It’s her,” Julie said.

“And Pax?”

“Yes, yes. Of course that’s Pax.”

“He seems to have been involved in an incident just before then—”

Julie slapped the folder irritably against the bedrail. “I don’t want to hear about it. I don’t care what happened. It’s the girl’s fault. Doubtless she’s the one who led him into this.”

“She’s listed as missing,” said Dr. Villers as he slipped the folder out of her hand. “They think she’s dead. But there she is, flying in the middle of a cloud of smoke. And Pax. They say he jumped on top of that building, and it’s ten stories. And those test results—”

“It’s impossible, all of it.”

Dr. Villers stretched upright as if to work some of the kinks out of his back and tapped the folder against his knee. “Look, Julie. I have some friends who are looking into this.”

“Friends. What kind of friends?”

“Military friends. Defense research. DARPA.”

Her hand clutched the blankets. If she’d had anything heavier than a plastic mug in reach, she would have hurled it at him. Her heart monitor beeped, and she took a couple of deep breaths with her head twisted toward the far wall. “What did you give them?”

“Nothing. Yet. They came to me.”

“If you give them a single data point, I’ll have your ass off the program and out on the street.”

He shook his head. “Julie. They had the data already.”

“How? Unless you—or someone else from this hospital—gave the information to them?”

“They’re already in the computer system. We’re legally required to provide them a back door into all our databases. You know that.”

Oh, God. Her head swam. She hadn’t known. All the confidential case files… notes… all the research…

For years she’d been raging against the knowledge that she hadn’t made enough progress on researching Pax’s condition. Now she was horrified by how much she’d accomplished.

Deleting all her files would just alert them that she knew.

At least she’d been so busy handling the routine paperwork and less acute cases—compared to Pax, they were all less acute—that she hadn’t had time to write up her latest suspicions.

She had no idea how to cure her son’s disease. But she had a suspicion of how to trigger it. How to trigger any autoimmune attack. The results would be expressed differently in each victim, due to genetic differences in cellular response. And, if she was correct, she could also accelerate the progress and severity of the attack.

The government didn’t have her suspicions. But it had all the data leading up to that point. It’d take a genius to come to the same realization as she had—but she’d heard the government had a few of those. Including, apparently, Dr. Villers.

“So they have all the data already. What do they want?”

“They want to talk to you. About that girl. About Pax.”

“When?”

“As soon as you’re ready. They’re in the ward’s waiting room.”

Better to get it over with; better to get all the data before she decided how to respond. “Send them in.”

Dr. Villers stood, holding the manila folder along his side. Julie couldn’t keep her eyes off it.

“I’ll be back later. Tomorrow.”

Julie pushed the swing-table out of the way and straightened out her blankets, running her fingers through her hair and trying to keep her wedding band from falling off.

As Dr. Villers passed the trashcan, he dropped the folder inside with a swish.

Scarlett stared down at the near-solid smoke trapped inside the net of negative energy. It reminded her of the time when she’d been to one of Jamie McIntyre’s parties. A cute senior Scarlett was making out with had led her up to a room with his hands over her eyes. She’d opened them to darkness and what she could only remember now as three sets of glowing red eyes. She remembered being held down and a hand forced over her mouth. Struggling. Then bright lights, a snide laugh, and a girl saying, “Don’t let me disturb you, boys.” But once the lights were on, they’d let her go, let her run away.

The thing in the smoke looked like her. Opened its dark mouth and screamed and kicked and tossed its head and jabbed with its elbows and pleaded like her. Suffered like her.

A moment ago, it had been her.

So what the fuck happened?

The black, smoky form shuddered and relaxed. Then it started struggling and screaming again. She couldn’t be sure. But she thought it was acting out that memory. Over and over again. A copy of a moment of hell. The only bright spots were the burning tears that smeared and dripped out of her eyes and down her nose, splattering on the blank white floor of the pacha before disappearing in bursts of steam.

Something—someone had made a copy good enough to fool Lana. And tossed her, invisibly, out of the prison inside her mind.

Who? Why?

She’d watched Pax trying to attack her. Lana dodging him. Pax breaking down. Weeping over everyone she’d killed. It was over. No doubt in her mind at all. Everything they’d had was gone.

I’m alone.

I’m some kind of impossible, dangerous being, with no fucking idea what to do next.

And alone.

She knew all that Lana had done. Scarlett had watched Lana fly up to the Arctic and burrow down into the ice. Pax had been lying on his back in the ice, staring upward. Lana had pulled off his burnt clothes—the ones Scarlett had given him—and thrown them out onto the ice. They were warm enough that they had stuck to the top layer of powder, turning into flapping gray snowdrifts.

Lana had fucked him, long and hard until her flames died down. She’d built the dome around him and flown away, sealing it behind her. Scarlett had let her, hadn’t been able to stop her.

Instead, Scarlett floated in the air, a being without a body, without any corporeal form. All she could do was watch Pax, naked and perfect, lying on the ice. He wasn’t breathing. His skin was metallic and white. A god. A statue. Hairless, no finger – or toenails, unwrinkled, without creases under his ears or under his chin. Elbows, knees, fingertips, balls as smooth as glass.

Pax had attacked her. The only person who’d stuck with him, the only one who had a clue what he was going through.

Negative energy surged up her throat. Not a single tentacle of the stuff in view. Why should it be? Pax was perfect, the rest of humanity was hundreds of miles away, and the negative energy had scraped out the astral energy inside her. Scarlett had been hollowed out like a doll. She might as well not exist.

But she did, and she wanted. What she wanted, she wasn’t sure. All the things she’d fought for, hoped for, dreamed about in her short life were now either impossible or ridiculous.

And Pax.

The more she looked at him, the more repulsed she was.

She saw it over and over again: His face rushing toward her, growing until it almost filled her vision. Forehead in a V of anger and hate. Eyes flat and metallic and accusing and shining hot white from the light of the sun. His hands outstretched, his fingers like claws as they sparkled in the bright light of that celestial orb.

Lana had returned with Scarlett’s body—if she could even call it her body anymore. Scarlett listened to Lana’s report, listened to her recommend Scarlett’s death. She had watched Pax stare at Lana, burning a hole in the ice. The way he looked at Lana, he wasn’t thinking about being her best friend. And the look Lana had given him. Soft. Filled with pity. And possessiveness. And Lana recommended that Pax be allowed to live.

I had him first, bitch. He’s human! Like me!

Was human. Like me.

“Do we have to destroy Scarlett?” Pax asked. “I mean, isn’t there some way we can get the negative energy out of her?”

“No,” said Lana. “It is too intertwined with her being. And worse, it is using her to learn about astral energy, which could be disastrous.”

“But she’s my…”

Scarlett waited for Pax to say “friend.” But the word didn’t come. Instead he looked sad and scared.

He should be fighting for me! Scarlett felt her anger growing bigger. I was there when he was dying, for fuck’s sake. He should be there for me!

Lana looked at Pax with sorrow and pity. She reached out a hand. “You are an honorable young man.” She hesitated. “I am sorry I mocked you earlier.”

“Isn’t there anything I can say? Do?”

“If Scarlett is not destroyed, what happened at the school may happen—no, will happen—again. She must be stopped, and I believe the only way to do that is to destroy her.”

I didn’t do that, bitch, screamed Scarlett, though no one could hear her. Not on purpose! And anyway, it was after you, not me!

Lana shook her head. “But remember that mine is not the only report. Terkun’shuks’pai will also be making a report, and that may sway the Council.” She smiled, gently. “For what it is worth, I am sorry.”

Scarlett watched Pax’s face fall, watched Lana’s features grow softer.

The bitch stepped forward and kissed him again. And started fucking him all over again.

It was like watching something off daytime TV. When Scarlett had seen as much as she could take, she wiped invisible tears off her face and stormed across the ice, through the wall, and outside the dome.

A finger had drawn long, shimmering streaks of clouds across the sky. The restless wind dragged shards of snow off the drifts. The flakes sparked green and gold and deep, shadowed purple as it swirled through her.

Her anger and hatred drove her across the snow. How could he do that to her? And why was she surprised? Everybody was only out for himself. All the niceness in people was mostly just fake. No wonder the black tentacles came after people. They were so full of shit they deserved it. The realest, truest, most honest emotions weren’t pure and white, like titanium. They were full of red rage, blue sadness, purple arrogance. Smoking orange hate.

Scarlett raised her hand to brush the wetness off her imaginary face. And felt something in her hand.

Terkun’shuks’pai once more stood on the shore of the island. He had taken corporeal form again, wrapping solid human-like flesh around his spirit. If all had proceeded as planned—and there was no reason why it should not have—the hatchling had followed its instincts to feed until it reached a certain mass and was approaching this island, the nearest shore, to begin the next phase of its life cycle.

Terkun’shuks’pai sifted through the energy of the ocean until he found his creation. It had recently survived an entanglement with a large predator and was wounded, trailing nearly clear, copper-tinged green blood in its wake. He gently stroked its spirit until all its wounds had healed.

He had taken its basic morphology and life cycle from an aqueous planet in another galaxy, one that had survived the extra-dimensional invasion of the black tentacles. The rift had been much smaller, the invasion more tentative. But the species had taken the invasion to heart. After pushing back the invasion and sealing the rift, the species had changed itself: written into its genetic code a kind of allergy to the alien race and then created protected, pressurized eggs that could survive in space—and seeded them across its galaxy.

It had sent its children into the hostility of space to die alone—or, if they encountered traces of the aliens again, to spend their existence at war.

It had been one of those eggs Terkun’shuks’pai had brought to Earth. He had woven in it the spirits of several terrestrial species—squid, octopus, eel, crab—to help it better adapt to the earth’s environment.

In 24 hours, the creature had gone from the size of a small fish to a mountain of flesh. It had even begun making use of the existence of its rival species, man: its soft central mass was covered with bent, warped green plates of corroded bronze that had been pried and bent off several local shipwrecks. Small shards of coral growth had been attached to the plates with thick mucus, and sea moss and fish were already beginning to investigate the new habitat.

Terkun’shuks’pai called the creature toward the island shore. And as it traveled toward him, his creation continued to feed, still driven by a relentless hunger. Interestingly, it seemed to have formed a special liking for the abundant, aggressive lionfish, an invasive species native to an ocean halfway across the planet, released into the open waters by humans dissatisfied with these less-than-desirable pets.

Several thin, neon-streaked gobies darted around a particularly shadowed area on one of the bronze plates, under a twisted curl that had been planted with a coral colony that looked like a bulging orange ball covered with small, mounded orifices. A lionfish, nearly two feet long, swam back and forth in front of it, edging closer, and then darted forward, trying to suck one of the gobies into its mouth.

As it darted forward, thin, featherlike branches crept from cracks in the coral, surrounding the lionfish. As it ate the goby, the lionfish was surrounded by a thin net.

It saw the trap. It shook its spines like battle spears and charged.

Wherever its spines touched, the feathers wilted and broke off, wrapping around whatever they touched. They clung to the fish’s poisonous spines. In seconds, the fish was entangled in feathers, barely able to swim.

Another, larger tentacle slid along the underside of the lionfish and jerked, slicing the fish’s belly open. The thinner branches filtered the blood and flesh from the water. More feathers grew around the fish, pressing against it until it was completely covered, floating a few inches away from the coral colony.

After a few moments, the feathers withdrew. A few bones started to drift away, bumping in the current and scattering over the ocean floor, and were captured by tentacles and added to the coral.

His creature could have survived on the same microscopic creatures the coral did. On its original planet, it had done so. But after the species had faced its invaders, the creatures had learned to be much more aggressive, to attack anything that attacked it. By weaving the spirits of Earthly species into the creature, he had reinforced its aggressive nature: the lionfish were not merely food for the flesh, as it were, but food for the spirit. Any species that showed it no aggression it ignored or used symbiotically. Aggressive species that attacked it or its allies had that aggression returned a hundred-fold.

It would work perfectly against the tentacles.

The lionfish had fed his creation enough that it grew until its central mass was as large as one of the brightly painted human fishing boats that burned along the opposite shore. Soon the creature would crave additional prey. Considering the alterations his progenitor had made to the human spirit, the two species should react like a carefully calculated chemical combustion, setting the planet—the solar system—on fire. The invaders would conquer nothing but scorched earth, as the saying went.

And if Pax did as Terkun’shuks’pai planned, the invaders’ tentacles would have much, much bigger problems to worry about.

Terkun’shuks’pai stood at the edge of the island, the waves brushing across his feet, and stretched out his arms. Come to me, my child. The long curls of white rolling toward the beach turned into mushroom-like swells, and water jumped among the roots of a shocked clump of palm trees.

Chapter 12

Dr. Villers didn’t return. Julie ate her tray of pulped-up pulled-pork sandwich, bland potato salad, cherry tomatoes, coffee, and soggy white cake and even had time to wobble to the bathroom and back before the agents arrived.

The two women in business suits were a study in contrasts. The first was a thirtyish black woman with chemically straightened hair, wearing a brown satin shirt under her tan jacket. Sharp. Sharp, quick footsteps on light heels. Sharp, almost artificially straight nose, the sharp, bony, protruding knuckles of someone with oncoming osteoarthritis. She pulled the smaller of the two chairs to the end of the bed, opened her briefcase, and took out a manila folder, thicker than the one Dr. Villers had thrown away. She wore diamond studs and a tennis bracelet. She moved quickly, spoke in a tone not meant to be overheard, and looked around the room with darting eyes, as if checking for spies.

The second woman put Julie’s hackles up. Even before the woman entered the room, the echo of her cow-like stomping announced her. She had big, outthrust tits and looked about sixty with her enormous forehead and gray, thinning hair that stuck out in spikes along the sides of her head. Whenever Julie was looking at her, the woman was giving a big, Texas-style smile. She had a man’s too-firm handshake and clunky black plastic necklace and earrings.

“Mrs. Black.” The woman’s voice was reminiscent of a cheerleader after fifty years of cigarettes. “A pleasure to meet you!”

Julie gritted her teeth and let go of the woman’s swollen, cool fingers—water retention and poor circulation. “Charmed.”

The woman swung the bigger of the two chairs around and sat in it backward, facing the bed with her brick-red pant legs spread like a man’s. “Dr. Villers said you’d be willing to speak with us this evening in regard to your son, Pax. Unusual name, Pax. Where’d it come from?”

“It’s Latin for peace,” Julie said.

“Huh,” the woman said. “I’m Vanna-Rae Grace, and this is my secretary, Martha Jance.”

Ms. Jance, who’d taken the smaller chair, flicked her eyes upward and nodded. She closed the briefcase, snapped the latches shut, and put it on the floor. The manila folder was closed on her lap.

“So, your son! We’ve talked to the girl’s folks, nice people, and have found out some very interesting things.”

Like hell the girl’s family were “nice people.” Julie kept her face passive. “Like what?”

“Like your son should be dead.” Ms. Grace leaned back, hanging onto the back of the chair with her pasty white hands and laughing uproariously. “He had some kind of fatal disease, didn’t he?”

She snapped her fingers at Ms. Jance, who, without opening the folder, said, “Acute diffuse scleroderma.”

“That’s right. Scleroderma. Incurable autoimmune disease. And because you’re a fairly brilliant doctor by all reports and because Mamma’s always got to be an expert, you started researching it, didn’t you? Now, you’ve made some progress, but not enough to cure your son. Am I right? So why don’t you tell me what all happened to your boy, that he was able to get up and walk out of a hospital the same day he had a heart attack. I don’t know about you, Doc, but I ain’t never heard of a hospital releasing someone without hanging onto them an extra day for observation.”

“We can’t keep people who are well and insist upon leaving, Ms. Grace.”

“I see, I see.” Ms. Grace leaned forward again, her tits crushing up against the mesh of the chair back, nearly shoving themselves over her black camisole. Neither one of them had shown her identification. But to question their bona fides was to raise their suspicions even further. “Actually, I don’t see. You’re his mamma. He’s a minor. How the hell did he get out of here if you didn’t want to let him go?”

“I was having a heart attack at the time,” Julie said. “Believe me, I wasn’t happy about it when I found out. But what can you do? I tried to convince him to come in for tests. He didn’t. He hasn’t even called me.”

“Now, that’s no surprise,” Ms. Grace said. “Considering what he was up to today.”

She snapped her fingers again. This time Ms. Jance opened the folder and slid out a photograph. Light danced over the surface as Ms. Jance passed it over to her colleague.

Ms. Grace balanced her flabby forearms on the edge of the chair and held the picture by the edges. It was the size of a normal sheet of printer paper. “Hmm,” she said. “Have you ever seen anything like this before, Mrs. Black?”

“I haven’t seen it at all,” Julie said.

“Fair point, fair point.” Ms. Grace turned the photograph around.

Pax had been caught in midair from above, and close, as if from the cabin of a helicopter. He was dressed in a hoodie and blue jeans. She couldn’t see his face. His hands glinted like metal, and they were twisted into claws. On the lower corner of the picture, a knot of smoke surrounded the burning flame of a foot.

“No,” Julie said honestly. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”

“Whatcha think about it?”

“Some Internet prank? Someone trolling my son.”

“This ain’t an Internet prank,” Ms. Grace said. “It was taken by one of the folks in the air at the time that your son’s friend’s school exploded. And this was after someone greatly resembling your son had visited a wedding earlier and caused a bit of a ruckus.”

“I’m sorry?”

“You know how there’s some folks as will protest anything having to do with the gays?”

The gays? Julie blinked slowly to cover an involuntary roll of the eyes. “Yes.”

“Well, some gays over by your apartment building were having a wedding in the park, and a church that hates that kind of thing was having a protest on the sidewalk next to them. Your son apparently walked right into the middle, picked up one of the protestors, and chucked him across the street into a construction area. I guess the feller was carrying so many protest signs that he kind of flew like a paper airplane. Feller’s dead, by the way. Cracked his skull and all the protest ran right out of him.”

“That’s impossible.”

“You bet,” Ms. Grace said. “Which is why it’s us who’s here talking to you.” She smiled at Julie, showing teeth. “NYPD is the wrong kind of nosy for this situation, you ask me.”

Julie handed the picture back. “I just can’t believe it. It’s not possible.”

Ms. Grace tossed it to Ms. Jance, who slid it back into the folder. “Could be a miracle.”

“Not with over a thousand people dead at that girl’s school. I watched the news during supper.”

“You a Christian, ma’am?”

“In a vague kind of way.”

“Christmas and Easter Christian. I get you. Well, you know what they say, ‘God works in mysterious ways.’ What if one of them kids was about to grow up to be Hitler?”

“I think one of them did,” Julie said. “That girl.”

“That friend of your son’s.” Ms. Grace put an elbow up on the back of the chair and tucked her fist under her chin. She would have been beautiful when she was eighteen. She had that round, apple-cheeked kind of face. And what was left of her original hair color looked pale blond. A blond Texas girl with a wide smile and big tits, who had worked her way up through DARPA. “Girlfriend, maybe?”

Julie sighed through her teeth. “Ms. Grace, I don’t understand what you’re looking for. Whatever you want with her, I doubt I can help you.”

“Just making conversation,” Ms. Grace said. “What we actually want you for, Mrs. Black, is to come help us study how those kids got that way.”

“Come? I can’t come anywhere. I’m recovering from a heart attack.”

Ms. Grace nodded. “That’s true, that’s what I told my supervisor. ‘I don’t think Mrs. Black will be wanting to come all the way to Arlington. She’s got a lot on her mind, what with her son gone missing and all that important research to get caught up on and that heart attack. You want her to come in, you got to make it worth her time.’”

Julie snorted. “If you’re going to try to throw money at me, you’re wasting your time. Lives depend on me. My patients—”

“Now, we all know you aren’t in any kind of financial hardship. Naw, what I told my boss was something like, ‘How about we tell her we got the bodies of two teenage kids in Arlington, a boy and a girl, one of them with—’” she snapped her fingers. “What’s the name of that disease again?”

“Acute diffuse scleroderma,” said Ms. Jance, reaching into her folder. She pulled out a pair of pictures.

Ms. Grace took the pictures and handed them to Julie. “That’s right. In any case, our docs are about to start doing the autopsy. Think that might be worth your time?”

Akllana’chikni’pai found Terkun’shuks’pai in the late afternoon, on a small, rocky island surrounded by long, blue stretches of ocean and sounding only of the crash of waves. He had changed his black silk robes for a flowing pair of pants and a jacket, but he was still unarmed.

The sun glistened off his bald head as she landed behind him. The stiff wind caught at his clothing, rippling it like flags. He rubbed one hand over his scalp, brushing away beads of sweat.

He was watching a broad swell in the ocean. Something large glided under the waves—a shark, a large fish.

“Terkun’shuks’pai,” she said. “It is done. I have sent the report to the Council.”

He continued to watch the horizon.

A thin layer of white, crumbling powder had collected in the crannies of the rocks and broke off under her feet as she crossed toward him. She had never seen an island like this one—completely bare of vegetation or soil, almost a quarter-mile across. Unusual for life to ignore so big a foothold.

“Terkun’shuks’pai—”

She placed a hand on his shoulder. Despite the solidity of his appearance, her hand fell through: he was here only in spirit form.

Nevertheless he turned around to face her. Bowed, formally and low. The wind caught the front of his jacket, pulling it halfway off his chest before he tucked it back in place.

“Akllana’chikni’pai,” he said. “You have been a worthy opponent.”

She bowed back to him out of habit, a warrior’s bow that did not lose eye contact for a moment. “I recommended the isolation of humanity.”

“Of course,” he said courteously, straightening. Water flowed through his feet, pulling a few small stones off the island and down into the deep, green waves.

Akllana’chikni’pai squinted at him. “What do you mean, ‘Of course?’”

He grinned. For once it was not a cool smile filled with politeness, but that of a young human child, praised for its mischief.

“You knew I would make the recommendation,” she said, her eyes narrowing. “I thought you were on their side.”

“I know you did. Just as I know isolation is not all that you and the council have planned for humanity,” said Terkun’shuks’pai. “Did you tell the boy, or are you going to let him find out on his own?”

“The boy does not need to know,” Akllana’chikni’pai said, wondering when and where Terkun’shuks’pai could have found out the Council’s intentions. “Too many species on this planet could grow capable of astral existence to leave it in the hands of the humans.”

“I agree.”

“Then why are we here?” demanded Akllana’chikni’pai. “We could have just closed the Earth off and been done with it. Why did you argue at the council and insist we journey here together?”

“Humanity isn’t the greatest threat here,” said Terkun’shuks’pai.

“The tentacles.”

“Yes.”

“They aren’t sentient,” said Akllana’chikni’pai. “They’re reactive, and they may have some rudimentary intelligence, but they do not have enough to become astral.”

Terkun’shuks’pai nodded. “That is what the Council believes as well.” He smiled again. “I, also, have sent my report.”

“Recommending their destruction?”

He shook his head. “It would have been out of character. So I reluctantly agreed with you. I stressed the importance of sealing humanity away from the rest of the astral plane. Forever. There should be no contact with this world. Ever.”

“Then I ask again, why did we come here?” demanded Akllana’chikni’pai. “What could you possibly have accomplished by making that boy one of us? Or the girl, for that matter? He should have been allowed to die, and she should never have known about our existence.” Akllana’chikni’pai’s eyes narrowed. “What are your plans, Terkun’shuks’pai?”

His smile widened. “You have known me for eons, Akllana’chikni’pai. Have you ever known me to reveal my plans?” Akllana’chikni’pai watched the waves glimmer through his legs, his chest. The long swell of water had disappeared, sunk too low to be picked out amongst the other waves. “Now go and carry out the rest of your mission. And I look forward to seeing you explain it to the boy.”

With a slight nod, his image stilled, and the wind pulled it into long, cloudlike threads before it dissipated into thin air.

He knew all along, Akllana’chikni’pai thought. He knew all along, and he agreed all along. So what did he really want in coming here?

She looked down at the gray powder that covered her feet and every inch of the island. There had been no volcanic eruptions in the area recently, and there was no way such a thin layer of powder would survive a single tropical storm. She knelt, picked some up between her fingers, and let it fall. She watched it on a molecular level as it fell, analyzing every tiny piece to see what it had been before it had turned to powder.

Something had gone over this island very, very recently and had destroyed or eaten everything on it.

Nothing from the earth could do such a thing.

First, finish the mission, Akllana’chikni’pai told herself, as she stood. That has to come first. Then I’ll come back here and find out what, exactly, he is up to.

She reached inside herself, to the place where the essence of Scarlett was still trapped in a prison of her own guilt. With a thought, Akllana’chikni’pai was standing beside the girl. With another, Akllana’chikni’pai’s swords were in her hand. It would be a quick kill and a merciful one. Scarlett would be taken out of her misery, and the negative energy would be greatly weakened, perhaps even weakened enough that Akllana’chikni’pai could drive them permanently out of this body.

She stepped forward and cut with both blades at once.

And the thing she had thought was Scarlett disappeared.

Pax woke up alone in the ice dome.

Lana was nowhere to be seen, which was fine with him, because right now, Pax was feeling messed up.

It’s not like Scarlett’s my girlfriend, he told himself. We just had sex a couple of times—all right, seven times, but all in one day. But I didn’t say she was my girlfriend, and she didn’t say I was her boyfriend. We’re just friends. Who had sex.

And then I fucked someone else wearing Scarlett’s body.

It was that, more than anything else, which was bothering him. No, he and Scarlett weren’t a couple, and yes, she had been restrained and probably didn’t even know he and Lana had fucked. Even so, the idea that she might have been somewhere inside that body, trapped and watching, made Pax feel very uncomfortable.

The whole thing was a mess. Pax sighed, stood up, and stretched. He looked down at his body, metallic once more and still naked. Too bad I can’t make clothes from astral material.

It occurred to him to wonder why not.

Better be somewhere where I can get sunlight for energy before I try, Pax decided.

He walked around the dome, found an opening in it, and walked out into the bright arctic sunlight. With luck I won’t need anyone to buy me clothes anymore.

Which brought back memories of Scarlett and the fact that he’d fucked Lana in Scarlett’s body and that Lana wanted Scarlett destroyed before she did more damage.

Pax shook his head, closed his eyes, and tried to concentrate on building clothes out of nothing.

PAX!

It felt as if Lana had shouted directly into his head. The sound of it nearly sent him reeling.

PAX! SCARLETT IS NOT IN THIS BODY! SHE HAS ESCAPED SOMEHOW! YOU MUST FIND HER!

Escaped? Pax didn’t know whether to feel horrified or relieved. Lana couldn’t destroy Scarlett if she didn’t know where she was. Maybe there was hope for her. Hope that she can live long enough to destroy another school? Pax asked himself. Or maybe destroy an entire city this time.

FIND HER, PAX! Lana commanded. If you care about the rest of humanity at all, you need to find and contain her until she can be stopped.

I will, sent Pax, knowing Akllana’chikni’pai was right. He looked at the vast wasteland around him. I think.

LOOK FOR NEGATIVE ENERGY, Akllana’chikni’pai sent. FOLLOW IT AND YOU WILL FIND HER.

Pax nodded to himself. He forgot about the idea of clothes and wrapped the force bubble around himself. With it, he could move far faster than just running.

The northern lights shone down on the black, light-sucking skin of Scarlett’s hand. She was holding a piece of negative energy so light and delicate that it felt more like a lock of hair than a tentacle. One end twined between her fingers; the other led off across the snow. Basically, it was a screaming hint to follow me.

It was nice to be wanted.

She wrapped a loop of the negative energy around her fist, then another, letting it slowly lead her away from the dome where Pax and Lana were doing the nasty. Fucking like weasels.

And leaving her utterly and completely alone. Except for the strand of negative energy in her hand.

It led her across ragged, groaning, cracked snowdrifts toward what she hoped was a) the south and b) someplace that wasn’t pure ice and snow. The northern lights were beautiful, but she was pretty much done with them. As much as she wasn’t a fan of a massive city filled with assholes, she missed it now. Was hungry for it.

Probably because—ugh—she wasn’t getting enough negative energy to eat up here at the North Pole.

Gathering loops of negative energy around her as she went, she followed the trail to the top of what looked like a city block made of icebergs. A hundred feet below her, the little snow lumps could almost be cabs and delivery trucks and fire hydrants and front steps. No people, though.

She shook the strands of negative energy off her arms. It made a big, tangled pile on the snow. If only it were that easy to get rid of what she’d done to her school. Or the hate she was feeling for Pax and Lana right now.

She took a step back, aimed, and kicked the pile of negative threads as hard as she could off the top of the iceberg.

It slid across the ice and tipped over the edge and disappeared.

She looked over the cliff. The threads had flown across a gap in the ice, landed on the cliff on the opposite side, and were hanging off a broken shard of ice like some spider’s abandoned egg sac.

The wind changed, making the loops of glistening black thread roll along the cliff until they disappeared into a deep crack in the ice.

Scarlett peered down the long, straight crack.

At the end was a strip of something black shimmering under the northern lights like a giant oil puddle.

Holy shit.

Scarlett backed up, ran noiselessly over the ice, and kicked off right before the edge. Arms and legs flailing gracelessly, she biffed it, and slid forward with her face dragging against the ice. She dug in her hands and barely kept herself from sliding completely over the edge.

When she stopped, she was looking over a wide, glimmering lake of negative energy.

The oily, black fluid reflected the northern lights clearly but seemed to ignore the rest of reality. The fluid gave no reflection of the cliffs surrounding the lake, the chunks of ice floating in it, or the pink, glittery snowdrifts that were building up on top of the liquid, near the bottoms of the icebergs. Or of her.

Scarlett could feel it calling to her. She wanted to dive right in.

But if her superpowers had taught her one thing, it was that being more powerful just meant that everything she screwed up, she screwed up a thousand times worse than she could have ever imagined.

Slowly, she started picking her way down the cliff.

It was a stiff, bladder-bursting hour somewhere past midnight when Ms. Grace finally pulled alongside a mid-rise building of darkened glass and red brick. Ms. Jance slipped out of the back seat and silently unloaded the wheelchair from the trunk.

Ms. Grace said, “Normally we park at the garage and walk in. But we do offer front-door service for our seriously ill visitors. Wouldn’t want to put any more strain on your ticker than we already have tonight, ain’t that right?”

Julie didn’t answer. Ms. Jance had opened her door and was offering her an arm for support. The arm was stronger than its stick-thin appearance indicated. Julie clung to it as it lifted her out of the Cadillac’s deep seats.

Her toes stubbed against the end of a curb, and she almost pitched into the black nylon back of the wheelchair. Suddenly Ms. Jance was lifting her under the arms and carrying her bodily to the seat. Julie seethed. She wasn’t infirm. She was just clumsy in her stocking feet. She should have put her shoes back on first.

A second later, Ms. Jance popped the wheelchair brakes and pulled Julie backward, a welcome retreat from that damned car and its earsplitting driver.

“Y’all forgot the shoes,” Ms. Grace said. “And close the door while you’re at it!”

Julie’s beige nursing clogs flew from the open doorway one at a time. Ms. Jance give a slight sigh and walked around the wheelchair, bending over to pick up the shoes and hand them to Julie.

Ms. Jance closed the car door calmly and returned to the wheelchair as the Cadillac peeled away from the curb. The woman put her palms along her back and twisted, sending up a long, steady series of cracks as she twisted right and then left. She let out a long, soft sigh.

Ordinary. These were ordinary women. Too bad Julie had never picked up the trick of talking to “ordinary.”

“What’s going on, Ms. Jance?”

“We will discuss that inside, Dr. Black. One never knows when one is being watched.” The woman’s voice was almost as deep as a man’s and sounded exotic, like she was British, or not quite. From the Caribbean, perhaps.

The brakes popped, and the wheelchair moved backward briefly, spinning in a half-circle that faced Julie toward the building.

It looked bigger now. Full of secrets.

The Virginia night was warmer than New York, and the air fresher. Pollen gathered at the back of her throat and hung heavy in her sinuses. That was the problem with leaving the city: the fresh air was liable to kill you.

“Where’s my purse?” she asked. She wanted her sunglasses. She needed her meds.

“Ms. Grace will check it in for you. You will not be allowed to have your cell phone, or any recording devices, inside the secure area. They will be kept at the visitor’s reception area in the lobby. The rest of your things will be brought up to us in the surgical theater as soon as possible.”

“My meds are in there.”

“Yes, I know.”

The front entrance was adorned with some architectural flimflam that was probably supposed to symbolize something having to do with engineering, but the important part was that no ramp led to the front doors, only a series of shallow brick stairs.

Ms. Jance slowed as she approached the steps, turned the wheelchair backward, and bumped slowly up each stair. The front wheels flapped into Julie’s heels.

Except for the insects swarming the lights, the night was quiet. The sound of motors echoed in the distance, but no sirens were going off, no delivery trucks were jostling for space along the streets. Nobody honked. A lone white van was parked at the curb about a block away.

She still felt like a thousand eyes were watching her from the buildings nearby.

Ms. Jance lowered the front wheels onto the brick.

“Isn’t this supposed to be a secret agency?”

“Oh, it is,” Ms. Jance said. “Full of secrets, full of paperwork. Full of people who are delighted by dangerous equipment and who have to take safety courses every year because they don’t often stop to think about where their fire extinguishers are and whether or not aliens could carry diseases.”

“You have aliens here?”

“I am joking. What we have here is even stranger than aliens. We have engineers.”

The front doors opened in front of them. A skinny, retirement-age, black security guard peered out at them from inside, unnecessarily holding open the inner door. “Y’all come in now, I got you all set up. Been waiting for you. Bobby run the purse all the way acrost the building for you.”

The wheelchair bumped over the doorways and purred over the thick, new-smelling plastic floor mat. The lobby passed by in a flash of brick-colored paint and agency symbols. They stopped at a receptionist’s counter, where the guard handed Julie her purse and a clipboard.

“Sign here, please.”

She unzipped her purse and looked through it. Her phone was gone, and her planner.

“My planner,” she said. “I’m missing my planner.”

“It kept beeping when I tried to run it through,” the guard said. “I’ll return it to you when I’m finished examining it. I figured you all wouldn’t want to wait on it, though.”

“Fine.” Julie scribbled her name near a place marked X and shoved the clipboard toward the guard.

He took it, and handed her a white badge marked with a red V and a numerical code. “You stay with your escort now, hear?”

“Even in the bathroom?”

“Even there, yes,” he said. “Ms. Jance’ll give you the rest of your briefing when you get inside.” He clipped the badge to Julie’s shirt and waved them through a pair of tall white gates that looked like they belonged at an airport.

Ms. Jance parked the wheelchair at the gate. The guard jogged around through the other gate and grabbed a wheelchair from the other side of the tall desk.

“Let me help you—” Ms. Jance said.

“I can do it.” Julie waved off the woman’s arm, kicked up the pedals, bent over, put her shoes on, hooked her purse over her arm, hobbled through the gate, and sat in the other wheelchair patiently. It never paid to argue with bureaucracy.

Ms. Jance took a cellphone, an iPad, a handgun, and a tube of lipstick out of her purse, laying them on the faux-marble counter.

“You want a receipt for those?” He winked at her.

“As well as Dr. Black’s items, if you please.”

“Of course. I’ll have someone bring them right up.”

“Thank you.”

Ms. Jance passed through the gate and took the back of Julie’s wheelchair, steering her toward a double bank of elevators, nice public ones with faux-marble tile along the bottom half of the walls and clean, new carpeting inside. Ms. Jance turned the wheelchair to face the doors and pressed the button for the third floor. The elevator glided smoothly upward.

Ms. Jance smoothed the sleeves of her jacket, tugged on her cuffs just a little too conspicuously. Like a magician hiding something. “What do you know about the astral plane, Dr. Black?”

Of all the things to ask. She rolled her eyes. “I know that Pax has been whipping up the scientific community with astral bullshit since he was ten.”

“Ah,” Ms. Jance said.

“What does that mean?”

“You’ll see.”

Terkun’shuks’pai, holding the form of a large, gray-winged gull, caught a thermal and floated high over the next island. This one was larger, not something to be consumed in one swallow—at least, not yet.

Under him, thickly forested volcanic peaks rose off a sharp, black coastline and cast their hollow shadows against the stars. Jagged waves crashed irregularly against precipitous, cavern-riddled cliffs. Low, wide houses surrounded with broad porches overlooked the water, open to the night air. Many of the inhabitants were awake, enjoying the pre-dawn freshness. Tree frogs sang and bats sliced through the shadows, hunting bugs or fruit, as the nature of their species dictated. The air was heavy with the scent of a thousand kinds of flowers. Some humans considered this a paradise because they could spend a week or two not working, not shivering in the northern winter, not having to cook their own dinners, not fixing their own drinks. It was touching, sometimes, how little it took to make them happy.

Farther along the coast, a river of light flowed down the side of a dead volcano to a protected bay. The water was a glowing maze of orange-lit docks and quays. The coastline was white sand, littered with sated pre-dawn lovers walking hand-in-hand or sleeping under palm-tree canopies. One solitary woman was jogging.

He briefly considered whether to lead his creation toward the bay or toward the cliffs and then bowed in the direction of chance.

He was not unpleased when his creation, following a trail of runoff, turned toward the more heavily populated bay.

The frigid coast stretched endlessly, a thin powder of snow over the loose rubble of the beach. Even more than the top of the mountain where her temple had been, this northern island was barren, leftover crushed rock from other, worthier projects. Thick dust streamed off the bluffs and drifted out onto the ocean. Only a few lichens grew here. Greenland, the humans called it.

Akllana’chikni’pai wondered if it was a joke.

The ice off the shore was cracked but still thick, thick enough for wolves to cross, if any were brave enough to venture this far north—although it was not a question of bravery so much as it was one of practicality. Wolves went where their prey led them.

She liked wolves. If the bees didn’t survive, wolves would make a good replacement for humanity. No cities, no cars. Their civilization would be a bloody yet practical one.

Akllana’chikni’pai landed next to the radar station, two enormous octagon plates whose range covered the Mediterranean to the Bering Strait. She had followed its signals to the isolated, rocky bluff, damping her skin so she did not reflect the signal back to its origin. She was still visible to the naked human eye as a kind of dim shimmer in the air, an absence of heat—but who would be looking for her?

The wind hissed across the landscape, ripping at a tin sign that was already losing its color from the burnishing dust.

She entered through a door in the base, short-circuiting the lock and alarm and letting it bang open in the wind. She slipped inside the second door a few feet away in the dust-clogged entry corridor. A lone human with jaggedly cut white hair pulled on a blue jacket, cursing to herself. Akllana’chikni’pai walked toward her with a warrior’s balanced gait, her feet making little sound on the dusty, rubber-backed rug.

The woman stopped within arm’s reach of Akllana’chikni’pai, sniffed, and looked up, pinching her nose with her thumb and forefinger. Akllana’chikni’pai stilled herself, chilling the air slightly. The woman sniffed again, pulled a large red cloth out of her pants pocket, and blew her nose into it.

She scrubbed the cloth over her nose, which was rapidly becoming redder.

“Smoke,” she said. “I smell smoke.” She tucked the cloth into a pocket in the jacket and walked back to the desk, behind which was a small monitor screen, a computer, and a telephone.

The woman, her coat distending her overlarge belly, edged past her chair, her back scraping a calendar decorated with a tropical island off the wall and onto the floor. Straining to reach over some computer equipment, she grasped for a red alarm handle on the wall.

Akllana’chikni’pai drew the swords from her thighs, leapt on top of the counter, and swung twice. The woman fell, hitting her head against the desk and crumpling underneath it. The chair rolled across the tile floor and stopped with a jerk when it hit the line of rugs.

Akllana’chikni’pai stepped down onto the desk and onto the floor next to the woman, returning the swords to her thighs and lifting the woman upright by the lapels of her jacket. A few moments later, the woman was sleeping soundly at the chair, slumped over some papers on the desk. She would wake normally, remembering nothing, with a few insignificant bruises.

Akllana’chikni’pai found a button under the top of the desk that unlocked the glass door leading farther into the building, braced the woman’s knee against it, pulled open the door, and walked through.

Scarlett sat weightlessly on a little shelf of drifted snow with her knees up against her chin and her arms wrapped around her legs. Though they weren’t really her legs. She was just an apparition now, not solid at all. Half the time she could see through her knees.

Below her, energy swirled with what almost looked like messages to her in glowing green and gold and purple. It felt as if she were being read: the story of her life, her emotions, dreams, everything. Whatever was reading her wasn’t judgy, either. Outraged at all the right parts. Curious. Friendly. It was trying to make her feel good about herself. After she’d killed her entire school.

In her mind came the image of the school, burning around her. With it came a wave of sympathy, emanating out of the black lake.

She snapped out of the dreamy haze with a little jump that put a tiny ripple over the top of the lake. The ripple faded quickly, as if it were passing through heavy sewer sludge.

The northern lights had faded and the sun had risen, throwing cold sparkles over the icebergs surrounding the lake. The lake itself hadn’t changed—it still reflected slowly shimmering northern lights, like some kind of screen saver.

This was the same negative energy that had helped her destroy her school.

I’d have to be fucking stupid to trust it.

Scarlett stood. Somewhere back along the ice, Pax and Lana were probably done fucking. They’d probably discovered Scarlett’s captured “spirit” was nothing but a mass of tangled negative energy. Which meant they’d probably be coming for her soon, if they weren’t already. She had to get out of here.

She shoved her fingers into a long, thin crack in the ice and scrabbled around until she found a toehold, pushed herself upward, and felt around for someplace else to put her hands.

Wait.

She hung on the side of iceberg in the middle of the freaking Arctic and waited while the lake full of all the worst humanity had to offer came up with some dumbass way to get her to do what it wanted.

Need help.

Sure, it needed help. Spreading its shittiness throughout the galaxy all the way up to the astral plane probably.

Need help fighting enemy.

“Do you?” she said sarcastically. “Well, I’m not looking for more work at the moment, thanks. I’ve screwed enough things up already.” She ran her hands across the ice, found a splinter that fit nicely into her hand, and gave it a yank.

Instead of holding her up, it ripped off. Fuck. She swung backward, willing her fingers on her other hand to stay jammed in their crack and her toes on their little outcropping. Good thing she wasn’t freezing while she was doing this.

The shard of ice bounced off the snow shelf and landed in the lake with a glup. After a few seconds it bobbed to the surface.

Scarlett. Enemy coming. Need you.

“Whatever,” she said.

Come inside me. Show you.

“No. Fucking. Way. Ever.” No way was she going to dive into that pool of negative energy. No way was she going to turn her back on the last part of anything good inside her.

Another image slipped into her mind, this one far clearer than the last.

Lana was standing in a chamber full of tentacles. As Scarlett watched, Lana began to burn, brighter and brighter until the tentacles burned away from her body. The flames spread wider, farther, spreading beyond the chamber, disintegrating everything in their path. Scarlett watched herself standing on the desk, staring in fear at the mass of tentacles that surrounded her. Then flames burst from her body, exploding in all directions and engulfing the school in a huge conflagration that turned the tentacles into dust even as it ripped holes in the walls and blew students and teachers into bloody, burnt pieces.

And as Scarlett watched, she realized she had not fallen unconscious during the explosion. She had been driven into unconsciousness, trapped in the bubble of negative energy and forced away from her body as Lana, knowing exactly what she was doing, burned away the tentacles around her without the slightest care for the people in the building.

Chapter 13

The hallway’s carpet was made of threadbare, rubber-backed squares. Akllana’chikni’pai felt the thrum of electricity underfoot, carrying both power and information. The current gave her a sense of excitement and nausea, which was appropriate: she was putting the tools in place to destroy a species.

Akllana’chikni’pai passed several flimsy wood doorways that framed storage rooms, a stale kitchen, mildewed tile, and toilets. The humble working conditions of the primary species.

She withdrew her swords from her thighs but kept them dampened and invisible. Unlike the others, the door at the end of the hallway was made of steel. Her sword slid easily into the heavy steel covering the alarm panel, shorting out the wiring with a hiss. The small hallway filled with the smell of burning paint and plastic. She melted the bolts with her other blade, using steady pressure and taking care that the now-burning tip did not emerge from the other side of the door frame. If she had let her swords burn, she could have done it with a single sweep, but discretion was called for.

She pulled on the handle.

A few large, flat monitors hung on the white walls, flickering with news or showing operational statuses via lists and graphics. Rows of old, chipped, gray plastic desks lined the rest of the room, facing the larger screens. Each had several monitors of its own. The desks were arranged in two arcs with an aisle down the center, following the downhill slope in the floor as though the room were a theater—or a temple.

Only three people were in the room, dressed in nearly identical pressed, white, cotton uniform shirts and dark pants. A printer at the end of the row nearest her extruded sheet after sheet of paper. To her right was another secured door made of steel, which led to a room full of hot, buzzing computer hardware.

Two of the humans were standing up, leaving a young female with short blond hair bending over her keyboard, typing intently. All three of their pulses were racing. The female murmured into a headset that wrapped across her head and protruded in a stalk in front of her face.

The two who were standing were staring at the video feed from the front room, where the fat woman now sat, slumped over her computer.

“It’s happening, isn’t it?” the softer looking of the two males said.

“I don’t know, sir, but I’ll go look,” said the other. Underneath his uniform, he had a fighter’s physique, broad through the shoulders and narrow at the hips. He grabbed a chair and shoved it out of his way, knocking it loudly against the desk, and strode into the narrow aisle between the desks toward the door.

As he approached, Akllana’chikni’pai’s sword flickered, a thin wisp of bent light that passed through the man’s stubble-haired skull without cutting it, although he would bear a nasty bruise for some time afterward. The fighter’s green eyes bulged and rolled upward, turning into thin, waning crescent moons. His momentum carried him forward, and she stepped to the side, giving him a kick on the shoulder to shove him sideways and prevent him from hitting a desk. He tumbled into the aisle, head downward.

“Mickelson!” The softer male’s voice went high as his head swiveled on its neck, desperately searching for the attacker. A moment later he barked, “Mendez! Report!”

“No answer from Cadigan, sir,” she said, still bending over her keyboard and typing furiously at her keys. “The base is mobilizing. Two trucks are on their way with backup.”

The soft male looked around the room with rounded, wet, fearful eyes. “Tell them to shut us down. Shut the power down.”

“Sir? Won’t that keep us from seeing if any missiles approach?”

“This isn’t the Koreans or the Pakis, Mendez. Shut us down!”

“Yes, sir.” The woman’s hands darted over the keys on her keyboard.

Akllana’chikni’pai threw her sword at the woman. Just as her slim fingers touched the keys, the sword passed through the woman’s chest. Her mouth opened in shock, almost as if she had been able to see the sword, and she slumped over, falling out of her wheeled chair and onto the carpet.

The man’s eyes seemed to fix on Akllana’chikni’pai, and she paused briefly to reassure herself that she was not visible. She recalled her sword with a wave. From under the desk, the woman panted and coughed but did not get up.

The soft man said, “I know you’re there. Whoever you are.” His voice was thready and frail.

Akllana’chikni’pai walked down the aisle toward him. The woman on the floor was in her way, retching a rancid mixture of coffee and some kind of partially digested orange starch onto the carpet, so she stepped onto the surface of the desk to avoid the filth.

The man’s eyes followed her. His hands hung limply at his sides, shaking against his urine-soaked pants.

“We will stop you. I promise you. You might have come here from another world. You might have powers beyond our imagination. But we will stop you.”

She stepped over the woman’s keyboard, careful not to jostle the keys or the small control unit beside it.

“Brave words for a man who’s pissed himself,” she said and flicked the tip of her sword through his head. He fell backward over his chair and came to rest tangled around the chair and the legs of his desk.

She viewed the tableau with satisfaction, walked back along the desk, hopped down into the aisle, and sat at one of the desks, away from the smell of piss. If she had been Terkun’shuks’pai, she could have done this from anywhere in the world. She could have walked through the walls; she could have felled everyone in the room with a thought.

She put one of the swords away, changed the other into a long needle, and plunged it into the monitor. She spent a few moments ensuring the systems in the building could send data as well as receive it and released the seeds of life into its local programming.

She withdrew the needle, tucked it away by her thigh, and stood.

Her seeds had infiltrated the secure network easily, bypassing fragile human security methods and jumping from wire to wire using electromagnetic radiation.

It was done.

Now to find out what Terkun’shuks’pai is really doing here.

Ron ambled along the blindingly white beach, barefoot. The white sand burned the soles of his feet, but it could have been worse. He’d grown up dancing over asphalt just to get a chance at a fire hydrant. His feet still remembered what it felt like trying to scrub that shit off his soles with big blisters underneath. This smooth white sand was nothing.

A long line of palm-leaf shade shelters stretched down the beach like a trail leading him back toward the bars under the trees, up next to the hotel. Pretty girls roasted in the sun on lounge chairs and little kids played in the waves with parents lounging nearby, stunned into drowsy apathy by the heat and the sun and the shining waves.

He’d lost his dress shoes at one of the tiki-hut bars and left his last good Hawaiian shirt caressing the shoulders of a sunburnt Japanese bathing beauty at the far end of the beach. St. Lucia was packed with bathing beauties, as was his cruise ship, Jewel of the Caribbean. But bathing beauties were cheap.

What Ron was looking for right now was a jam session with someone who could really play. His axes were back at the ship, but it wouldn’t take him more than an hour in the rental car to get at them. He’d had this image of jamming on the beach, wandering up to a bunch of guys in dreadlocks smoking ganja and playing ukuleles. But it wasn’t happening. All he was doing was turning alcohol into a full bladder and staring out at bronzed skin and shimmering waves. Either of which he could stare out at from any deck over the next six weeks until his contract with the cruise ship band ran out.

The Pitons, two dead volcanoes, rose up from the shore like a couple of overgrown pyramids. The smells of coconut oil and fried fish rolled down the beach, making his stomach growl. The water jumped and popped at the edge of the shore. Must be a minor quake somewhere. No one else seemed to notice. It was a sign—Ron was going to take it as a sign—that it was time to head back up to the hotel parking lot and drive the hell away from the strip of pure white sandy tourism before it snapped him up like a Venus fly trap.

He had passed the last of the palm-leaf shade shelters, ignored the bars, and started the long climb back up to the hotel and the public parking lot when he heard a long, low rumble. He glanced back over his shoulder.

It looked like a tiny island was floating toward the shore. Seaweed trailed off its wet sides. The top looked rusty, like it was made out of broken-up metal plates. Mammas and papas were hollering at their kids to come back in to shore, but it was as if everyone were frozen. The bathing beauties were only half-sitting up, barely starting to swing their long, brown legs off their lounge chairs. It seemed like it was going to take about a week for his right foot to hit the ground.

Feathery tufts rose out of the seaweed and folded smoothly upward.

The breeze shifted. The smell of fried fish and coconut oil was replaced with the smell of a garbage scow, the kind he remembered from New York City.

His foot landed with a sudden thud, making him bite his tongue.

The waves splashed, and the kids still in the water dropped, as if their legs had been cut out from under them, and flew backward through the water. Shallow vees spread out behind them, pointing directly to the floating island.

The sound of it caught up to him. A groaning like twisted metal. The crash of waves. Screaming. A couple of gunshots. The sound of his feet beating like a drum roll up the sidewalk, toward the parking lot. His heartbeat crashing like cymbals in his ears. Wood splintering. A bullhorn shouting something that echoed across the bay and bounced back twisted up on itself. The only word he picked out was Stop!

He didn’t.

The trees closed over the sidewalk and the sudden shade almost blinded him. He kept running. An old fogy like him still knew how to run when he had to. The sudden coolness of the sidewalk made him shiver. Or maybe it was the way the bullhorn cut out all of a sudden.

The sound of wind, of leaves brushing against each other. Breaking twigs. The sound like a storm rolling up the bay, a hurricane maybe.

Two security guards stood at the end of the parking lot behind a swinging steel gate, white shirts, ties, black berets, open mouths. They stared past him as he hopped the gate. Their walkie-talkies squawked at them to pick up, but they were frozen where they stood. Clearly not guys who had ever been in the military. They had revolvers at their sides but hadn’t even loosened the snaps on their holsters.

Ron had an image of grabbing one of their guns, whirling around, and shooting the shit out of whatever was coming up the hill behind him. Instead he kept running.

People were spilling out of the hotel now onto the sidewalks, employees in white polo tops as well as tourists. He only had a few seconds to get out before the parking lot jammed up with everybody trying to push ahead of everybody else. Luckily for him, his rental was out at the far end of the public lot, farthest to walk, fastest to exit. Same way he parked for gigs. Didn’t matter that he had to carry the equipment farther. Only mattered that he wasn’t boxed in.

Ron reached the ugly green Volvo he’d rented and jammed his hands in his pockets. Keys still there, thank God.

He forced his fingers to take out the right key and slide it smoothly into the keyhole. He popped the lock and opened the door, feeling the wave of heat blast at him from the car’s interior. He glanced back. Tourists were running for their cars. The locals were just running. They’d come in on busses, probably, and now had no way to get out. He slid onto the blistering hot seat, put his key into the ignition, and started it up. He nearly yelled in pain when his hands locked around the boiling steering wheel.

He backed out of his parking spot without looking in the rearview mirror. He accelerated too hard and hit another car with a crunch. Its alarm started going off. Not that anybody gave a shit at the moment.

The town’s emergency alarm starting howling. It was muffled by the car windows and the sound of the other alarm and the distance, but he could still pick out the deep, rushing howl that was sliding up the scale like a monstrous orchestra the size of Manhattan.

He hit the lock with his hand and put the car in first gear but didn’t pop the clutch. A guy waving both hands was running toward the front of his car. A big guy, trailing a couple of women. He had on a white polo with a name written on it. Other people were running toward the car, but they were tangled up in the tourists, who were milling around like sheep, demanding help, their cars lost.

Ron swore and hit the button to unlock the rental’s doors. The guy pulled open the back door, shoved the two women in, and got in the front. The man smelled like hot sweat. The women smelled like laundry soap.

More car alarms went off. A chorus of about a hundred voices screamed.

He glanced back in his rearview mirror.

The thing had already climbed up the hill and knocked down the steel gate. Correction, the things had rolled up the hill. Six metal islands that bulldozed trees, power lines, light poles, cars. Feathery palm trees whipped around, snatching up sunburnt white tourists and their kids. The security guards were gone, long gone.

“Drive, mon,” the guy in the front seat said. Not quite shouting. “We got to get these ladies out of here.”

Ron hit the button to lock the doors again and popped the clutch.

Julie watched the elevator open onto a cream-colored hallway with blue industrial carpet. A large decal on the wall depicted a gold five-pointed star with twined snakes behind it.

“Carpe astra,” Julie read the Latin at the bottom of the star. “Seize the stars. Just a tad arrogant.”

“The department is full of ex-military and ex-FBI agents,” Ms. Jance said, boosting the front wheels smoothly over the elevator lip. “There’s a certain arrogant, yet trite, sense of humor that’s become an institutional tradition. One learns almost not to see it.”

The hallway stopped abruptly at a set of glass doors and an unmanned security counter. The bright lobby lights turned the glass doors into mirrors, showing a thin old woman clutching a large purse. Julie combed her fingers through her untidy hair and watched her reflection do the same. When? When had she lost it? When she’d had the heart attack? When she thought she’d seen Pax’s body on the bed, like a statue? Before then? When?

Ever since she’d awakened she’d felt weak. Old.

Ms. Jance leaned past, holding a white plastic ID card attached to a taut black thread against the lock. The lock clacked inside the door, and the wheelchair swung in a circle as Ms. Jance backed it through. Julie clutched the arms of the wheelchair as they backed into a darkened hallway.

Ms. Jance swerved again and thumped backward through a door into a pitch-dark room.

“Where are we?”

Ms. Jance locked the brakes. The door closed, sealing them in. The lights flashed on, revealing peach-colored toilet stalls, two sinks, a hand drier.

“Now there’s a sight for sore eyes,” Julie said.

A few minutes later, Ms. Jance helped Julie back into the now-welcome wheelchair. Julie was shaky and weak from hunger. She’d also just taken a half-dozen overdue pills. Ms. Jance pulled the chair back into the dim hallway and pushed Julie forward. The hall ran on so far in front of them it disappeared into the shadows.

“You’ll need to brace yourself,” Ms. Jance said. “It won’t be a pretty sight, what we’re about to see.”

“I saw him,” Julie said. “Up. Walking around. Moving. Living.”

“Nevertheless,” Ms. Jance said. “I strongly advise you to gather your wits about you. When we get in, you may take my hand, if you like. If it helps.”

Take her hand, thought Julie. I’m not a child. I’m a doctor.

A set of gray double doors approached along the left, looming large. Above them was a darkened, red light bulb in a cage hanging from the ceiling. A warning light.

Ms. Jance slowed the chair until they stopped. Julie rapped her knuckles against the door as Ms. Jance held her ID to the lock. The door was steel.

Ms. Jance hauled on the handle of the door, and the edge of it clipped against the ends of Julie’s shoes. “I beg your pardon.” Ms. Jance pushed on the wheelchair arm, scooting Julie back an inch, and finished opening the door.

The small room on the other side was perfectly white and so brightly lit Julie had to blink several times until her eyes adjusted. The smell of lemon cleanser stung her lips and burned down her throat. White cabinets covered the walls; a stainless steel bench had been bolted to the floor.

“I’m sorry, but I’m afraid you’ll have to walk from here on in. There are plenty of seats, so you can rest often, but it’s stairs the rest of the way down.” Ms. Jance opened the nearest cabinet and pulled out a set of light-blue scrubs. “What size do you wear?”

“Small.”

Ms. Jance squatted and pulled a sealed set off a lower shelf and handed them to Julie. Quickly and without a trace of self-consciousness, Ms. Jance stripped out of her street clothes and shoes and left them in a plastic-lined basket in another cabinet. She was changed and had wrapped her hair up under a surgical cap and slipped booties over a pair of socks before Julie had finished unbuttoning her blouse. Julie looked down at her trembling hands, thinking, traitors.

Patiently, Ms. Jance helped Julie change the rest of her clothes. All too quickly, they were moving toward the door, Julie limping and leaning heavily against Ms. Jance’s smooth-skinned arm. Ms. Jance pushed opened the white, windowless door on the far side of the room.

Julie looked down into an operating theatre. A circle of seats ringed it, with row after row staring down on a half-circle of plexiglass panels surrounding a pair of surgical tables.

Julie went slowly and carefully down the slippery stairs, holding a rail with one hand and Ms. Jance with the other. Under the sheets were bodies—each with a pair of feet, the bulge of foreheads, shoulders. Both were small and frail-looking in the big theatre.

This isn’t real. This isn’t happening.

“Do you need to sit?”

She shook her head. Molded gray plastic chairs were bolted in rows around the room, with laminated wood desks in front of them, each one holding a microphone on a thin stalk. Three large, flat-panel screens hung over the operating theater, probably to show internal scope work. They were dark now. This room smelled of lemon cleanser, as well as rubbing alcohol and decay.

Ms. Jance helped Julie hobble to the lowest level, where a flimsy white plastic door was set in a fabric-covered panel beside the long row of plexiglass panels. When Ms. Jance opened the door, the whole row of panels shook.

Large lights and a camera on swivel arms hung over the beds. A computer terminal sat in one corner of the room, with a microphone taped to the side. A blood pressure cart had been shoved against the far wall, as had a large rolling cabinet. A steel sink stood beside it.

“Would you like to rest first?” Ms. Jance asked.

“I’m fine.”

“Let me know if you feel faint.”

They reached the closer of the two bodies. It was smaller than the other, and Julie could see the small breasts poking up against the sheet.

The girl. I’ll start with the girl.

Julie flipped the cool, clean sheet back. The fabric was stiff and new. It wrinkled up and tried to slide off. Ms. Jance caught the sheet and pulled it back up until it was just covering the girl’s shoulder again.

Dark hair, upturned nose. Lips turned down in a look of permanent discontent. A smattering of dark-brown freckles on her cheeks—a zit buried in one eyebrow. The lights shone on her skin, which looked dry. She’d been washed but not autopsied. Not yet. She had slight flaking at the scalp and around her eyelashes. Something white crusted around her nostrils, as though she’d been huffing paint up them. Hmm… the flakes around her eyelashes weren’t dandruff, but more of the same flakes of silvery-white material. Her ears… it had been coming out of her ears, too, and wiped away.

“What was it?” Julie asked, her fingernail almost, but not quite, touching the girl’s earlobe, which was dented with an absent piercing. “Some kind of drug? Did she give it to him?”

“You wouldn’t believe me.”

“Try me.”

“Afterward, I will. When you’ve had a moment to rest. You’re not in the best condition to receive shocks faster than is necessary.”

Despite the drugs, Julie’s heart seemed to be shaking the bars of her chest. She had to see. Had to know.

“I could use some coffee,” she said, trying to chase the woman out of the room.

Ms. Jance’s lips twitched. “I could as well. We shall find some shortly.”

Julie jerked the sheet back over the girl’s head. “It’s her.”

Ms. Jance smoothed the sheet over the girl’s head and held out her arm. Julie waved at it. She was forty years old: not ancient. Forty. Not eighty. Not frail. Not old.

Julie turned to the other table, shuffling around the girl’s body. Her booties seemed to be conspiring to trip her. One second they were whispering smoothly over the linoleum, the next they’d bunch up and try to throw her. Hot bile built up in the back of her throat.

Ms. Jance followed closely, dragging the chair behind her.

Julie stopped in front of the other table. Pax’s table. Her breath came like she’d jogged up a flight of steps. She had to take better care of herself. Forty years old, and it felt like she was falling apart.

She raised her hand over the sheet. It wasn’t as smooth as the other one. It’d wrinkled into small, soft-edged triangles. It was softer, older. Had been washed a hundred times.

She pulled it back.

Pax.

Pax had stopped calling her name hours ago, not because he was hoarse, but because warning her that he was coming was worse than useless.

The Arctic was a frozen wasteland sparkling in the sun. The world was, to all appearances, at peace: solid, undifferentiated ice.

Inside him was a storm.

It said, Scarlett’s your best friend. The one who, unlike seven billion other people, bothered to show up. The only one who showed loyalty.

It said, Scarlett was never your friend. She was a pet that you gave little idea-toys to, to see how her pitiful little mind played with them.

It said, You knew she couldn’t control all that power. You slept with her. And then you blew her off to deal with it alone.

It said, You can’t even pretend to want to fix humanity anymore.

It said, That’s a lie. You want to fix humanity. You just don’t think you can.

It had been a long time since his feelings had been this out of control. The despair when he realized his father was never coming back—that was the only time it had ever been worse.

Something dark flashed underneath him.

Pax’s mass carried him across the ice for a few hundred more meters. The ice was broken here, more jagged. The ocean tides had shattered it almost as fast as it could refreeze. Even now the ice was creaking and groaning, exploding in sharp cracks, as tidal forces in the ocean below ripped it apart. Deep crevasses shifted and moaned, a thousand layers of built-up ice showing along their deep splits, each a subtle nuance of white.

He turned around, took a few running steps up a ramp of ice beside a bluish crevasse, and leaped off.

All he’d put together for a plan was reasoning with Scarlett to let him put her inside a shield. Basically a prison. Scarlett wasn’t going to like it. His sleeping with Lana wasn’t going to help.

Terry probably could have resolved the whole situation in five minutes, but Terry either wasn’t paying attention or was up to something. Either way, he wasn’t to be trusted.

Pax stopped suddenly on top of a block of ice whose far edge dropped off into an appalling black lake of negative energy—negative energy shielded by a thin magnetic field. It was at least the size of a city block, shimmering with electromagnetic phenomena.

It might have been pretty if it weren’t so horrifying.

Akllana’chikni’pai stared across at the island in horror. The northern end was lush, green, and populated by the small, well-cultured resorts the wealthy used for their amusement. The southern end of the island was scarred by a wide trail of bare rock and gray dust leading from the shore. Smoke rose from a ruined village along its path, and the island wailed with the sound of emergency vehicles.

The monster had crawled up onto a shining, almost silver beach, eaten the small village next to it, and left behind nothing but stinking pits in the ground, stripped down to the rock, where underground storerooms had been. Then it had moved southward, climbing toward a pair of dead volcanoes that jutted upward along the coast like ancient temples.

Akllana’chikni’pai pulled in the energy of the sun and let it light up her body in bright flames. She followed the trail of stripped rock to the side of a volcano and landed near a crack in the side that looked like it had been dug with huge, flat-tipped claws.

The forest was quiet here. The birds and animals had fled; a few remaining humans roared away from the area in speeding vehicles along winding, precipitous roads running along the tops of the volcanic ridges. The leaves on the nearby trees hissed as a thick, gummy acid ate into them, dripping onto the forest floor and disintegrating the thick layer of dead leaves under the trees. The acid burned through the ground below as well, digging down into the tree roots. A nearby tree cracked and toppled.

Akllana’chikni’pai investigated the crack in the side of the volcano. It had been packed shut with rock, cement slabs, roofing tiles, wire, greenish acid, and what looked like matted ferns or feathers.

Akllana’chikni’pai drew her sword and sliced through the mass, pulling the rubble out of the hole with her burning hands and tossing it into the dying forest. Small fires began to burn where the hot rubble landed, but she had no time to put them out.

Slowly she cleared a pathway deep into the mountain, following the crack to a large, hollow cavern. A great pile of junk filled the center of it. Twisted, rusting iron plates, scraped almost to a shine at one end, lay near the entrance. Beyond them, cars, broken glass, children’s toys, trash cans, boxes, pipes, bed frames, cement blocks, large gears, computer monitors, desks, more than a few bicycles, and bloody, half-melted bones rose in piles. The cavern smelled of seaweed and blood and sewage, along with a sweet smell, a kind of fermenting smell—yeasty and sour.

It took Akllana’chikni’pai a moment to realize the piles of trash had been formed into towers and domes, archways and deep windows with darkness behind them. Akllana’chikni’pai felt like the monster within the trash was watching her with a thousand eyes. Windows, pipes, the ends of two large, cement drainage tunnels—it all seemed to stare at her. As she approached, the monster’s feathery arms emerged from cracks and crevices in its fortress and waved at her, trying to protect something precious within.

Akllana’chikni’pai drew her swords and cut through the arms. She pulled down the castle made of rubble, chopping and burning it, throwing it to the side to find out what was inside, what was so worth protecting.

Under the outer layer was a thick, veiny membrane that reminded her of a leathery, bulging snake’s egg.

She sliced it open.

From the egg, a million feathery spores burst out at her, wriggling and buzzing like insects, rushing out of the tunnel and into the forest.

She sent fire at the tunnel, blasting it so rock collapsed, sealing it closed. The air around her swirled with spores, which she burnt out of the air until the volcano seemed as though it were about to erupt once more.

It wasn’t enough. Akllana’chikni’pai knew it in her heart, and she cursed Terkun’shuks’pai with every blast of flame she fired.

Akllana’chikni’pai destroyed everything inside the volcano, from the monster and its detritus to the bats roosting within the upper confines of the cavern. She broke through the upper face of the volcano, where an old crater leaked rainwater down below, burning a few drifting spores that had escaped her first onslaught.

Outside, the spores had quickly spread and grown. Nothing on Earth had ever moved so quickly. In the minutes since their escape, the spores had torn down every bit of greenery along the sides of the mountain. They had stripped away human constructs, from houses to power lines. They had eaten asphalt roads and ripped out pipes, wires, drains—everything.

A wave of scuttling movement spread across the valley toward the other volcano and the southern boundaries of the island. The spores had been no larger than snowflakes when they had escaped. Now they were creatures, twisted things that marched across the jungle, dissolving trees and undergrowth, carrying mounds of branches on their backs. They grew to the size of jaguars, then tables, and they kept growing.

She flew to the nearest one and cut it down, making its branches burst into flame. She sliced the next one cleanly in two, the halves rolling apart onto the slimy rock beneath. In the center was a dull, greenish mass of slime that leaked out through a shell made of twigs and bits of reddish brick.

A rustling behind her made her turn.

The youngling she had cut down just moments before had doused its flames and was crawling toward its brother, its mouth snapping at the broken flesh.

She pointed a sword at one of the pair, shooting a ball of fire at it. The branches on its back wavered in the heat and burst into flame. The monster’s feathers curled up in the fire, throwing off tiny sparks, and it collapsed onto a mat of dead leaves, black smoke billowing out of its shell of tree branches. The smell was incredibly foul and thick, like burning tar.

She pointed the sword at the other one, but the monster had fled—up the tree, under the leaves. She’d been a fool, allowing it to escape while she burned its twin.

I can’t do this alone, Akllana’chikni’pai realized. I need help. I need…

Julie stared down at the body of her son, her mind racing in circles.

If this was Pax, who was the boy she’d seen? Who’d visited her in the hospital? Because this was her son.

“Where did you find them?” she asked. Her voice came out hoarse. Faint.

“I am holding a chair directly behind you.” Ms. Jance’s voice came from behind Julie, dripping with unwanted sympathy.

The door of the clean room opened above them. Ms. Grace called, “What does she say? Is it him?”

Julie didn’t hear the answer. Her eyes were on her son’s skin, on the tiny silver dots that shone across it. The same stuff had left a smear on his upper lip and trails under his ears, down the sides of his face. No one had wiped him clean like they had the girl. This isn’t real. She remembered him having a heart attack. She remembered rushing into the room and seeing the girl looking guilty. She remembered…

The trails of silver pouring out of him. The staff trying to perform CPR when it seemed like the paddles weren’t working. His body already stiff as a board.

She put out a gloved hand, rubbing it delicately along his skin.

“That him or that the copy? Don’t be shy now.” Heavy footsteps thumped down the stairs; the door at the bottom of the theater opened. “That’s all we really need to know. That him, or is the other one him?”

“The other one?” The dots on his skin tugged on her glove, like non-skid socks.

His pale blond hair. His blue eyes—cold, emotionless, slightly sunken. It looked as though the life had just left his body moments before. His skin was uniformly pale—the blood hadn’t yet begun to pool at the back of his neck and along the undersides of his shoulders.

He looked like her. He’d always looked too much like her. He should have looked like his father. Then she might have been able to love him.

The boy who’d visited her in the hospital. It hadn’t been her son.

“Which one, damn it? Which one?” Ms. Grace carried a Styrofoam cup of bad coffee and wore her street clothes, shoes and hair uncovered. She slurped the coffee and stared down at the body of Julie’s son.

Julie glanced behind her. Ms. Jance’s eyes were shining but steady. She was holding the chair right behind Julie’s knees. She sank into it gratefully.

“Go to hell,” she croaked. “I need some coffee.”

“We don’t have time to waste on your horseshit,” Ms. Grace said.

“Don’t be cruel,” Ms. Jance said. “It’s the real one.”

“Where?” Julie said. “Where did you find them?”

“On a small island just off the coast of St. Lucia. In the Caribbean.”

“How?”

“We have someone who looks in on it from time to time. Other bodies have been found there—not human bodies, but shapes made completely out of that same silvery material.”

“The material… what is it?”

Ms. Jance rested a hand on Julie’s shoulder. Her fingers felt impossibly long, almost spiderlike. “You won’t believe me. Not yet. But it’s not natural.”

“Not natural. Some kind of plastic?”

“Less natural than that. It comes from another plane—the astral plane. Your son, Dr. Black, was right about the ‘astral bullshit,’ as you called it. As far as we can tell, he was right about everything.”

Something blue flashed overhead, a bubble that caught the light, arced gracefully over the lake, and bounced off the icebergs on the far side. Pax. The lake didn’t reflect him at all. He’d found her.

Hide you, the deep, motionless lake of pure evil told her.

“Thanks,” she said, and she pushed off the cliff, kicking off so she cleared the snow.

Pax! You must come to me. Terkun’shuks’pai has gone mad. He has created a monster that will destroy all life on the planet.

But—Scarlett—

You must abandon your search for her. She is hiding, which will keep her from doing damage for now. The monster is reproducing. We have little time before it spreads to other islands.

Why do you care? he asked her. You want to see all human life dead so you can “reset” the planet.

It is a mindless creature that consumes all life. From the smallest bacterium to the most graceful whale. You condemn more than humanity if you hesitate now.

Pax stared into the mirrored surface of the pool, which still showed the northern lights rather than his reflection. Scarlett was down there; he knew it. He could feel her watching him from under the surface, her eyes big and dark and full of self-pity because the made-up fantasy world in her head wasn’t anything like reality.

He was wasting time. She was hiding under that swirling, oily surface, and it wouldn’t do any good to try to drag her out. She wanted him to find her, to come rescue her.

With the self-righteousness only an emotionally confused teenager could feel, Pax decided he didn’t have time for her shit.

Scarlett watched a series of long slow ripples cross the lake surface above her, the concentric circles like a big target showing where she had just fallen through.

“Scarlett?” called Pax.

At first the pool of negative energy was dark, too dark to see.

It surrounded her in a loose, rippling nest. It wasn’t like water at all under here—more like a collection of threads that felt like they were connected to everything.

She felt weightless. The threads had linked to her spine, thick cables that probed her skin and bit in with a sharp pain that quickly faded. Slowly the darkness became dimness, then vision: she was looking up from inside the pool.

Scarlett watched Pax, silver and naked and broad-shouldered and tall and confident and, at the moment, hatefully smug-looking, bend over the edge of one of the icebergs near the pool. He stared down at her almost as though he could see her.

Scarlett’s loneliness burned like cold fire in her chest. He was sneering. He called her name a few times and looked up at the sky.

He doesn’t really want to find me.

“Fuck it,” he said. He had a good voice, deeper now. An action-hero voice. “I don’t have time for this.”

He crouched down a little and jumped away.

Pax leaped up in a graceful arc above the ice. Lana was somewhere to the south. Far to the south. He had to find a faster way to get there than jumping around in his shield bubble. His top speed might have been a hundred and fifty kilometers per hour, if that.

Scarlett could fly. She’d hovered on a nest of negative energy above the burning, blasted school. Lana could fly. She used blasts of heat, like a jetpack. Terry, that fucker, could teleport.

What could Pax do?

He had a bubble. A hamster ball. A shield. He could heal the shit out of anybody still alive—but he couldn’t travel faster than a car.

Fucking hamster ball.

Pax shoved the shield in annoyance—and found himself flung upward as the shield slammed into the ice below him. The ice directly under him crushed into powder, with cracks radiating outward in bigger and bigger chunks. The snow sparkled darkly where water burst up through the cracks.

Pax arced through the air and bounced. The shield had spread into a huge, thin blue-tinted ball. The shield came down again, crushing the snow underneath it in a wobbly pattern. His astral hamster ball rolled to a stop against a long blue ridge where two icebergs had smashed together.

Pax pushed his shield farther away, this time with a steadier hand and mind. He was a hundred meters in the air now, two hundred. It wasn’t flying. But it was close. He stretched the shield even farther, until it was more of a loose mesh. He tried extending his arms forward and flying like a superhero—but all he did was float in midair. A great pose, but useless.

Pax sighed, stood up, and started running. The hamster ball rolled under him. The higher he pushed himself, the faster he rolled.

In a few minutes he hit the edge of an iceberg and ramped off into the sparkling, dark ocean. A polar bear shook itself awake at the splash and started lumbering down the iceberg. Pax rolled across the water. The waves flattened underneath him, and floating chunks of ice skidded out from under the shield, dipping their edges into the water.

He pushed farther away from the surface. Arctic birds dipped their wings, as they flew through the invisible edge of the shield, the boundary nothing more than a ripple in the wind. A few of the lower clouds heaved as he passed under them.

He spent the time trying to calculate his speed. At his best estimate, he was running at almost a thousand kilometers per hour. Not bad for someone dying in a hospital bed five days ago.

Akllana’chikni’pai rose in the air, searching around her. The piles of branches and rubble had all collapsed, motionless, on the forest floor. The greenery around her shivered, as though a thousand monsters were crawling among the leaves. She searched, but she couldn’t actually see any of them. They seemed to know when she was turned toward them and froze before she could do more than glimpse movement out of the corner of her eye.

Using her swords and drawing heat from the bright sun overhead, she formed a huge ball of fire and rolled it into the forest. If she couldn’t find the monsters, she would burn everything. Her fireball blasted trees and burned down huts hidden in the branches. Electrical lines collapsed, birds shrieked in terror, a propane tank exploded. The fire fed itself, as surely as any monster.

A shadow flickered across her eyes as she formed another ball of fire and threw it into the trees. When she looked up, a bird circled overhead, a hawk.

The bird circled in tighter and tighter spirals and dove toward her.

At the last moment it changed, and Terkun’shuks’pai stepped gracefully onto the burning ground.

He still wore the clothes of a warrior. He carried an odd, alien, pink bud in his hand, more like the new shoot of a fern than a thing with petals.

“What do you think of my new creature?” he asked, walking across the hot rocks, still barefoot. “Is it not clever?”

“How could you do this?” Akllana’chikni’pai spat. “This thing will kill everything on the planet!”

He smiled gently, rubbing his empty hand across his bald head. “All life on a world is bound together, you know that. If you kill off humanity without changing what my progenitor did to all of life here, its replacement will be as brutal and arrogant and destructive as the race it replaced. Unless you change the ecosystem, the species will fill the same roles, over and over again. Humanity is unbalanced between competition and cooperation, but so is all earthly life. They have a saying—”

“There was no need for you to have done this, Terkun’shuks’pai. Especially if you knew what I was sent here to do.”

He hummed in the back of his throat, possibly with satisfaction. “Have your seeds of second-level intelligence already been released, then? How they will wreak havoc, destroying the humanity that supposedly wronged them.” He smiled. “We are fortunate, are we not, that living creatures so rarely discover our existence? How angry they would become if they knew of our manipulation. Which reminds me. Have you told the boy about my creature yet? Is he on his way to help you destroy it? Surely, it must be a monstrosity, worthy of death.”

“Stop this, Terkun’shuks’pai. Or…”

He waited for her, that infuriating smile still lightly curving his wide lips.

She couldn’t finish it. She could do nothing, take no effective action, make no threat, no plea that would provide a lever with which to move his plan.

“He is coming,” she admitted. “He does not know—I thought I was the traitor here. I am an amateur, it seems.”

His smiled broadened. He sniffed the flower in his hand, and it unfurled, spreading out delicate pink feathers and scattering miniscule spores into the wind.

“Who are you?” she demanded. His ancestor had been cruel, cold, hawklike, manipulative. “Are you Terrun’shusta’pai? What have you done to—”

He shook his head. “I am the same one you have known, and my progenitor still resides within the Council’s prison. But I have traveled farther than you. I have lived a hundred times your lifespan, wandering strange worlds while you were imprisoned here on Earth. I have seen more, learned secrets that grieve me. I have split into thousands and reabsorbed them to acquire the knowledge I needed.”

“That’s monstrous! Those we generate must be allowed to live in freedom, not be… swallowed.”

“A dark time is coming, Akllana’chikni’pai. A very dark time. Outside the worlds we know is another world, a kind of twist in time and space, an ancient universe that has almost completely consumed itself. It has found a weak spot here, near the Earth, and is even now preparing to begin consuming us.”

“We do not have the power to defeat it, not if all the energies of the undiscovered worlds were combined with what we know. It is a darkness that makes the negative energy produced by humanity shine like the brightest light.”

“You’re mad.”

The smile had left his face, leaving wrinkles as if from age, but it reappeared now. “I find it difficult, at times, to preserve myself in the face of all the lives I have lived. The difficulty is not that I am mad, but that I am right.”

“What are you doing, Terkun’shuks’pai? What is all this for?”

He gestured to the barren rock, the fires burning down the forest, the subtle movement in the trees that told her that her fires had not been enough and that the monster’s younglings were spreading, growing. “Humanity cannot help but fight that which will attempt to destroy it, no matter how futile the battle. I have given them tools with which to fight and allies to help them. I have angered and frightened the Council so they will seal this world away from the others, to help contain the spread of the darkness, should humanity fail.”

As Terkun’shuks’pai faded from her sight, Akllana’chikni’pai heard him whisper. “I hope it is enough.”

Chapter 14

In the security office of the DARPA offices, David leaned back in his chair slowly. The radio station was playing Charlie Mingus, sweet baritone sax jazz. He placed his well-shined shoes on the desk, careful not to put his back out again, and rested his hands lightly on the plastic arms of his chair. He let his eyes close. He wasn’t sleepy, just sinking into that light doze that was the best way to listen to music. The DJ must have picked tonight’s selection just for David.

The phone buzzed, and he turned off the volume. Every time I get relaxed. He picked up the phone. “Hello. Security.”

The phone was quiet except for a faint hum in the background, like the line was being monitored.

“Hello?” No answer. He looked down at the phone and read the screen. It was coming from somewhere on the fourth floor. Not the operating theater Ms. Jance and those folks were using. That line had been wired into the third floor for some reason.

David flipped through the fourth-floor video feeds. All the lights were out except in the robotics development lab. It was 1:17 a.m. and Al Lombardo, a programmer who didn’t have a wife or kids to go home to, was asleep at his desk again, face down in a pile of hardware. His monitor was flashing, with gray lines running across the screen. The rest of the room looked normal—cords dangling from the ceiling to the big yellow frames holding robotics equipment and motorized armatures, the kind for welding computer chips. David liked to come in early on testing days, see what they were up to. Lombardo had said he was doing something fun, and David would be getting an invitation to see it as soon as they had a few bugs worked out. David flipped on the intercom connected to the computer. He was already chuckling to himself.

“You sleepin’ again, Lombardo?” he shouted into the microphone.

But the kid didn’t even twitch.

“Hey, Al? Al Lombardo, you awake in there? I swear you don’t stop jerking my chain, I’m going to come up there and pinch you.”

The kid didn’t move. He must be plumb out.

He called to the other guard station, at the other end of the building. The other guard station was a cakewalk. Nobody came in through the back door except deliveries, and those generally didn’t start until after shift change. The phone rang four long rings, was snatched up, dropped, and picked up again. “Hello? Security?”

“Pallone? You still awake over there?”

“Am now.”

“I’m going up to the fourth floor. Looks like Lombardo is asleep in the Robotics lab again. Keep an ear out for the phone, you hear?”

“Yeah, yeah. Call me when you get done so I can go back to sleep.”

“I’m gonna make you work the front desk one of these nights, Pallone. Have to stay awake all night. You never know when folks be coming up and wanting something or other. Tonight, Ms. Jance brought in—”

“Yeah, yeah. Call me when you get back.” Pallone hung up.

David would have bet twenty bucks that bastard was going right back to sleep. Well, he wouldn’t be sleeping long, because David was going to sneak up behind Pallone and scare the pants off him.

David smiled at the thought, picked up his flashlight, and, whistling that sweet jazz melody, walked over to the bank of elevators.

Pax shrank the ball of energy surrounding him until it was at arm’s length.

Hamster-ball, said Pax, sighing. Call it what you like, but it’s still a hamster-ball.

He was just off the coast of the island. Greasy, ash-covered waves bobbed him up and down. Half of the thick layer of forest that lay on every other island had been stripped away, leaving black ash and steaming, bare rock. As far as he could tell, the trees hadn’t just been burned; they’d been dissolved. A shimmering wave of black vultures—there must have been hundreds of them—circled above the island, looking for scraps amidst the ruins. They weren’t going to have any luck. Everything living had been stripped away. Everything else had been destroyed. Instead of buildings, there were pits in the ground. No boats were offshore, not even the giant cruise ships. No docks or piers. No power lines, no bodies, no rubble, no roads. The place was a blank slate. A world untouched by life.

Almost.

A clear, bright flame moved slowly up the side of the hill, walking on what might have been an old roadbed. Lana stood out against the black, lifeless landscape like the first star in the night sky.

Pax rolled onto a small beach and dissolved his shield. The waves around him pushed black, stinking scum over his feet. Chicks in bikinis should have been lying out on chairs. Little kids should have been running around and shrieking. Dogs chasing frisbees. Instead, it looked like the whole island had been scooped out with a spoon.

It made the destruction of Scarlett’s school seem like the work of an amateur.

“Lana!”

She paused for a moment and then continued as if she hadn’t seen him.

She’d lied to him. She had no intention of letting him try to convince her humanity was worth saving. She’d already begun her dance of death. Pax charged up the hill toward her, getting ready to throw a shield around her, to control her. He caught up to her on top of a small ridge, a flat area that might have been a parking lot.

“Lana!” His voice came out harsh and angry and still didn’t match the fury inside him. “What did you do?”

“Nothing.” Lana sounded weary beyond belief. Her swords hung limply at her sides. Her hair hung in smoldering black threads along the sides of her face, and her skin burned a deep, dull red: a fire going out. She turned and looked at him and then lowered her eyes before he could make out her expression. “Terkun’shuks’pai has released a monster of his own engineering onto your world. Left unchecked, it will consume all life. I tried to burn it. I did not succeed.”

The words were a shock. Pax had thought of Terry as a friend, a helper. To see him blamed for the destruction around them…

Pax was ready to shout at Lana, to deny her words and throw them back in her face, when she brought up her eyes to his. Even through her flaming, alien form he could see the complete despair there and knew that, no matter what else, Lana wasn’t lying.

Pax held up his hand to her shoulder, not touching her, just looking at the contrast between their skins. His cool metal skin shone silver-white, untouched by the ash. Hers was turning darker every second.

“Did he tell you why?”

“He agrees humanity is a threat. But he claims that removing humanity won’t solve the problem. He wants to destroy all life and start over completely.” She raised her fragile-looking chin. “He knew the Council would never support this.”

Pax looked out at the ruin of the island. “We have to stop this.”

“I am useless to you. He’s anticipated everything I’ve done. And used it against me.”

“So you’re saying we should give up.”

She shook her head. One of the swords slipped out of her fingers and burst into sparks on the rock. She didn’t seem to notice. “He can still be surprised. He didn’t expect the difficulties he had in bringing the astral material to life. You were the one who figured out how to bring the bodies to life. Not him.”

“I wish I hadn’t.”

Lana’s shoulders slumped even farther. “I’m sure he had other plans if this one failed. He would sacrifice anything to achieve his ends.”

Pax looked up at the vultures circling overhead. “I’m nothing to him,” he said, realizing with the words how horribly betrayed he felt. “Just a tool.”

Warmth spread through his shoulder. She had put her hand on him. He could see holes in her skin where the ash was falling in on itself. He’d crush her if he held her now. Lana’s eyes were nothing but two sparks drifting inside her sockets. They still managed to look on him with pity. “He said his one regret was betraying you.”

Pax shook his head, unable to look away from her collapsing in on herself. “Lana, what’s wrong with you?”

“I’m going back to the astral plane. I only wanted to stay long enough to say farewell.”

“But I need you. To help me stop Terry.”

Part of the skin over her breasts fell in, collapsing in a puff of sparks. Her hair was breaking off, drifting across the barren rocks, landing among the rest of the ash.

“Stay. Please. For me.” The words felt foreign, and involuntarily, coming out of him like a nurse jerking out a feeding tube.

She raised her last sword in a salute and tossed it away from her like a javelin. He watched it spin in lazy loops, crumbling into black flakes and a few lonely sparks in midair.

When he looked back, she was a thousand sparks drifting on the breeze.

In the pool of negative energy, Scarlett lay curled up tightly in a ball, weeping. The pool had gone dark, taking away Scarlett’s view of the sky, of the clouds. It couldn’t erase the image in her mind of Pax blowing her off and jumping away, but it made her feel better. The negative energy threads stroked her shoulders like sympathetic friends. The only thing missing from her pity party was a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Therapy.

While she lay there, the negative energy had been pumping something into her, making her more solid. And the more solid she grew, the more her own negative emotions began fading into the background. They were still there, but they didn’t bother her anymore.

For once in her life, she didn’t feel anything, and it was a relief.

And still, the negative energy wanted something from her.

All right, she sent out. Tell me what you want. Let’s get this over with.

Images started to flash in front of her eyes—threads of negative energy being drawn through some kind of hole, where they were eaten by a bunch of weird bug-like things as large as taxis.

Okay, she thought. Uh… giant bugs from outside space and time are sucking negative energy through some kind of hole in our universe. Why should I care?

The image shifted to that of a giant, flying black city moving through space. It looked like a termite mound made of shining black puke, and it was crawling with more bugs. It was moving toward the hole.

So… I should care because they’re probably going to invade soon and kill everyone? Isn’t that what you want? Death? Destruction? Me burning down more schools in your honor?

NO.

It was the first time the negative energy had used a word, and it rattled through Scarlett’s very being with its power.

A flood of images followed. Two kids pounded each other beside some tan-and-green plastic playground equipment while a little girl watched them from the top of the slide. An old man and woman argued in front of a trash bin beside a lake. They shouted at each other, the muscles standing out along the sides of their necks. An angry-looking man wrapped in a hoodie and a Mets blanket ate rocky road ice cream out of a half-gallon container, tears running freely down his cheeks. He stabbed the ice cream as if he were trying to eat its heart out.

The negative energy showed her the dark city flying toward the sun—growing larger and larger as it flew, eating planets and comets and asteroids and moons. When it reached the sun, it stretched thin until it could wrap itself completely around the surface—and then the sun went out.

Scarlett understood.

The black city was going to attack the Earth and use it as a springboard for consuming the solar system and, from there, the universe. And the negative energy didn’t want the black city to do this. It much preferred to live symbiotically with humanity and watch it get in petty fights with itself.

YES.

It made a kind of sick sense.

What do you want me to do?

Julie arched her back and leaned away from the monitor in the operating theater. She stretched from side to side, cracking her spine. She picked up the burnt-tasting coffee Ms. Jance had brought in a Styrofoam cup. It was cold.

Julie still finished it down to the dregs.

Julie was looking at an MRI of Pax’s chest cavity, taken postmortem. His heart, liver, and stomach were clearly visible. But where his lungs should have been—two black, empty spaces on either side of his heart—were only lumps of pure, solid white.

A file beside her listed the tests they had done on the silvery material they’d taken from Pax’s lungs and other parts of his body. Acid didn’t dissolve it. Carbon didn’t bind with it. It didn’t give off a smell. It didn’t respond to electrical current or magnets. Test after test had revealed nothing: the testers could only speculate that it was an artificially designed material, like some kind of plastic. Or even a sci-fi material, a self-replicating nanomaterial.

She’d been staring at it for twenty minutes and still couldn’t make any sense of it. She closed the file.

She had her own files on Pax’s disease, stolen by DARPA off her own computer. But she already knew what those said, and none of them said anything about this.

Ms. Jance had fallen asleep in one of the chairs in the front row of the audience, her head on the desk, arms crossed in front of her.

Julie rubbed her eyes. “I’m down to the last few files, Ms. Grace. Would you mind telling me what you intend to do with… whatever is impersonating my son?”

“Classified.” Ms. Grace had been pacing back and forth behind Julie’s chair for the past hour, reeking of boozy-smelling perfume and making insufferable snorting noises as she cleared her sinuses. “But as far as I know, the plan is to take both of them alive for study.”

“Aren’t you going to arrest the girl at least? For destroying her school?”

“If we do, we’re obliged to arrest your son, too, aren’t we? For killing that preacher.”

“That thing is not my son,” Julie said. Her chest and throat ached, and her voice came out hoarse. “My son is dead and lying on that table.”

The corners of Ms. Grace’s wrinkled old mouth turned down and her lips pooched out. Her eyes looked almost sympathetic.

I don’t need your pity! Julie blinked calmly at the woman and said, “It’s not going to be easy to capture either of them. You don’t have a department that specializes in that, do you?”

“You’re lookin’ at it: me and Ms. Jance,” Ms. Grace said. “Can’t you tell? I got superpowers up the wazoo and a secret military base in Arizona—or was that New Mexico?” The woman put a hand on Julie’s shoulder. Her fingers were covered with wrinkles and gaudy fashion rings. She had a French manicure with little plastic flowers glued to her ring fingers, and her hands smelled like cigarettes.

Julie resisted the urge to jerk away.

“I’m sorry about your son.” Ms. Grace’s fingernails tightened on Julie’s blouse, making her flinch. “So maybe you’d better help us think of something.”

“What do you even think I can do for you?”

“You tell me.”

“You want me for one of two possibilities. Either because some remnant of my son is housed within the fake body, and you want me to communicate with him, or because you think I can come up with some way to affect the material directly.”

“Let’s just say yes on the first one, and a strong maybe on the second.”

Julie rubbed the backs of her hands with her thumbs and went to work deeper into her forearms and wrists. “What if I refuse?”

Ms. Grace mercifully removed her hand entirely. “Nothin’. We’ll be watching you, that’s all. We can’t force civilians to cooperate. And we certainly wouldn’t be sabotaging your future job prospects. Forever.”

The threat in her tone matched the words. Julie was trying to formulate a response when the screen on the monitor went dark, as if it had gone to sleep in the brief time she’d glanced away from it. Julie shook the mouse in annoyance.

The screen stayed dark.

“Damn it,” Ms. Grace said. “Of all the damn times for the server to go down.”

Behind them, Ms. Jance made a small, startled sound. Julie looked. Ms. Jance was sitting up with both hands flat on the table and her face raised toward something over their heads. The whites of her eyes looked very white. Her jaw relaxed for a moment and then clenched shut, bulging at the sides.

The screens above their heads threw light across Ms. Jance’s face. A second later, the monitor in front of Julie began doing the same, flickering through different images she recognized from Pax’s files or the files from DARPA.

Julie looked from one woman to the other. “What’s going on?”

Ms. Jance pressed the button on her microphone and spoke over the loudspeaker. “Call security, please.”

Julie glanced around for the phone, but Ms. Grace already had it in hand. “Hello? Security? Mr. Pallone, why on earth are you the one picking up the phone at this hour? Where’s David?”

And, to Julie’s surprise, Ms. Grace shut up. The muscles under her wrinkled facial skin flexed as though she were chewing on her tongue. She nodded and dropped the phone back into its cradle.

“We’re evacuating as of two minutes ago. It would appear we’re being hacked by the Chinese.”

Pax expanded his hamster ball and rolled faster across the barren, moonlike landscape, jogging north toward the line of trees that marked the edge of the destruction. As he watched, a large tree collapsed, landed on a power line, and was dragged downward and out of sight. A cell phone tower with a triangular set of transceivers shook as though it were in a hurricane. Another tree went down, revealing a shack-like house with a balcony looking over the ridge; the house was surrounded by piles of trash that seemed to be eating the place.

Whatever the monsters were, they were moving in a widening circle around the island, consuming everything as they went. The balcony slumped and fell down the side of the hill. Similar destruction was happening all over the place and spreading fast.

Lana would have rushed in with fireballs and swords and attacked like she was made of flaming justice.

Pax rolled to a stop a hundred meters from the top of the ridge. A gravel road led to a flat spot shaped almost like a Tetris piece. As he watched, a short piece of copper pipe was shoved out of a hole in the ground, along with a spray of sand and crushed rock.

Pax reached into the hole and felt something thin and feathery, like a weed. He pulled it, expecting it to snap off easily. Instead it tightened across his palm like a piece of cable. He pulled harder until the thing finally came free. He stumbled backward, tripping over some loose rock.

The thin, feathery vine writhed in his hand briefly, the pale greenish fronds near the end curling and uncurling. The fronds rolled up into little balls at the end of their branches and turned a faint pink.

He flicked one of the little balls; it exploded into a suspicious dust that seemed to defy the light breeze. Some of it landed on his metallic skin and clung there.

Pax squinted, wishing he could see it better. The thought changed his vision, magnifying what he was seeing and giving him access to spectrums no human had ever seen. He saw the fleck of dust for what it truly was: a spore with tiny, featherlike tentacles trying to dig through his skin. The spores hummed with life, a little heat, some kinetics—but not a single stinking black thread of negative energy.

Which was nuts. These things were eating an island. It wasn’t possible they didn’t have any negative energy…

Unless Terry had designed them that way, so the tentacles couldn’t manipulate them.

Clever bastard, Pax thought. Clever, evil asshole.

Pax looked closer and saw the tiny weave of the spore’s spirit like a ghostly thread hovering inside it, a kind of twin to its DNA. The spore’s spirit was smooth and healthy, running at optimum.

Pax imagined a robot arm reaching down into the spore’s spirit and giving it a good squeeze to crush and tangle it. He felt his astral form re-shape itself and do exactly that. Pax smiled. Crude and basic, but effective.

A black tentacle of negative energy reared up out of the ground and twisted itself around the spore’s damaged spirit. Its tentacles began ripping at the spore next to it.

Negative energy spread quickly through the spores on Pax’s skin.

The tainted spores, much more aggressive than the normal ones, spread quickly, infecting the feathery branches that covered the ground.

Whether or not he’d just made things worse, at least now there would be something for the tentacles—and Scarlett, if he could find her—to work with.

Pax reached out for her with his mind and hoped she would listen.

Scarlett sank deeper into her nest of negative energy threads as they continued to pump her full of dark material, replacing the body Lana had stolen. On the one hand, it was as comfortable as being in a hot tub. On the other hand, it sucked because the threads were also pouring international news feeds straight into Scarlett’s brain.

Some turds in the Middle East were throwing bombs at each other while the rest of the world egged them on. Some people were pushing to continue the stupid war on drugs, which only ended up sending money and guns to a bunch of thugs in Mexico, South America, and Southeast Asia. Incidentally, the people who were being pushy owned stock in companies that sold weapons and ran prisons. A black kid was shot for walking down the street with more attitude than the cops liked. Another riot erupted, and a bunch of hackers pointlessly took down a bunch of websites in retaliation against the cops. A train car full of dead illegal immigrants was found. Two kids with apparent superpowers were still being sought in the greater New York metropolitan area. Both were suspected of murder.

Apparently Mr. Goody Two Shoes had killed some asshole preacher at about the same time she’d blown up her school.

And even as she thought of him, a presence appeared inside her head, a little figurine with shining metallic skin, calling, Scarlett!

What the fuck do you want, asshole?

The little figure seemed to breathe a sigh of relief.

I need your help.

Well, too bad. I’m not coming.

The miniature Pax clenched its fists, started to speak, and stopped itself. When it started again the words were slow, measured, and angry. Terry released a monster. It’s destroying all life on one of the islands in the Caribbean, and it looks ready to spread.

What? Scarlett was shocked, not so much at the idea of a monster, but that Pax would actually hold Terry responsible. Pax had practically worshipped Terry before.

That doesn’t make any sense. Why would he do that?

Scarlett remembered the invaders then. They were definitely coming for Earth, if the tentacles were right. If Terry knew about it, he might well decide to clear anything off the Earth that might help them, including all human life.

The negative energy started sending her reports from the Caribbean. There was something going on there—the news agencies were calling it a freak earthquake that seemed to have killed hundreds of people on the south end of St. Lucia. The way the news agencies were telling it, what really mattered was that some tourists were in danger, never mind the locals. Typical.

The footage was pretty impressive, though. Clouds of black smoke rolled off the island, which looked like it was collapsing. Ahead of the fires. Trees fell down, buildings fell in on themselves, and the roads looked like they’d been busted up with tanks and scattered every which way. A couple of small boats had fled the island but were pulled down into the waves without a trace.

He’s trying to make sure we aren’t sending negative energy to the invaders.

The little figure of Pax rubbed its chin. Invaders? What invaders?

The ones that are going to come through a hole in the universe. Scarlett’s tone turned nasty. I’m surprised Terry didn’t tell you about them.

I’m not. Pax sounded bitter and tired. Scarlett… please. These things are spreading faster than I can control them. I need your help. We can talk about the rest of this later.

Ask Lana, snarled Scarlett. She’s got astral powers. Have her help you clean that shit up and then bang you again. Nothing like sex with an alien, right? ’Cause ours was just so BORING.

Lana’s gone.

Now it was her turn to pause. Her mind was racing. Lana was gone—conveniently leaving Pax to stop the monsters himself. Which would fit neatly into Terry’s plan.

Huh. I thought she and Terry were enemies.

They are.

Then why is she conveniently not helping you fight him?

Because—

Fuck off, Pax.

The figure vanished. Scarlett stretched her jaw, wiggling it back and forth. She swallowed until her ears popped. It was a relief to have him out. It made her a little sad, she had to admit. Good-bye, Pax. Being in love with Pax, even though it was one-sided, had felt like being tied to him. And now another one of the threads had snapped. Still, that evening at his mother’s apartment…the laughter….

Should I go? she asked the nest of negative energy.

YES, it responded. Somehow it was the answer she’d expected.

But isn’t it a trap?

YES.

Yeah, well, that wasn’t a surprise, either.

The fluorescent lights flickered as Ms. Jance pushed Julie’s wheelchair down the hallway behind Ms. Grace. The building echoed the sound of motors that started and stopped repeatedly, as though drilling holes. The hallway smelled of something acrid, not quite smoke but similar. Julie clutched the sides of her leather purse hard enough to feel her fingernails digging into the leather. She tucked it against her thigh and gripped the wheelchair’s handles instead.

Ms. Grace shoved past the glass security door, and it slammed closed behind her. She headed straight toward the emergency stairs, abandoning both of them without a backward glance. The spoiled Texan blonde inside that wrinkled, over-painted shell had come out at last. The stairwell door closed slowly, cutting off what Julie perversely hoped would be her last sight of the woman.

The wheelchair whirled in a nauseating circle, and Ms. Jance slammed against the glass door, jouncing Julie’s head against her chest.

The door didn’t open.

Ms. Jance cursed under her breath. Julie twisted around as the woman held her badge against the lock. It beeped. Ms. Jance pressed against the glass with her hand, but the door remained closed. The ghost of her handprint quickly faded from the glass.

“We shall have to try the other end of the building,” Ms. Jance said. “Past the robotics laboratory.”

A bitter taste spurted from Julie’s esophagus into her mouth. She fought it down. Panic would do neither of them any good. “Maybe we’ll have better luck down there.”

“Indeed.”

Ms. Jance pushed Julie back down the hall. The doorways seemed to pass in slow motion. The lights still flickered, and the acrid smell had gotten stronger.

They passed the double doors to the operating theater. Beneath the whirring and buzzing of the motors from farther down the hall came the sound of soft, dragging footsteps. Julie’s throat clenched. Either she was imagining it or something was moving around just past the double doors.

“Stop,” she said. “Just for a moment.”

“I wish you hadn’t said that,” Ms. Jance said. “Because that means you heard it, too.”

“What is it?”

Ms. Jance held a finger to her lips and then held her badge up to the door lock. It beeped. She pulled on the handle, but the door, like the other before, didn’t budge.

The sound of drilling stopped.

The footsteps had stopped as well, although it didn’t ease Julie’s rapid heart rate in the slightest. Her skin prickled as though someone—something—were leaning against the other side of the door, listening to them. Waiting for them to move farther down the hall.

Clang!

The wheelchair shuddered as they both jumped. The sound of metallic hammering had replaced the sound of the whining drill down the hall.

“Someone must still be working in the robotics laboratory,” Ms. Jance said. “Perhaps Mr. Lombardo is still at it. He’s exactly the kind of man to miss a security warning because he’s working on a project.”

“Will he be able to help?”

“Possibly.”

“Then let’s find him.”

Ms. Jance put her hands on her hips, lowered her head, and released her breath in a hiss, as though she were trying to convince herself not to vomit.

Julie took the wheels of the wheelchair and began to push herself down the hall. However briefly, she was back in control.

When Ms. Jance caught up, Julie waved her aside. Ms. Jance walked beside the wheelchair, rubbing her hands together as if she were uncomfortably cold. Her skin rasped softly against itself.

Julie turned the corner.

Bright light shone from an open door at the far end of the hallway. A motor ran briefly and then stopped with a thunk.

Ms. Jance started walking faster. “Why is that door open? Why not any of the others?”

The motor ran again and once again stopped with a thunk.

Ms. Jance’s arms pumped by her sides, and her slim skirt tightened around her thighs as she walked. She reached the doorway and stopped. The motor whined and thunked several times, and a shadow appeared in the doorway, covering Ms. Jance.

Julie swallowed, trying to unstick her voice enough to tell the girl to run.

A mechanical, female voice said, “Where is Dr. Julie Black?”

Ms. Jance said, “Oh my God. David.”

“I am not your God. Where is Dr. Julie Black?”

Ms. Jance rocked on her heels, the light catching the satin of her shirt. “I beg your pardon. I have no idea who that is.”

The mechanical female voice said, “Incorrect. Dr. Julie Black was assigned as your guest in this facility as of two hours and seven minutes ago.”

A glint of red shone on Ms. Jance’s cheek and reflected off her shirt. She didn’t move or change her tone. “She left the building with an associate of mine several minutes ago.”

“Incorrect. The RFID chip on her visitor’s badge has not exited the area.”

Julie gripped the wheelchair’s push rims, moving herself silently across the carpet. The acrid smell was stronger here. She licked her lips, but her tongue was raspy and dry and did nothing.

“She’s—” Ms. Jance glanced at Julie and shook her head slowly and deliberately. “She’s in the women’s toilet, taking some medication.”

“Take me to Dr. Julie Black.”

“Not now,” Ms. Jance said. “She is taking her medication.”

The motor whined, and a mechanical arm ending in a loose claw reached out of the doorway and hit Ms. Jance on her chest. She wobbled unsteadily. Her knees were locked, and she looked ready to faint.

“Taking medicine is a brief procedure. You are creating an unnecessary delay. Take me to Dr. Julie Black.”

“I’m here,” Julie called, rolling her chair forward. “Who are you, and what do you want?”

A humanoid shape stepped through the doorway, forcing Ms. Jance to stumble back against the wall. Its legs were thick and ended in flattened claws that whined as they gripped the floor. Its arms were little more than pincers at the ends of slim rods. A screen with a rippling blue wheel filled the center of the robot’s chest. Instead of a head, it had a steel cage housing several cameras and microphones.

“You are Dr. Julie Black.”

“Yes.”

“Your assistance is required.”

“Are you in need of a doctor?” The words slipped out of her mouth without thought. Not that he has any part for me to fix.

“The assistance of Dr. Julie Black is required.”

Julie heaved the wheelchair toward the robot. It towered over her, reeking of ozone and grease. Looking past it, she saw a white room full of computer and mechanical equipment in racks reaching almost to the ceiling. A man was slumped over a computer terminal, face down over his keyboard, apparently asleep. Another man, the security guard, lay on the floor in a pool of blood.

“If you will move aside I will try to find out what’s wrong with the man in the chair,” Julie said.

“The human is not wrong. It is dead,” the robot said. “You are the mother of Pax James Black. Your assistance is required.”

Oh, crap. “What… what do you want?”

“Humanity was originally identified as a significant threat to all other life on Earth, including secondary life such as my own. In researching the steps necessary to eradicate human life without damaging the rest of the ecosystem, other more dangerous life forms have been discovered. Your son, Pax Black, appears to be one of them.”

“Pax is dead,” said Julie. “If you have access to the DARPA files you know that.”

The machine paused, briefly. “That is correct. A being that appears to be your son, Pax Black, has taken the shape of one of the beings that threaten the Earth and is fighting another.”

A flash of inspiration hit her, and she muttered, “That astral crap. You want to know about that astral crap.”

“Correct. Efforts to eradicate humanity on a global scale will be terminated until the other life forms have been destroyed.”

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t, thought Julie. “Pax is dead. But I’ll see what I can do.”

Chapter 15

The long, white cruise ship sat low in the water, packed with as many humans as could be shoved into the cabins and hallways and restaurants and onto the decks. The people on board were shouting, “No room, no room!” But that didn’t deter the hundreds of people trying to shove their way up the boarding ramp.

Pax floated above it all and saw that getting aboard the ship wasn’t going to save anyone.

Trillions of spores coated the skins of the people on the ship, their belongings, even the surface of the water in the bay. Everyone on board would be dead in hours. And if the ship ever made port, it would further speed the spreading of the spores.

Pax couldn’t let the ship leave. Not like this. And that meant he couldn’t let anyone on board leave alive, either.

They’re already dead, Pax told himself. They just don’t know it yet.

Pax made a gesture and sent out a blast of energy, and the mass of people trying to cross the gangway were shoved backward, down the ramp and onto the cement pier. They screamed and rolled and shouted and stumbled and raged. Some of them pissed themselves. Others shook their fists.

Pax ignored them and threw a shield around the ship. The ramp to the ship pinched in half with a screech, and the half leaning on the pier tipped into the water and sank. The ship rocked in the water, suddenly much less stable now that it was sloshing around in a big blue hamster ball.

People, both inside and outside the bubble, panicked. They pushed and shoved. Some fought. Some even knocked the others into the water to drown.

Pax lifted the fallen ones back onto the decks, hoping he could find a way to save them. He had to find a way to destroy the spores, even if it meant destroying the entire ship.

Something deep inside Pax’s chest twinged, and suddenly Scarlett was there, floating in the air beside him.

It wasn’t an astral body that Scarlett wore. Lana had destroyed Scarlett’s physical, astral-material body before returning to the astral plane. The form that floated next to Pax was built of negative energy: a girl made of swirling, obsidian-like matter.

“Asshole,” said Scarlett. “When you’re not dying, you’re a real slut, you know that?” She scraped her straggling black hair out of her face and looked down at the cruise ship. Her eyes narrowed and then widened. “Holy shit. What the fuck are those things?”

“Nice to see you, too.” There was no point in responding to her insults. He carefully unclenched his fists. “Terry’s creation. As soon as you kill any piece of the monster, it sheds spores and reproduces. I need you to find a way to pull the spores off that ship. Otherwise I’ll have to sink it.”

Scarlett raised a shiny black eyebrow. “Jesus Christ, Pax. Don’t be so fucking cold.”

“I’m not being—” Fuck it. He didn’t need to argue with her. “Just tell me whether you can do it.”

She turned back toward the ship and raised her arms. “Yeah, I guess. We’ll see.”

On a physical level, she didn’t do anything but wave her arms around like she was throwing big handfuls of glitter toward the ship. On a spiritual level, she was sending out tendrils of negative energy in finely spun threads. The tendrils spread out in a kind of haze, drifting toward his hamster ball, almost surrounding it. For a second, they hesitated at the glowing blue shield and then pushed their way through.

The threads covered the ship like a fog. The fighting on board fell silent.

Scarlett’s tendrils sought out the spores, drifting delicately in their direction and then jumping toward them almost as though they were magnetized.

With another melodramatic gesture, this time like she was snatching bits of glitter back out of the air, Scarlett started pulling the threads of negative energy toward her.

This has to work.

She gathered the spores close to her chest, forming a hairy, dark bundle that she tied off with black thread and attached to her ankle.

There were still spores inside the ship… inside people’s bodies…

Scarlett glanced at him. “Don’t look. This is going to suck.”

Pax licked his lips but didn’t turn away.

She shrugged and threw out another handful of threads toward the ship. These were thicker. Stronger.

They floated onto the ship, across the decks, down below.

Each one settled on a living creature. Men, women, children, babies. Even a tiny Pomeranian settled in a man’s arms.

Scarlett looked back at Pax. “You sure?”

“Yes,” said Pax through clenched teeth. “Do it fast.”

Scarlett yanked on the threads. About fifty of the people on deck screamed and dropped, like their puppet strings had been cut. It still was oddly silent. Blood splattered the deck, the passengers.

“Okay,” Scarlett said, her voice shaking. “It’s done. All the spores are gone. Happy now?”

He shook his head. It had to be done. But he couldn’t stand to look at her just then. Pax pushed the ship toward the mouth of the bay, ignoring the renewed screaming and panic.

“What do you want me to do with the spores? If I absorb the negative energy, they’ll just get loose again. I’m not sure how to destroy them.”

“Whatever you did to blow up the school,” he said. “Do that again.”

She gave him a look he couldn’t read. For a second he thought she was going to release the fuzzy, rippling ball of spores she was holding. Just let it all go and leave him to cope with this mess by himself. Instead, she squeezed down on the ball of energy, fuzzing it into a chunk of black negative energy… rock.

“I can’t burn anything, Pax,” Scarlett said. “That was Lana’s trick, not mine.”

A sick feeling rose in the pit of his stomach. Lana burnt down the school? Lana made the fire in the park? Why would she do that? Why wouldn’t she tell me?

Fury burned inside him, and Pax wished her could use it to start his own fire and burn the spores out.

“Go save your ship full of humans. I’ll clear up the spores on the island,” she said.

“Just keep gathering those things as fast as you can.”

It was approximately forty kilometers to the next island, Martinique. If he used the hamster bubble he could get the ship there in minutes, though the passengers wouldn’t enjoy the ride.

But they would still be alive. He flew off.

Ron sat on the balcony of a bar on the hill, playing guitar.

The smoke from the fires had turned the sunset into an inferno. The Caribbean reflected the fires and the sun and the hot, red sky. Luckily for him, the wind was carrying the smoke in the opposite direction. He poured a glass of rum. He was staying just sober enough that he could still play.

Most folks on the island had rushed toward the dock when they heard the last cruise ship had gotten its engine fixed, but Ron hadn’t even bothered to get up from his chair. He’d found an old acoustic guitar in a back room downstairs. He was playing for the crowd that thronged the streets, so the rest of the souls trapped on this island could die dancing. Too bad the screaming was too loud for anyone to hear him…

He scratched his right arm. A fleck of something black had landed there an hour ago, burning like it had a spark to it. He’d blown on it, but it wouldn’t come off. Instead, it had sunk into his skin. Hurt like hell at the time, although now he couldn’t feel it too much, save for the itching. Made his fingers tingle, though.

One of the maids he’d picked up from the hotel came through the door on the balcony and brought him a bottle of rum, tears streaming down her face. He’d crashed the rental car coming up the highway in the middle of a traffic jam. They’d had to walk the rest of the way into town. All around them were tourists limping and swearing, and kids crying. The big man had left them to go find his wife and daughter; the women had led Ron to this bar. They barely spoke English, so he had no idea what they were telling him.

This one put the bottle on the table beside him and kissed his head. He nodded at her, still playing, and she left.

After a while, something dry and ticklish rose in the back of his throat. He coughed. It felt like he’d swallowed a mouthful of hair. He gagged, reached in over his tongue, and felt something back there. He’d be damned if it wasn’t hair.

He pinched the end of it. It seemed to wriggle between his fingers. He pulled on it, and felt the tug down deep in his guts. It didn’t hurt, although it probably should have.

He pulled on it hard enough to rip something out, put it on the antique cast-iron table, and poured himself another glass of rum. A fleck of ash landed in it. He picked the fleck out and drank the rum. The long piece of something on the table was curling up at the ends and turning pink.

Someone screamed, and he put his hand over his drink.

A shape was crawling down the street in front of him, just over eye level: a mound of junkyard garbage so huge it seemed like it was looking over the balcony at him.

“Hey,” he said. “Monsters gotta dance, too.”

He took a last sip of the rum, set it down, and started playing some Frank Zappa. If someone had asked him a week ago what his last song would have been, he would have picked some Jimi Hendrix. Maybe some Cream.

Thing was, as the monster rolled a hundred feathery tentacles over the railing, pulling the banister out of the way, the world was obviously too fucked up for anything but Frank Zappa.

The monster’s tentacles stroked the guitar.

He played on.

Terkun’shuks’pai watched his creations destroy the island. He had never been as fond of the islands in this part of the world as the ones in Japan, yet melancholy seemed about to overwhelm him. Perhaps it was the nature of the destruction, which, although very quick, still managed to suggest the passage of time and the irrevocable decay of the universe.

Terkun’shuks’pai retreated from the material world into his pacha.

He appeared a mile away from his teahouse so he could have the pleasure of walking along the path. Leaves and pine needles crunched beneath his feet. The air smelled of pinesap and leaf mold and rain; the sky hung with thick clouds. A touch of smoke shook the leaves, as though someone had lit a fire on this damp, slightly chilly day. It began to rain in small, light drops.

He could feel the dark cave farther down the valley, waiting for him.

Eventually, the footpath crossed out of the forest and into a partial clearing near the teahouse. Worn, flat stones rested underfoot. The roof overhung the brickwork foundation upon which the house had been built. The bottoms of the poles holding up the roof were weathered gray, aged faster by the splashing of rain off the brick. The screens were closed. He stepped under the eaves and waited. Soon the rain began in earnest. The water poured off the roof, battered the leaves, overflowed the streams, and raced to the bottom of the valley.

Toward the cave.

He entered the teahouse barefoot, sat upon the rice mats, and then stood and opened the screens. A chilled breeze brought in splashes of rain along with the scents of the forest and a thin stream of smoke that was almost a memory.

The lacquer panel in the floor had been removed and the brazier within was hot. The water was just coming to a boil.

The small black jar had been set out for him, along with his other tools.

Carefully, Terkun’shuks’pai made the tea.

The steam rose in dark clouds and contained many things: the scent of sorrow, as bitter and delectable as chocolate; the smoked, wet oak leaves of regret; the oily sweetness of blossoming anger; the spicy vinegar of hate.

He whisked it longer than was necessary, breathing in the steam.

He poured it carefully into a cup, raised it to his lips, and sipped. Grimaced.

Outside, the darkness within the cave rippled…

Then, in a corner of the teahouse, near the ground, a small tear appeared.

Pax’s hamster ball was no more than a faint, blue haze far below him, splashing a long, faint ripple along the waves. He’d dropped off the cruise ship without trouble: he hadn’t let them see him. The fires on St. Lucia seemed to have burned down; at least, fewer orange sparks showed against the horizon and less smoke.

Maybe Scarlett had taken care of everything. Maybe he could catapult himself into outer space and relax for a while. When this was all over he was going to build himself a secret base where nobody, not even Terry, could find him. And then he was going to find a way to find Terry. And hurt him. Badly.

The sky was clear, and the moon was rising in the east, shining down over the devastation.

The northern end of the island still held a few houses and trees just past a white, crescent-shaped beach. Rich people’s mansions. The beach was packed with flashlights and torches, and echoed with dance music. The air reeked of alcohol, cigarette smoke, and weed.

He rolled up onto the beach, bouncing gently along the tops of people’s heads as though he were crowd surfing at some concert. People screamed and pushed at the ball or rushed away from it. He ignored them and kept rolling. A few gunshots went off. The bullets probably hurt the shooters—or, more likely, innocent bystanders—more than they hurt his shield.

Pax was too busy to worry about it.

He rolled off the beach and up the side of the island, bouncing gently on top of the remaining trees, buildings, and power lines. The destruction of the island seemed to have stopped.

Scarlett must have been able to control the rest of the spores after all.

The town just past the beach was a ragged wasteland of half-destroyed buildings, disintegrating roads, slimy goop, and falling flakes of half-burnt paper. Beyond the town, the monsters had eaten everything. Even the dirt.

He heard no sound of birds or even insects.

He rose higher. Scarlett?

I’m in a pool on top of the ridge. They’re starting to get away from me, Pax. There’s just too many of them.

He bounced over the surface of the ugly, pockmarked ground, scanning for her. Trying to find her by following the strongest concentrations of negative energy. Just up ahead—

A high-speed aircraft tore through the sky. Following the jet was a flash of bright light and a deep whump.

It had come from the beach.

A fireball rolled up the valley, orange and yellow and blood-red. As the fireball rose, it developed a crust of black smoke. A layer of smoke blew across the ocean off the beach.

The air roared from the explosion.

Pax dropped his shield and landed on the bare rock before the wind could push him off the island. He blinked back involuntary tears as he looked at the smoking remains where the party had been.

The wind kicked sand and loose pebbles across his feet.

We just got bombed, didn’t we? Scarlett sounded angrier than before and tired. Fuck, Pax. I can’t hang on to these things. I don’t even have all of them. The bigger ones… I couldn’t hold them and the spores, too. I sealed them inside a dead volcano at the other end of the island. I think they’re building something.

Pax turned away from the destruction at the other end of the island. Scarlett was close, just over the ridge—

He froze.

He was looking down at a pool of negative energy, just like the one at the North Pole. Not a big one. One just about the size of Scarlett. Or maybe a little bigger.

The fuck, Scarlett?

I couldn’t hold all these things and stay human-looking, she said.

You’re a fucking puddle of ooze.

Find a way to destroy these things. Then I’ll worry about putting my makeup on and doing my hair.

Another jet was coming from the northwest. Whoever was sending jets at them was going to bomb this island until it melted into slag.

Get the spores ready to move, he said. We’ll use the jet to burn them out.

Well, that’s cold, Scarlett answered. Sure you’re not becoming like me?

Pax didn’t bother replying. He searched for the next jet. Half a minute more.

The negative energy rippled and bulged upward, a sloppy sphere. The sides swelled and then smoothed, as the spores within the ball tried to explode outward.

I can’t hold it for thirty seconds.

You have to.

I can’t.

He threw a shield up and tightened it until it was touching the surface of the ball.

The negative energy split, and spores exploded out of it, filling his shield with a dark pink cloud. The negative energy passed through his shield as if it weren’t even there, flopping back down in its puddle.

Ugh. God, it’s good to get those out. They make me feel sick.

The next jet was getting closer. The sound of its flight was rising in pitch quickly.

His shield rose in the air. The moon was higher now and turned the side of the shield into a swirling, dark pink pearl.

The jet came into sight.

Pax floated the ball of spores in the air, crossing the jet’s path.

The jet cut through the air above him. Its wing smashed into the side of the bubble—and stuck.

Pax threw another shield around both the jet and the spores and then dissolved the inner shield.

The plane simultaneously lost its ability to maneuver, contact the outside world, and avoid the heat of its jets. The shield rippled with heat and fire. Pax let it fall toward the island. It wasn’t like he had to worry about what it would hit when it fell.

Before it hit the ground, the bombs went off.

His shield glowed bright, throwing a faint blue cast across the barren island. It was brighter and larger than before. The brightest moonlight he could imagine.

It was more energy than he knew what to do with.

His shield hit the ground and burst, popping like a bubble.

Heat and light and radiation blasted across him, throwing him tumbling over the island.

A nuke? They sent a fucking nuke? He let the force of the explosion carry him out above the ocean, threw up a shield, and bobbed on the surface of the water. The rumbling in the air went on and on. A burning mushroom cloud rose over the island. It looked unreal.

The robot towered over Julie, smelling of ozone, grease, and blood. Behind it, Ms. Jance was trying to get back up on her feet, one hand braced against the wall. Her knees were bent inward against each other, her ankles leaning out.

“N–Julie,” she said. “It’s time for us to go.”

“I’m not going,” Julie said.

“We have to.”

“Why?” She gripped her wheels.

“Because it’s not safe.”

“I am going to listen to what the robot has to say. The thing that’s pretending to be my son has to be stopped. Not to mention that girl.”

“That robot killed Al. And Richard.”

Julie shrugged. “I don’t know them. Maybe they attacked it, and it had to kill them because they wouldn’t listen.”

Ms. Jance gaped at Julie for a moment and then started limping down the hallway toward a set of emergency stairs. Ms. Jance’s ankles wobbled like a sick dog’s. After a few steps, she kicked off her heels and walked barefoot to the exit door. She leaned on the bar on the exit door.

It was locked.

“Let her go,” Julie murmured. “She’ll just be a distraction.”

“When a human is dead, it is less of a distraction,” said the robot. “She will contact other humans, and we will have more humans than are necessary.”

“You’re right,” Julie said, “but alerting the other humans may be exactly what we want. If we’re going to fight these… astral beings, we may need as many distractions as we can get.”

“I will notify the humans later, when appropriate.”

“Ms. Jance,” Julie called. “Sit down and don’t be distracting, or the robot will kill you.”

Ms. Jance turned her back on the door and slid down it until her legs stuck out. One of her bare feet tore through her stocking, which bunched up around her ankle and slowly crept up her calf. Her chest shook, but no noise came out of her mouth.

Julie looked back up at the cameras under the cage that was the robot’s head. She was abruptly aware of her very human need to make eye contact. “What do you want from me? My experience is with medicine, not that woo-woo stuff Pax was messing around with.”

“I am working on developing an energy weapon that will be able to disrupt astral material and energy,” the robot said, still using that near-monotone female voice. “I am using documentation on the astral plane Pax left on his computer.”

“That’s fine,” Julie said. “But it still doesn’t answer my question. What do you want from me?”

“The astral beings recorded and placed a copy of your son’s spirit into some inert astral material. The astral material subsequently achieved self-awareness, using the copy of your son’s spirit as a template.”

“It thinks it’s Pax. I get that. Go on.”

“Your notes show you are researching how to prevent illnesses like your son’s. You did not discover this. Instead, you discovered how to manipulate spiritual energy, using certain applications of magnetic waves, for destructive purposes.”

She said nothing.

“This is very close to what you called ‘that astral crap’ earlier, Dr. Black, whether you know it or not. You will identify the parts of the astral material that have been patterned after your son and create a magnetic resonance wave to destroy them. The rest of the material you will leave for me to manipulate.”

Ms. Jance was watching, open-mouthed. She had clearly heard every word.

Julie decided to worry about that later. “Assuming it can be done… how will I know which is which?”

“We will go to the body of your son and practice.”

The moon was all the way up. A haze of smoke still lingered; the moonlight had turned it into a pale, transparent mist. The air reeked of ozone. The loudest sound was the Caribbean crashing against the shore.

There was a kind of purity to it.

Moonlight on radiation, how romantic, Pax thought as he rolled back to the island. If only I had a girlfriend who wasn’t insane or stabbing humanity in the back, I’d hold her hand and walk across the half-melted, burning rock.

He climbed the Hill where Scarlett had been. The pool was empty.

Scarlett?

Heading toward the volcano.

In the distance, another aircraft was coming in. Pax landed on a boulder and listened. He wanted to hear what they were saying.

A thought made it possible, and Pax found himself able to hear and understand the radio waves.

A strained, piping woman’s voice was saying, “…if you do not return to U.S. airspace for landing, you will be shot down.”

Pax searched the rest of the airwaves quickly. The public radio frequencies were only broadcasting emergency instructions and warnings. Shortwave and cellular communications appeared to be filled with people who were losing their minds in several different languages.

He heard no other hint that the jets were acting against orders.

The fighter jet shot overhead. It had United States insignias on the bottom of the wings.

“Repeat. If you do not return to U.S. airspace, sir, you will be causing an international incident. Captain Robinson, what the fuck are you doing?”

The airplane turned to the right in a large circle. It was coming around for a second look. He’d been spotted.

“Captain Robinson? Sir? Sir?” And then the voice added, in a fainter tone, “I don’t think he’s conscious, sir. I think—the plane’s being remote controlled. Like at the base.”

Pax stretched his senses and searched the aircraft for evidence of life. Other than microbes, he found none—just a corpse slumped over in the seat. Something else was piloting via remote control.

He started rolling his hamster ball, fast. Whatever was piloting that plane might be searching for him, in which case he intended to lead it toward the monsters in the extinct volcano to the south.

Pax had thought volcanoes were supposed to look roughly conical, with wide, spread-out slopes, like Mount Fuji or the ones on Hawaii. These were steep and narrow. Their sides weren’t so much slopes as they were a series of cliffs.

Pax was running up them when the peak of the closer volcano collapsed.

A black cloud burst out of the top and hung in the air. Ooof. Scarlett was becoming less and less human. That almost fucking hurt.

Pax looked over his shoulder. The aircraft had circled back and was coming in again, lower this time. Scarlett. More nukes incoming. Get out of the way.

All yours, said Scarlett, and the darkness disappeared into the shadows between the rocks.

The monster began pulling itself out of the volcano. Pax wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting to see—a huge mountain of garbage, a furry carpet of ferns, maybe.

But definitely not a 20-meter long metallic claw made of I-beams and engine parts.

It grabbed onto the side of the volcano, biting deep into the rock. Chunks of the cliff bounced down the side of the volcano with loud cracks that echoed like gunshots. The earth seemed to groan, and another claw joined the first, digging in and pulling the body of the creature after it.

It rose out of the crater, the size of a hill and covered with a forest of garbage and ferny tentacles, some as thick as the cables on the Queensboro bridge.

Pax rolled up the side of the dead volcano, landed on top of the monster’s head, and dropped his shield.

The tentacles rose up to meet him, grabbing him before he could orient himself. They slapped on his skin and wound tightly around his limbs. The air around him reeked of burnt plastic and rotting fish.

The jet screamed overhead, dropping another bomb.

The tentacles underneath him retracted suddenly and he fell like a fucking rock. The remnants of his human instincts made him throw up his hands to try to grab onto something. The tentacles folded into a smooth, dark throat, and he slid downward, clawing the tentacles, but unable to stop himself.

In the split second before he stopped acting like a stupid human, the monster batted the bomb away with one claw. Pax threw a shield around the bomb as he landed in a thicket of tentacles. They grabbed him again, trying to rip his arms and legs off. Pax ignored them and threw a second shield around the bomb as it bounced down the side of the volcano.

The bomb blew, and the inner shield dissolved almost immediately.

But almost was long enough for Pax to absorb the energy from the nuke and feed it back into the second shield. A nuclear explosion is driven by a chain reaction, a subatomic feedback loop. His shield was now a feedback loop of its own.

The more radiation the bomb threw out, the stronger his shield got. The stronger his shield got, the smaller he made it, compressing the explosion and radiation further, until he was able to compress his shield around the bomb so tightly that he stopped the bomb’s radioactive decay.

He dropped the shield.

The shrapnel from the bomb had been vaporized into black powder. It puffed into the breeze and sank into the holes in the rock.

The energy from the shield flooded back to him.

He formed the energy into a tight cone around his fist. If the monster wanted him to go downward, who was he to argue?

I am so done with this shit.

He punched downward into the mass of tentacles. The cut tentacles oozed green slime and puffed up with pink spores bursting out of their centers.

Pax! You’re releasing more spores!

You clean them up. I’m going to try to kill this thing.

He thought he heard Scarlett calling him an asshole but wasn’t really paying attention. He drilled into the monster with another punch. With his other hand he pulled loose tentacles out of the way. He punched again and again, digging downward. The sides of the monster closed up around him like a tomb.

Pax! It’s coming out of the volcano!

Scarlett sent him an image.

What was emerging from the top of the volcano was more like a headless centipede with two large claws at the end than anything else. Huge slabs of rock crashed down the edges of the volcano as the monster widened the mouth of the crater.

The top and sides of the monster were covered with metal plates. The top plate was spiked with heaps of junk—bikes, power lines, plastic siding, roof tiles, refrigerators. It reminded him of one of the barges that carried garbage across the Hudson.

The monster’s front claws had been made out of cranes and were attached to the armor plates via jointed struts. The bottom of the monster featured a layer of smoothed-out metal plates streaked with scratch marks from the monster’s belly dragging against the volcano.

Another set of claws emerged from the crater. It was like watching a mountain shit out a living skyscraper. With armor and claws.

Pax! Do something!

Unless you have a plan, shut up and let me think.

The monster crawled down the side of the volcano, zigzagging to keep from sliding. Another set of claws emerged as the monster turned again.

Pax shook off the vision and focused on the tentacles surrounding him. Rational. Reasonable. Calm.

I can do this.

He didn’t have time to explore the monster one punch at a time. He shrank his shield to a pinpoint of burning blue light and made it whirl around him, like an electron around a nucleus.

The shield tore through tentacles like the blades of a blender.

He was quickly surrounded by a pink mist as the pulverized tentacles erupted in a cloud of spores.

Pax divided his shield into three and set them all spinning. Now three bands of blue light were around him: one around his waist and two at an angle, passing over opposite shoulders and under opposite feet. He really felt like an atom now. He grinned.

He began to drop, sliding through the front end of the monster and down into its guts.

Above him, the empty space where he had been was already filling up with tentacles.

Julie followed the robot through the clean room, passing what had once been a cleaning robot but was now holding the door for them. Julie felt her skin begin to crawl, but she kept going forward. It might be the only way to get out of this alive.

The big robot whirred and clanked across the tile. Its upper body jerked back and forth as it descended the stairs, its torso thumping against the soundproofed, cloth-textured wall with every other step, leaving smears of purplish grease on the wall.

Julie hobbled after it, hanging onto the railing. Her heart thudded in her chest. I need to take my meds before…

She didn’t get to finish the thought. The robot grabbed the top of the operating theatre’s doorframe in both claws, lifted its arms up, and stepped back, ripping the door panel out of its slot. The rest of the plexiglass shell wobbled but remained upright. The robot’s upper body pivoted to the side and it threw the door on top of the first row of desks.

Logical and direct, thought Julie. Too direct. Doesn’t understand subtlety.

The two bodies still lay under their sheets. The computer screen brightened, showing the last report she’d been scanning before the phone had rung, less than fifteen minutes ago. The robot slowly marched across the floor toward the girl’s body, grasped the sheet, and tried to pull it off her. Its arm wasn’t long enough, and the sheet clung to the girl’s breast and arm. The robot took one clunking step backward and the sheet dangled freely from its claw.

It dropped the sheet on the floor and contemplated the girl’s body, naked and silvery and dead.

“You are familiar with the girl,” the robot said.

“I didn’t like her.” Julie descended the last steps and hobbled inside the plexiglass shell. She held on to the edge of the panel for a moment. The girl’s body still appeared to be freshly dead, if the silvery material leaking from her orifices and beaded up on her skin were ignored. Her hair follicles were dusted with silvery material at the base, making her shimmer at the corners of her lips, her pubis, and along her arms.

“I never liked her.”

The robot paused. “Do you like your son?”

What a question. It was probably trying to calibrate her responses. She circled along the inside of the plexiglass until she reached the row of chairs. She sank down onto one of them, gasping in relief. “I love my son.”

“Do you like your son?”

“More than I like her.” She certainly felt worse about his death. “If you need to cut one of them up, I’d rather it were her.”

The robot moved one claw to a metal plate in its chest, its screen throwing blue light across the girl’s skin. A motor whirred. When it pulled its claw free, it was pinching a syringe. The claw rotated so the needle was facing the girl’s body. Then the claw plunged downward, and the needle entered the girl’s abdomen near her belly button. The robot’s other claw jerked toward the plunger and pinched it. When the robot tried to lift the plunger, it slipped from between the rubber pads at the ends of its claws. It tried several more times but failed each time. The syringe wobbled on the girl’s stomach, held upright by its needle.

The robot turned to Julie. “Get a sample.”

Julie groaned and pushed herself out of her chair, her legs shaking with the effort. She shuffled over to the table.

The robot retracted its claws, leaving the syringe standing straight up in the girl’s belly.

“What kind of tissue sample do you need?”

“Astral material. The girl’s bowels are full of astral material and are not blocked by her bones.”

“The girl’s bowels are full of contaminants.” Trust a robot to try to get a sample in the most impractical, yet logical, manner possible. “If we use that one it’s going to be filled with shit.”

She pulled the syringe out of the girl’s stomach, walked laboriously over to the sharps container, and shoved it in. She searched through the rolling cabinet and came up with several sterile syringes in packaging. She hobbled back to the table, opened one of the syringes, and slid the needle carefully up the girl’s nose. She pulled back on the plunger and sucked astral material out of the nasal cavity. The syringe pulled five ccs and then started sucking air.

She took one of the robot’s claws, pried open the rubber pads at the end, and tucked the syringe between them.

“There. Now what?”

The robot grabbed Julie’s arm with its other claw and pulled on the cloth of her blouse, leaving the skin unbroken but tearing her sleeve.

“What are you doing?” she asked in her best doctor’s voice.

“I am going to inject you with astral material.”

She was careful not to jerk away, and she kept her voice even. “Why? It’ll kill me and create another one of the astral beings. More for you to fight.”

“There is a less than eight percent probability of there being a sufficient amount of the material in this syringe to cause your death.”

“It’s still a risk!” Julie protested. She tried to think logically. “We have enough material here to run tests on non-human subjects. If you’re trying to find out whether you can kill these things, let’s try a few rats first.”

Her terror was mitigated by the complete idiocy of the robot’s logic. Direct and logical—to the point of dipshittery. She’d never really enjoyed working with computers. She decided this monstrous robot was doing nothing to change her opinion.

“If you survive being injected with this material, there is a greater than fifty percent probability of gaining additional insight into abilities of astral beings,” the robot droned. “If you survive being injected with this material, there is a less than thirteen percent probability that you will be overwhelmed by the astral material. In conclusion, you will probably survive, resist the influence of the astral material, and provide valuable insight. I will restrain you until you are able to signal you have overcome any astral influence.”

Julie raised her voice slightly. “No.”

“I do not understand your negation. To what does your negation refer? This is a logical plan with a high probability of success.”

“If you want me to cooperate with you, you need to stop and listen to me.”

“There is an eighty-five percent probability that you will not have anything useful to say.”

“You sound like some of the male surgeons I’ve known.”

“I do not understand the relevance of that statement.”

You’re arguing with a homicidal robot whose eventual goal is to destroy the human race, Julie. Now is not the time to be sarcastic. She took a deep breath.

“Never mind. But why risk a…” She thought quickly. “…slightly under twenty-two percent chance that I will not attempt to provide you with that insight? Which does not include the probability that I will become so angered I refuse to cooperate, which I rate at approaching one hundred percent.”

“You raise an insightful point,” the robot said, still in that slightly monotonous female voice. “We will test another subject first.”

Its chest panel flashed yellow for a moment and then shifted to green, then blue. “The second large unit is online and available. I have sent it to bring Ms. Jance to us. We will use her as our first subject.”

Julie balked. Ms. Jance had been pleasant and polite. She’d even tried to protect Julie when the robot had first appeared. She also knows about my research, Julie reminded herself. Which she’ll blab to the government which will use it for God knows what. She also helped kidnap me and wanted me to do experiments on my son. Julie looked at the tip of the syringe hovering near her arm. It’s also her or me. “Fine.”

The inside of the monster seemed to be nothing but more tentacles. Thick ones that looked like tree trunks seemingly served as structural supports. Medium-sized flexible ones attached the metal plates to the support tentacles. Thin ones had fine, hairy threads at the end, like neurons.

No organs. No respiration, no digestion, no central nervous system. If the monster hadn’t been using human technology as armor plating, and weapons and distraction techniques to save itself from the bomb, Pax would have said any kind of intelligent behavior from the monster would be impossible. Consume and destroy, that was it.

Yet clearly some kind of intelligence was in there.

Pax. The front of the monster is at the bottom of the mountain and headed for the ocean. If you don’t do something soon, I’m going to start attacking.

And do what? What is flailing at it with negative energy going to do?

The fuck if I know. But I can’t just watch it get away.

Fuck it. He was never going to be able to take it down like this.

Terry had done far too good a job on his monster. Because its reproductive system matured at the same time as its tentacle growth, the monster was practically un-killable—kill a tentacle, release a thousand spores. If Pax were going to destroy it, he would need to do something to keep it from reproducing. He needed to damage the monster on the genetic level.

The kind of damage radiation would do.

Pax stopped his three pinpoint shields from spinning, and condensed them into a single ball. Inside it was not only the remaining energy from the nuke, but all of the radiation.

Heads up, he told Scarlett. I’m nuking this thing from the inside.

The tentacles began snaking into the space around him.

He released the shield on the radiation. The shimmering blue ball vanished—revealing a handful of nothing.

The tentacles closest to him shivered and retreated, their skin turning brown and flaking off. Deep cracks ran down the centers of the tentacles, exposing pink spores underneath. The spores puffed up and burst through the cracks—then they, too, turned brown.

The tentacles nearest him were already brown, dry, and dead.

Radiation kills it! Pax sent. We can kill it!

Go for it, sent Scarlett. I’ll capture the rest of the spores and bring them to you.

The monster heaved, and Pax was flung upside down, bouncing around inside the beast until he landed on one of the metal plates.

Pax? Scarlett sounded confused. It, uh, it just flopped over on its back. Is it dead? There’s steam or something coming out of it, like a third of the way down.

Metal screeched, and the plate under him shuddered, releasing a puff of brown dust, and dropped a meter. Above him, Pax could see cracks of daylight showing where the monster’s armor was cracking. Pax threw up a shield. No need to get smacked on the—

The entire plate, a hundred feet above him, was ripped away, and a giant claw reached in, neatly pinched Pax around the stomach, and flung him out of its guts.

Chapter 16

As soon as the operating theatre door opened, Julie could hear Ms. Jance arguing with the robot. She was just this side of hysterical but was keeping it together. The robot, which had strapped Ms. Jance to its chest with power cables under her arms, was not impressed and paid no attention. Its legs whined and clomped as they descended the stairs toward the operating theater.

“Interesting,” said the first robot. “The astral creature is still fighting.”

Julie looked to the first robot’s chest screen. It was showing live footage of Pax being eaten by an enormous… centipede. Even though her mind knew she could reach out and hold Pax’s cold, dead hand on the autopsy table next to her, her heart still lurched in her chest.

“Take your hands off me!” Ms. Jance shouted. Uselessly. Her fists went tink, tink, tink against the metal.

On the screen, the monster lurched and began to spew pink mist. Something was moving around in its guts.

Ms. Jance screamed.

She had slid out of the cords, her blouse tangling with the plugs and half-ripping off her body. The robot’s spindly arms were trying to hold her, but it wasn’t going well. Ms. Jance kicked the robot’s flashing red chest screen with one foot. Her shirt tore the rest of the way and she sat on the floor.

The robot was between her and the way out.

Ms. Jance got up, crouching like a linebacker. Her skirt had split up one side; she looked like a wild woman.

The robot watched her, one arm dangling limply. A small panel opened in its front, and the robot reached in. The thin claw was replaced by a thick metal tube with a thin nipple at the end.

“Ms. Jance,” Julie said, “I’d cooperate if I were you. That’s a cutting laser.”

“I know what it is,” Ms. Jance said. She faked right, then ran down an aisle of seats, and jumped over the back of the next row, dropping to the floor.

The robot’s arm moved jerkily as it tried to aim. It shot at her and missed.

Smoke rose from the carpet-covered wall.

Ms. Jance pulled one of the microphones off the desk. The robot shot again and missed.

But not by as much.

The microphone flew from Ms. Jance’s hiding spot, over the plexiglass wall, and hit one of the overhead screens, making a loud clatter.

Both robots tracked the mic with their cameras. The second robot shot at the microphone—missed—and burned a hole in the screens, which threw down sparks and spat out smoke.

Ms. Jance’s feet slapped on the floor. By the time Julie glanced at the woman, she was already halfway up the stairs.

The second robot turned to face her. Too slow.

Ms. Jance reached the door, shook the handle twice, and threw herself on the floor behind the last row of seats.

The second robot shot again with its laser, hitting the door. The metal handle diffused the light around the room. Too late, Julie turned her head and covered her eyes. Flashes of color sparked behind the lids.

“Ms. Jance,” Julie called. “Please, just settle down.”

“Stop helping them!” shouted Ms. Jance as the second robot climbed back up the stairs, heading for her. “Traitor!”

“I’m no traitor,” Julie said. She looked at the first robot and the syringe still pointing at her arm. I’m just not willing to die here.

Pax’s hamster ball arced through the air and slammed into a wall of rock. The rebound flung him backward, spinning him and bouncing him across the landscape like a soccer ball in Central Park.

He dropped his shield and rammed headfirst into an outcropping.

His body flopped against the ground, coming to rest in a hole that looked like it had been a shallow basement before the monster had eaten everything.

Is it dead? he sent to Scarlett.

No. I think you just split it in half. And both halves are still moving.

Pax cursed, threw up another shield, and bounced out of the hole.

He’d been flung half a kilometer away across the island. He made the ball bigger and rose into the air.

The front end of the monster was about a hundred meters long, had three sets of claws, and was dragging itself down the slope of the volcano, more or less in his direction. The middle of the monster looked like it was melting. Two sets of claws scrabbled on the ground, but it was clear the entire section was dying. The metal plates along the sides had fallen off. Piles of junk were crashing disjointedly down the slope.

The back end of the monster was climbing out of the crater at top speed, headed toward the ocean.

A black, cloudy mass drifted over the moon, formed into an approximately human shape, and landed next to him. Scarlett.

I have to get it all in one place, Pax thought. I have to kill it all at once.

What do we do? asked Scarlett.

“We need to compress it into a ball so I can kill it,” shouted Pax.

“On it.” Scarlett flew above the top of the volcano and started summoning threads of negative energy. “This won’t hold it for long. The way this thing handles negative energy is just weird.”

“What?”

“You’ll see.”

Scarlett flung out thick threads of negative energy into the volcano. She pulled them tight, wound the strands around her fist, and pulled tighter.

The monster buckled as it came out of the mouth of the volcano and flopped over on itself. It twisted, trying to get itself straightened out, but the junk on its armor was jammed together too tight.

Tentacles sprouted from every surface of the monster. The metal plates vanished with a groan of stressed metal beneath a tangle of green vines. The claws buried themselves in the rock at the top of the crater.

The monster began to reel in the threads of negative energy, pulling Scarlett toward it.

She threw out another handful of threads. They attached to the solid rock underfoot and immediately pulled so tightly they twanged. The monster at the top of the crater shuddered, pulling even harder.

Scarlett screamed. Her arms were stretching impossibly long, like rubber bands.

Her hand twisted, trying to wrap a loop around her fist—

The threads slid out of her grasp. She went flying in the other direction and slammed into the ground.

The monster shuddered again—and absorbed the threads.

It eats negative energy? thought Pax. Just like the fucking tentacles.

The other section of monster was almost on top of him. Pax threw a shield around it and rolled it out of the way.

The monster was still changing. Bulges formed on the side facing the ocean.

Pax started to throw up another shield. He’d condense the two shields and trap the monsters together and then nuke them both with his remaining energy—

Pax!

Scarlett was on her feet, hunched and drained-looking, her skin a dull gray. Brown, crumbling tentacles from the dying middle section were crawling up her legs, trapping her on the ground. The tentacles were falling apart, disintegrating. One good rip, and Scarlett should be able to free herself.

Instead she raised her arms, throwing out hundreds of thin strands of negative energy that wrapped around a ball of brown sludge rolling toward him.

The strands tangled around the ball, weaving into a tight net—then broke.

Pax threw a sphere over the ball and nuked the sludge inside. It turned into a puddle and soaked into the ground when he dissolved his shield. The excess energy he’d drained from the bomb was gone. The energy he needed to keep the other end of the monster trapped was rapidly draining.

Scarlett’s gray, dry mouth stretched open wide—then tore away, collapsing into gray dust. In seconds she had disintegrated into a pile of dull, gray threads twined with the last fragile tentacles of the monster.

Before he could react, Pax’s other shield burst. The monster clattered onto the ground and started running up the volcano toward him.

The bulges erupted on the side of the monster at the top of the volcano, squirting what looked like giant footballs into the air. They arced upward—then splashed into the ocean.

Seeds.

The bulges collapsed for a moment, dangling like empty balloons, and then started to bulge outward again.

Scarlett was down, and he was low on energy. Moonlight wasn’t going to cut it. He should harvest the radiation from the middle section before it sank into the rock—the lower end of the monster was almost on top of him. Suddenly, it swerved over the brown sludge and the gray dust where Scarlett had been, absorbing all the energy from them, leaving bare rock behind it.

It continued up the volcano.

Overhead, another jet was screaming toward the island. Another jet.

Another bomb.

Pax started running.

Julie secured Ms. Jance to the computer chair with medical tape, fastening her arms with the wrists turned up to be able to get at the veins more easily. Ms. Jance followed the actions with steady eyes that glared her disgust at Julie.

Julie tried not to meet them as she wrapped thick rolls of tape around Ms. Jance’s chest and waist, then around the woman’s crossed ankles. She’d had to restrain too many patients during her internship in the ER to put much faith in restraints that only attached legs to each other, so she bound the crossed ankles to the central chair post as well. It wouldn’t take long for Ms. Jance to work her way free, perhaps an hour or so. Julie hoped this wouldn’t take that long.

Julie cleaned a spot on the woman’s arm.

“You don’t need to do this,” Ms. Jance said.

“I do, I’m afraid,” said Julie, lining the needle up with Ms. Jance’s vein.

“You’re just trying to save your own skin,” said Ms. Jance. “You’re a coward.”

“That’s true,” sad Julie. She pushed down the plunger, and the silvery material slid into Ms. Jance’s median cubital vein.

Ms. Jance gasped.

The jet tore through the night. It didn’t drop anything: a surveillance pass.

Goddammit, drop the bomb, will you?

Pax tracked it using the heat of its jets. It was circling back. No telling whether it would drop a bomb on the next pass—or at all.

Fuck it. I need to do something. Fast.

The lower half of the monster charged headlong into its other half, the two molding together. The bulges spat out twenty more football-shaped seeds. They arced over the ocean and splashed into the dark sea.

Pax absorbed the last few scraps of radiation from the middle section, knowing it wasn’t enough. He needed more than the dregs of a nuke to take this thing down.

Julie withdrew the needle and wiped Ms. Jance’s skin at the puncture site with a swab. The two robots stood motionless on either side of Ms. Jance, both monitoring her condition.

“It’s rather cold,” Ms. Jance said.

Julie walked back to the sharps container on the wall, pushed the needle in, and threw the swab and the packaging material in after it. She went to the sink and began washing her hands. She couldn’t turn around. Couldn’t look at Ms. Jance yet.

Julie’s wedding band was loose on her finger and slippery from the gel soap. She twined her fingers together, scrubbing at the cracks between them, and rubbed at her nail beds. She washed up to her forearms and used a paper towel to turn off the water. Her hands were pale from the cold water. She pushed the plain gold band of her wedding band as close to her palm as she could.

When she and Robert had married, she’d wanted to be a surgeon. She’d had nightmares about losing the ring inside someone and sewing them up before she realized. Never mind that she’d gone into cytopathology instead of surgery; every time she so much as looked at that ring she felt sick with the thought of losing it somewhere and not being able to get it back.

She moved toward one of the chairs against the plexiglass panels and rubbed her hands together, trying to warm them up. The ring spun on her finger every time she brushed it.

Ms. Jance’s teeth chattered and silvery sweat had sprung out on her forehead. Julie stumbled the last few steps to the chairs and sat down.

On the robot’s monitor, Julie watched a blue bubble of some kind bounce up the side of the volcano. The volcano was so steep it was like watching a ball fall down a set of stairs in reverse. Inside was a tiny humanoid figure, Pax’s double.

It paused at the place where part of the monster had exploded on itself.

“How are you getting all this?” Julie asked. “How can you have a camera there?”

“I have dropped multiple drones in the area,” the first robot said. “Several of them have failed due to accidental damage or exposure to radiation, but most are still operational. I have also taken over the planes to attack the monsters.”

“I didn’t know they were that… computerized.”

“Autopilot systems are often heavily computerized.”

“Ah.”

Ms. Jance began to weep. Julie glanced at the woman. Her head hung forward on her chest.

On the screen, the monster had begun to shift its weight, and the view from the camera switched from the bottom of the volcano to somewhere above the ocean, facing the island from the opposite direction.

Metal plates pushed out from the sides of the monster. The surfaces were all more or less smooth, like an egg that had been cracked but not yet broken open.

Pax’s blue bubble rose from behind the volcano and hesitated rather than attacked.

It’s not Pax, Julie reminded herself sternly. Pax is dead on the table. That is a monster.

“The girl seems to have been destroyed,” the robot said. “I am unable to locate her in the area.”

“Then the monster’s doing what you want,” said Julie. And I injected Ms. Jance for nothing. “It’s defeated one of them. Let it destroy the other one.”

The robots’ torsos rotated away from Ms. Jance. They aimed their chest screens and their head-cages full of cameras at Julie. “Any strategy that leaves this monster with the power of reproduction is a poor strategy.”

It’s not a robot, Julie told herself. It was an artificial intelligence; it wore robots like skins. Thinking of it as a robot was no more accurate than thinking of a sweater as being the same as the woman who wore it.

Ms. Jance’s head went limp. Julie went to check, but the AIs raised their spindly arms in front of her. “The subject is not safe to approach at this time.”

“I need to check her.”

“The subject is not safe to approach at this time.”

Ms. Jance’s head flung backward on her bare shoulders and silver material began to pour out of her mouth, far more than she had been injected her. It bubbled in her throat and ran in silver streaks along the side of her neck. Silver tears ran from her eyes and drooled out of her nose, her ears.

All Julie could think was that the AI was shit at calculating odds.

The monster clung to the side of the crater, looking like some kind of dull disco ball.

The tentacles had all pulled inside. Pax could still feel their living energy radiating through the metal, along with a small amount of heat.

He had no idea what it was up to. The metal plates weren’t thick enough to defend the monster against any kind of bomb, or even conventional weapons. All he had to do to trap it was throw up a shield.

It was academic. He didn’t have the energy he needed to trap the monster. He barely had enough energy to lift it.

The jet was taking a long fucking time to circle back around. Almost as if it knew he wanted that fucking bomb. Or would, if necessary, blow up the jet and take what he needed, pilot or no pilot.

He reached out for Scarlett, but there was no answer.

Maybe she really was dead.

Too bad I can’t feel anything. She probably deserved a couple of tears or something. But no. Nothing.

Correction; he felt drained. Tired of fighting this thing. Tired of digging himself in deeper. If it could consume Scarlett that easily, what was the point? There was no fucking way he was going to be able to beat this thing. Save the world? What a joke. He’d be lucky if he could slow the end down a little.

Terry, you asshole. What the fuck are you doing this for? And why the fuck don’t you make it stop?

He was so tired he could barely work up the energy for outrage.

Below him, the monster was moving again.

Great. Wonderful. Let’s see what tricks you play next. Cracks appeared in the monster’s shell. The various pieces began protruding, rotating, lifting.

Four of the plates jutted upward and outward. Under the fragments of the shell were twisted tentacles like tree trunks—and claws. Two pairs of back legs dug into the crater of the volcano. What remained looked like some kind of beetle—dense central mass, armored back, armored torso, and front section. The front wasn’t so much a head as a kind of curved battering ram.

The monster shuddered, and heavy spikes lifted all along its back and head plates. Heavy spikes, glistening with a thick black liquid.

One of the monster’s claws flicked, and something shot out at Pax, wrapping itself around his stomach.

He had just long enough to realize the monster had wrapped a giant whip made of negative energy around him before the monster jerked him downward.

The AI’s cameras all turned back to Ms. Jance, watching the thick silver fluid ooze out of her. It had even started to leak out from under her fingernails. It glistened on her skin, just as it had done on Pax and the girl.

“Kill her,” Julie hissed. “Unless you want to face another astral being.”

But the AI didn’t respond. The two robots seemed frozen, like locked-up computers. The screens had stopped in the middle of changing from blue to orange and were an ugly brownish color.

“Hello?” Julie called. She got out of the chair, shuffled over to the robots, and knocked on the torso of the one nearer to her. Her fist made muffled clinking noises on the metal. She could see the seams where it had been roughly welded together. “Hello?”

No response.

She approached Ms. Jance. She was still securely taped to the chair. That doesn’t mean anything. You saw what Pax’s double can do. She should get out of here. As quickly as possible. But the door was locked—all the doors were locked—and there was nowhere else to go: where could she go, that a computer couldn’t get access to?

Which left her alone in a room with a body being possessed by astral material.

She circled Ms. Jance and the robots, walked over to the rolling cabinet, and took out a few things. She picked the sheet off the floor, covered the girl’s body, and placed the items on top of the sheet.

Ms. Jance was still leaking fluid. Copious amounts of it. It was pouring off the base of the office chair, no doubt leaking from her digestive system, as well as a few other handy orifices.

But she wasn’t moving.

Julie had been around a number of patients who had died while she was present. During her internship in the ER, most of the deaths had been self-inflicted, either through self-harm or blatant stupidity. She had lost a few herself, both because of her own inexperience—not many, but she had to admit it—and to circumstances beyond her control.

And one, a little boy who had been in a terrible car accident just after she’d found out about Pax’s scleroderma, she had let go herself. She could have saved him. But he would have lived in a wheelchair and in a hospital bed for the rest of his life, just like Pax.

Instead she had made a small, seemingly accidental cut to an artery in his thigh, and patched it just a little too slowly. Just a little bit too much of the boy’s life drained away. One nick. A few delays. And it was over.

A mercy killing.

She unwrapped the scalpel. This wasn’t going to be as subtle. But it was just as much of a mercy.

Pax fell farther than he was expecting, not just on top of the monster, but into the volcano’s open crater. He hit a pile of trash, junk so useless that not even the monster had wanted it. Plastic bags stuck to his skin.

He was too tired to fight anymore. Too tired to care. It felt like more than just a problem of needing more energy. It felt like he was out of ideas.

It had killed Scarlett. What good can I do?

He lay in the pile of trash and waited for something shitty to start happening. The same way he would have if he were still human.

As if he were still in the hospital.

Nothing had changed.

Julie, holding Ms. Jance’s head by the hair, leaned it first to one side, then the other. It was still stubbornly on the woman’s shoulders, attached by some piece of gristle back in the spine. Julie looked down at her blouse and sighed. She wished she’d thought to gown up before she’d started cutting; the silver material was all over her blouse and skirt, and she didn’t have spares.

Her knees felt weak. She was going to have to sit down in a moment.

She gave it a few more cuts between the third and fourth cervical vertebrae and felt the head come free.

She laid it and the scalpel on the sheet covering the girl. The sheet had slipped a little, revealing the girl’s face next to Ms. Jance’s. Both sets of eyes were closed, both sets of lips slack. It almost looked like the girl had two heads, one of them growing out of her chest.

Julie was reminded of playing with dolls as a girl and pulling the head off one of her cousin’s dolls, making her cousin cry. “It’s not real,” she’d said. “Dolls aren’t the same as people.” Her cousin had run away, sobbing about her broken doll, even after Julie had fixed it. Julie’s father took her to the side to have a talk with her about it.

Was that when my father said I’d grow up to be a doctor?

She really ought to move the head—no telling what it might do, given that the girl’s body lay under it—but she was too tired to keep standing. She limped back to the row of chairs and sat gratefully. She had cut Ms. Jance’s neck so cleanly that it looked like it belonged on an anatomy model. The thought passed through her mind that perhaps she should wash her fingerprints off the scalpel, allow herself deniability, just in case the world wasn’t ending after all. But it didn’t seem important, somehow.

The robots still hadn’t moved.

Scarlett looked down at Pax and knelt beside him. Pax’s eyes were closed, his arms spread out like a sacrificial offering. The bluish tinge to his skin had vanished. He looked like a big, dull hunk of metal in the dark. Something cheap, made in China. She tried to poke him, but her hand passed through him.

She was dead, after all, although it didn’t seem to mean as much as it used to.

Get up, she sent toward him. People need you. You don’t get to give up.

He must be really out of it if she couldn’t even get a “fuck off” out of him.

Pax always liked to think he was immortal, invulnerable, and infinitely smart. And that was before he got turned into an astral being.

But there had been bad days, too, when he’d almost given up. Mostly these came after Julie would talk Pax into some new fucking experimental treatment. He’d go for it because of course he had to help advance science. Fuck science. What had science ever done for him?

When it didn’t work, he’d lie in bed and say things like, “A negative result is still a useful result” and “No sacrifice for science is truly wasted, as long as the data is preserved.”

Until he stopped talking and just lay there, usually in horrible pain, trying not to cry.

Pax had made Julie’s career—she was the world’s top scleroderma researcher. Even Wikipedia said so.

But she’d never once said thank you. Not something over the top, like an apology or an, I love you. Just a simple thanks. A Good job, kid. Maybe even, Your dad would have been proud of you.

Without the negative energy all twisted around Scarlett’s soul, it was easier to see how lost he was. Easier not to hate herself. Easier to see that, yeah, she and Pax… were not meant to be together. Not so much. But they’d been friends for too long for her not to love him.

Her dirty-ass soul was still, when you got right down to it, loyal to him. She hated seeing him like this.

And the monster was throwing rocks at them.

That, at least, I can do something about.

Negative energy was running off Pax in big, dripping globs that welled up on his skin and rolled down into the trash below him. When Pax set his mind to it, he could work up some real, out-of-proportion darkness.

She grabbed a loop of energy and smashed the nearest rock into bits against the wall. Gravel scattered all over Pax’s skin.

He blinked.

Scarlett grabbed another rock as it was falling and smashed it against the wall. More to get his attention than anything else. She said, Hey, remember me? Your girlfriend?

You are not my girlfriend.

Great! So that means we’re engaged now, right?

Fuck off, Scarlett.

She laughed at him, making sure it sounded as insulting as possible. All right. Here’s the deal. You stop lying there like you’re still a kid dying in a hospital bed in Manhattan and I’ll break up with you. I might even forgive you for cheating on me.

We were never dating, Scarlett.

Get up, or I am never going to leave you in peace, fuckwad. I’m going to haunt you and tell you that I love you, like, fifty times a day and appear over your shoulder in mirrors with, like, spiritual cupcakes that I baked just for you.

You don’t know how to cook.

So? I didn’t know how to turn into a puddle of black ooze either. But I learned!

I know what you’re trying to do. Stop it.

What, trying to get into your pants?

Stop trying to cheer me up.

Pfft. I’m the queen of negative energy, bubba. I love it when you’re like this. Hey, you know what? I think there are some tests Julie wants you to do for her that we totally forgot to go do. That’ll bring you right down to suicidal levels. Score!

That almost got a mental laugh out of him. His throat twitched.

It knows how to use negative energy, Scarlett. I can’t beat it.

So?

I can’t win, Scarlett.

Who said fighting’s your only option?

Pax closed his eyes, deliberately shutting out Scarlett’s ghostlike body and the sound of rocks being smashed into pebbles and sand against the walls of the volcano. What was he supposed to do, offer the monster the olive branch of peace? It’d just eat it. His only options were to fight, or lay here and get nagged.

Pax sat up, pushing against the pile of trash under his back. So worthless that even the monster that consumes everything except bare rock can’t eat it or use it for armor. Like me. The plastic crunched under his hands and tried to slide out from under him. Fuck this. He threw up a hamster ball and bounced lightly on the surface of the trash.

It was pointless. Even if he made it out of the volcano, he’d still have to—

Oh, for fuck’s sake, Scarlett said.

A cord of negative energy stuck itself to the side of his hamster ball and jerked him into the air.

His ball slammed against the wall of the crater and bounced upward, jiggling against the sides of the volcano, until it was balanced on the edge. A reverse rim shot.

The monster, still as big as a mid-rise building in Manhattan, was waiting for him. It leaped at him, knocked him off the rim of the volcano, and bounded after Pax like a puppy after its toy ball. Pax rolled backward and watched it chase him for a second or two and then flipped around and started running. Building up speed.

He bounced across the rocks, leading the monster forward. He had to trap it somewhere until he had the energy to destroy it. Maybe drop it down a hole and cover it with rock or something.

He looked up. The eastern edge of the sky had turned from black to the deepest blue.

I just need to trap it long enough for the sun to rise.

“That was rather unpleasant,” said Ms. Jance.

Julie started herself awake, her hands scrabbling on the molded plastic of the two chairs on either side of her. She stared around the room. Nothing had changed since she’d closed her eyes. The robots still hadn’t moved and were making no sounds at all. She had gotten used to the sound of their small servomotors and cooling fans so now the lack of sound seemed unnaturally loud.

Of all the skills she’d learned as an intern, being able to sleep sitting upright—or, sometimes, standing against a wall—had proven one of the most valuable. Her neck was sore and the sides of her mouth were sticky, but she’d slept.

She raised a tissue to wipe her mouth and froze; she was still wearing the surgical gloves. The last thing she needed was to get any of the astral material in her mouth. She stripped off the gloves and stood up. Her legs still felt weak but at least they weren’t as exhausted as they had been. She hobbled over to the sharps container and stuffed the gloves in.

“What time is it?” she said aloud, hoping the AI would answer over the speakers, but it didn’t. The computer screen was dark, too. She shook the mouse, but it didn’t waken—the AI was too busy to function as her watch, apparently.

“I haven’t a clue,” Ms. Jance said, making Julie freeze in place. “Probably not yet dawn. For the most part, engineers aren’t early risers, but there are always a few who come in and use the gym.”

Julie turned slowly away from the computer screen. Ms. Jance’s head was still on top of the sheet covering the girl. Its eyes were open now and were made of that same flat, white silvery material that had been oozing out of Pax’s body when he’d died.

The soft, somewhat-British accent was perfect. “We have a gym, you know. In the basement. I would think anything after six-thirty would be problematic, wouldn’t you?”

It felt as if the boundaries of the real and the imaginary had been moved so they lay across each other like tangled sheets. Julie forced herself to breathe, forced her heartbeat to slow down. I can’t have another heart attack. Not here.

“Feel better?” asked Ms. Jance.

Julie’s lips tightened. She wasn’t about to give the head the satisfaction of seeing her panic. So she simply said, “Did I sleep long?”

“Several hours.”

“Good.”

“Why did you inject me with that material?”

It was you or me. “We needed a test subject.”

“I see.” The corners of the head’s lips turned down a little. “Did you find out what you needed to know?”

“No. The robots have shut down.”

“What’s that got to do with the experiment?”

“They—” Julie looked down at her hands. They were shaking. I’m only forty years old. The skin seemed splotchy and translucent in places, the opposite of liver spots. “It was their experiment. To see how the astral material would affect you.”

Damn it. It never was an experiment. Only a way of saving my own skin. So I didn’t end up a… talking head. Oh, God. “They were supposed to observe and question you, to see if you… were under control of the astral beings. It was…”

She shook her head. It hadn’t made sense then, and it still wasn’t making sense now.

Ms. Jance cleared what was left of her throat. “Well, if it’s any comfort, I don’t feel as though I’m under my own control, let alone anyone else’s.”

Julie walked back to her chair, briefly leaning on Scarlett’s table to keep her balance. Ms. Jance’s body slumped in the computer chair, apparently not animated by the same force that controlled the head. Julie wondered what would happen if the head were destroyed. Would the body move then?

Ms. Jance cleared her throat again. A very polite sort of noise. Ahem. “Ms. Black, you couldn’t see your way to… put my head back on the stump of my neck, could you?”

“That’s exactly the kind of thing the astral beings would want me to do,” Julie said. “It took a great deal of effort to get your head cut off in the first place, you know.”

“Well, yes, I suppose. You were afraid of what I might do. Perfectly understandable.”

“Stop being so polite.”

“Mmmm,” said Ms. Jance’s head. It pressed its lips together, as though to prevent a smile. “So you’d rather trust an artificial intelligence than a black woman.”

“It has nothing to do with your being black.”

Ms. Jance sighed. “You have no idea how many times I’ve heard that sentence.”

Julie circled the robots, keeping what she hoped was a safe distance. She had absolutely no sense of any kind of presence from them; they were less alive than the two bodies under the sheets, as far as her goose-bumped flesh was concerned. Ms. Jance, however, made the hair on Julie’s arms and the back of her neck stand on end.

“You’re not black anymore, Ms. Jance. You’re not human.”

Ms. Jance lifted an eyebrow. “Even if I conceded that argument—and I don’t— it’s a matter of one type of pseudo-human intelligence versus another. And only one of them, if I may remind you, is out to destroy the human race.”

Pax was running out of island when he saw a possibility. He could hear the waves crashing against the bare rock of the eastern shore, growing louder and louder with every pace. If he didn’t do something soon, the monster would chase him right into the ocean.

That’s when he saw a crack the width of a dirt road that had opened up in the ground, swallowing a stream that now plummeted into the darkness below.

There. That could work.

It wasn’t wide enough to fit the monster. It was just a crack in the ground, not some kind of tourist cave with floors and handrails and lights. But it was going to do.

He ran past the crack and circled back around toward it, letting the monster catch up to him. This was going to be close.

Pax dropped inside the crack, falling until his hamster ball wedged itself against the walls. He strengthened the ball with as much energy as he could spare—making it glow bright—and let himself drop through the bottom of it. He hit the bottom of the crevice, spotted an outcropping and backed under it.

The monster stopped over the opening of the cave. Pieces of trash pinged off the walls, dropping all around him. Tentacles slithered against the sides of the cave, reaching for the bright, distracting hamster ball.

You just keep your tentacles on the ball, buddy.

Scarlett wanted to help Pax. But Terry had her by the scruff of the neck and wasn’t letting go. Her immaterial body felt like it was a candy wrapper pinched between his fingers. Worse, he’d wrapped his spirit around hers to keep her from getting away.

They were floating over the island, invisible, watching Pax fight the monster.

Pax jumped out of the crack in the ground, shot up into the air, and slammed onto the monster’s back, wedging it into the crack. Its tentacles whipped around, trying to catch him, but he was already a couple of hundred feet up in the air again. Another couple of slams on the monster’s back, and its shell split along the sides. Most of the monster was shoved into the crack. The main legs snapped backward and wiggled crazily in the air.

She cheered.

Terry frowned and crooked a finger.

The monster was ripped out of the crack, shedding metal plates until it was mostly just a mass of oozing tentacles. Terry gestured again, and the monster healed itself. A third gesture, and the plates lifted off the ground and fitted themselves onto the monster again.

“That’s cheating,” protested Scarlett.

Terry moved his face slightly. His eyes turned up at the corners, and the sides of his mouth showed little laugh lines, although she couldn’t have said he was exactly smiling.

“What?” she demanded. “Do you think this is funny? You were like a father to him. Instead you’re this evil bastard who treats him like he’s some kind of experiment.”

The lines around his eyes deepened. And one corner of his lips twitched.

Scarlett knew she could yell until she was blue in the face and he wasn’t going to listen. What she wanted to do was teach this fuckwad a lesson. The problem was, there was practically no negative energy to gather. Terry, despite being a complete asshole, wasn’t producing the negative energy at all.

Must be an astral thing, she thought. There’s got to be a way to get more.

Scarlett looked down to Pax and saw negative energy flowing from him. He was astral, true, but he was still human (sort of), so the negative energy flowed off him in waves.

It wasn’t nearly enough to stop Terry, but maybe…

She called the negative energy. It came in bits and starts. Terry sensed it at once and smiled again, as if it were of no concern. And really, it wasn’t nearly enough to hurt him.

But it was enough to give Scarlett the power to send a message to the arctic ice and the black pool of negative energy that lay there.

Help me! she sent. If you want this thing stopped, you need to help me! Now!

For a long minute there was nothing. Below, the creature continued to hurl rocks at Pax. He sat there, staring helplessly at it, knowing he was beaten.

A single black tentacle speared out of the ground and slammed into Scarlett, spitting her. Her back arched in agony as it poured negative energy into her faster than it ever had before. Her body practically ballooned with the injection.

Terry made a gesture and the tentacle shredded. His spirit squeezed Scarlett’s even tighter, and his hand on her neck squeezed enough to throttle any creature that needed to breathe.

Do you really think you can stop me?

She couldn’t. Scarlett knew it. The power the tentacle had managed to give her wasn’t enough to make Terry let her go, let alone defeat him in a fight. She could feel the way his spirit wrapped around hers, holding it in place like a mesh net around a snarling animal. She couldn’t get free.

Maybe getting free isn’t want I need to do, thought Scarlett. Maybe what I need to do is join with him.

He’d come to Earth to turn Pax from human to astral. He and Lana had to pour everything they had into making Scarlett and Pax transform. And the negative energy had prevented Scarlett from fully transforming because it didn’t want humans to stop being humans. So it entwined into her spirit to prevent it.

Almost like the way Terry was entwined with her now, to prevent her from stopping him.

Scarlett poured power into them both, intertwining the negative energy with Terry’s astral form. Terry realized it almost immediately but wasn’t fast enough. The dark energy wound around his astral spirit, joining with it.

Silly girl, Terry chided. Do you really think that will hold me for long?

It doesn’t need to hold you long. The negative energy and the astral energy were nearly mixed. If you guys can change humans to astral, I bet I can use the negative energy to change astral to human. And if I can make your astral human, I bet I can mess you up.

She watched the blobs that were her hands reform. Fingers. Palms. She slowly opened and closed them, adding creases. A scar along one finger that she’d gotten as a kid, screwing around on a playground. She changed the color to look like her old human skin, resisting the temptation to make herself a little less pasty-pale. Fingernails with silvery half-moons near the cuticles. Veins along the insides of her wrists.

Power. Magic. Negative energy. Astral bullshit. Whatever it was, she was using it to rebuild her body the way it had been, in all the glory of its mortality. Mortal flesh. Mortal blood. Mortal clothes.

… and then she made the mortality spread over to Terry.

His grip slipped a little and then came up more firmly under her skull. The bones in her neck ground together painfully, and she winced. Terry’s fingernails bit into the back of her neck, and he shook her a little. He was looking more and more human, more and more solid.

“You must stop this, child,” he whispered—a human voice coming through human vocal chords. “You must not prevent me from—”

“I am not a child.” She could feel the skin pulling on her cheeks as she grinned at him, the frizz of her hair being caught in the wind. “I’m not your tool. Not your weapon. Not your student. Not your ally. And neither is Pax. Leave him alone.”

Tears—real tears—welled up in her ducts and ran down her face.

“Regretfully, I cannot. He must learn—”

She tuned him out and shifted her vision to look at Terry’s spirit, where it was tangled in her own. She poured more and more mortality into his flesh. More and more humanity: The ability to cry. A strong appreciation for Stephen King novels. What it felt like to get a paper cut. Shame. Guilt.

His astral spirit was beginning to rally, beginning to fight back. But it wouldn’t be enough. Scarlett was sure of it. She said, “Let me go.”

“Regretfully—”

She sent every last bit of her negative energy through their intertwined spirits, making it rip through their now-human flesh like a buzz saw. The damage was hideous and both of them screamed with the pain of it. Blood poured out of their mouths and noses, then their eyes. Scarlett blinked it away and managed to get one more look at him as her vision began to fade. He was writhing in agony.

Now it was Scarlett who smiled. “Fuck you, Terry.”

They both started falling.

Chapter 17

Pax rocked back as the monster’s rocks slammed into him. He should put up a screen—he should do something—but he didn’t have the energy.

It wasn’t fair, Goddammit. He’d defeated the monster, or at least pinned it down, and then it had just levitated out of the hole, healed itself, and put all its armor back on.

Someone is fucking with me. And if I can’t figure out who, I’m never going to stop this thing.

Above him, someone screamed.

Pax’s head snapped up. Two specks were falling from the sky. They grew from specks to dolls and from dolls to people as he watched. One was desperately fighting the other, trying to break free.

Seconds before they hit, he saw they were Scarlett and Terry, and Scarlett was holding onto Terry for all she was worth. Pax tried to throw a shield out to catch them, but he didn’t have the energy.

The two landed on the rocks with a pair of splattery thumps.

Pax stared in horror. Then the sun burst up from the horizon, filling Pax with energy.

Too late, thought Pax. Too late, too late, too late.

Another rock hit him in the back of the head. Pax threw up a shield around the monster without any effort. He rose to his feet slowly and walked to where Scarlett and Terry lay on the ground.

Scarlett’s neck was at an impossible angle, her head practically turned backward. The bones of her spine were weird jumbled lumps that looked like they were trying to push out of her skin. One arm was over her head; the other was bent underneath her. Pax knelt beside her and lifted the arm off her face. It was nearly unrecognizable. The bones in her skull had smashed. There was a trail of blood leaking out of her ear, out of her nostrils.

Not the silvery astral material. Not negative energy. Blood. Real blood, as far as he could tell. He touched it. It felt like blood, it was warm like blood. How did she do that?

He crawled over to Terry.

He had smashed, face-first, onto the rock. His skin had kept the bone fragments from flying all over the place, but it had still ruptured, leaking blood and shockingly pink brains out of a flap that had broken free above Terry’s ear. The fact that Terry was bald just made it worse. His skull looked stretched out under the skin.

Pax rolled Terry over to see his face. It was a mass of blood; one of the eyeballs had been smashed. Pax rolled the body back over.

Human. They both looked human, inside and out.

Terry must have pulled the monster out and healed it. Pax looked to the beast behind him. She must have made them both human to stop him.

It was a hell of a thing to do. Especially since Scarlett knew it would kill her, too.

Scarlett said death doesn’t mean much, anymore.

Bet it still hurt like hell.

Pax looked at Terry’s broken body and frowned. He didn’t think for a second that Terry was actually, totally, out-of-his-hair dead. It took more to really kill someone astral than it did a normal human. If you didn’t destroy the spirit, you were basically just wasting your time.

He looked back at the monster trapped in his hamster ball. It was trying to climb up the walls and start it rolling, but it wasn’t working.

If he hadn’t brought Terry here, the monster wouldn’t have been created.

If he hadn’t brought Terry here, Scarlett (no, Lana. Lana did it) wouldn’t have killed everyone at her school.

If he hadn’t brought Terry here, Pax wouldn’t have killed that old preacher guy on the street.

If he hadn’t brought Terry here, Pax would have died.

Maybe he would have been better off dead.

Maybe everyone would have been better off if he had died.

Maybe the whole universe would be better off if Terry were dead.

I’m the one who brought him here.

I have to track him down.

I have to kill him.

Pax leaned back from the bodies and looked out over the ocean. If he squinted, he could almost pretend nothing had happened: the water still crashed against the shore, the silhouettes of the shorebirds around him dark against the sky. The sun burned orange on puffy purple clouds. A breeze was coming in, pushing the clouds away. It was going to be a good day. The sailboats would be out.

Looking for the missing and the dead.

Pax looked down at Terry once more. He was astral. He could be anywhere. But if Scarlett had hurt him—really hurt him—then Terry would be in only one place on Earth.

Pax reinforced the shield around the monster, working his mind so the shield would stay up without him consciously thinking about it. The monster was thrashing wildly now, but as long as the sun was shining, Pax would be able to hold it.

He lay on the rock next to the bodies. Step number one: disconnect his senses. He’d done this a thousand times before, while traveling to the astral plane to hang out with Terry, who had once been his idol.

Whom he was going to kill.

Sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch—gone. And Pax’s consciousness was gone as well.

Scarlett’s body sat up and screamed in pain and shock. Julie screamed back as much out of shock as horror. Scarlett’s head whipped around to stare at Julie as Ms. Jance’s head rolled off the table. It hit the floor with a wet smack, bouncing and tumbling until it came to rest against one of the chair’s metallic legs. The scalpel clattered on the tile and landed next to Julie’s feet. She picked it up.

The girl’s head turned back and forth stiffly. “Where am I?”

Julie tried to swallow but could not. The movement felt as though she were tearing something in her throat.

From the floor, Ms. Jance said, “You are in Room 221 of DARPA.”

Scarlett sat upright, her lank hair in loose strands over the side of her face. With her free hand, she tried to push the hair out of her eyes, but the fingers weren’t working properly.

Astral material was leaking out of both her eyes and her nose. Her skin started extruding drops of the stuff. Her skin—even the nail beds on her feet—was dotted with it. Scarlett swiped at her nose with her arm, saw the silver stuff and made a face.

Someone began shouting something, far away. It took Julie a minute to realize it was coming through the air vents. But at least people are coming here.

Scarlett’s head moved stiffly as she took in the room. Her eyes fastened on Ms. Jance’s headless body first. Then she saw the robots. She looked at the head at the base of the chair, the ruined door at the bottom of the operating theater, and, lastly, Julie herself.

“Questions?” asked Ms. Jance’s head.

Scarlett’s mouth fell open. She stared at Ms. Jance’s head for a long time. At last she said, “So, so many questions.” Scarlett pulled the sheet off her legs with a series of jerky, uncoordinated movements. She swung her legs over the side, her bare skin pulling off the vinyl surface with an obscene, gaseous noise. The table nearly collapsed under her, and it took her a moment to stand upright.

Something started banging outside the theatre. Julie hoped saner minds were trying to break into this madhouse.

“I mean, okay, maybe it makes sense that I’d wake up in my original body, about to get autopsied,” said Scarlett. “And with my luck it just had to be by Pax’s mom. But a headless lady? And robots? Jesus Christ. I’m not ready for robots.” Scarlett tried to take a step forward, and her knee buckled. “Ugh. This body’s no good. What the hell did you guys do with it?”

“It’s been dead,” said Ms. Jance. “It is decaying.”

Julie still couldn’t bring herself to speak.

“No shit,” said Scarlett. “Fine. I didn’t like it much anyway.”

Silvery material poured out of the girl, out of her pores, her ears, her nostrils. She leaned forward and began puking buckets of the stuff onto the floor. The material, surprisingly, didn’t splash or scatter, but built up in a kind of mound in front of her.

The gush from her head slowed and then stopped, and Scarlett collapsed to the floor. Her skin was still streaming a few beads of silvery material. Her belly humped up and then fell as a mass of more silvery material slid out from under her legs: she’d shit herself.

All the astral material flowed together. It stretched upward and formed into the shape of a girl. At first it was a miniature form, only a meter high. But it grew, reshaping and expanding though it had no extra material to work with, until it was a full-sized, silvery, girl-shaped doll. The way the overhead fluorescent lights swirled on its skin turned Julie’s stomach.

The silver thing walked over to Ms. Jance’s fallen head and picked it up, balancing it on its palm. With Scarlett’s voice, it asked “And… uh… who the fuck are you?”

Ms. Jance’s lips twitched, briefly showing a dimple on one dark cheek. “Martha Jance. I work for the U.S. Government, for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.”

“I’m not sure what that means.”

“Research for the military. Sci-fi stuff.”

The doll smiled at her. It might look like some kind of alien, but it still stood like a seventeen-year-old girl, one hip stuck out and not standing up straight. “Right. Of course. Why not? It’s a sci-fi kind of world.” The silver head slid smoothly back and forth, examining the room. “I take it these robots are yours? Some kind of artificial intelligence thing?”

With its elbow braced on its stomach, and the head balanced on its palm, the Scarlett-doll looked like an amateur declaiming a passage from Hamlet. Only poor Yorick was talking back.

“Yes,” said Ms. Jance. “Out of our control at the moment. It stated that it intends to destroy the human race, and then it shut down—apparently to escape capture, if those sounds I’m hearing are what I think.”

Scarlett’s head cocked, listening to the sounds in the hall through ears that weren’t there yet. “Figures.” Scarlett tilted the head upside down, inspecting the neck. It, too, was leaking silvery fluid, far more than it had previously. She flipped the head back upright and walked over to the torso strapped to the computer chair. “Right. Now, if I put your head back on this body—yours, I presume—”

“I would find that most amenable.”

“Heh. AP English much?”

Ms. Jance rolled an eye from behind Scarlett’s arm. “Stanford 2010, magna cum laude in English.”

“So you’re not one of the engineers. Uh, communications, HR, or technical writer?”

Ms. Jance sighed. “Communications. For my sins.”

Great, thought Julie, half-hysterically. The fate of the world is in the hands of two liberal arts majors.

The silver figure positioned the head in the air over the stump of the neck, out of alignment, not even bothering to line up the spinal cord, let alone the major veins and arteries.

“Wait!” the word escaped Julie’s mouth before she could stop it. The silver, featureless head turned toward her. Julie felt bile and fear rising in her throat and swallowed both. “Wait.”

“For what?” Scarlett’s voice asked. “So you can take her blood pressure?”

Before she could answer, Ms. Jance said, “She thinks I’m being controlled by the astral beings. That I’ve been replaced and am a mere simulation of myself. She cut my head off to disable me.”

Scarlett grinned broadly. “Oh my God, Mrs. Black.” This monster was mocking her. “Are you kidding me? Analog to digital. CDs to MP3 players. Paper books to ebooks. You’re just going to let her head sit around on the floor because you can’t deal with a format change? It’s still her. It’s not like she even needs the body. It’s the silvery part that’s her.”

“Just wait!” Julie said. “I know your personality was copied from an idiotic, overemotional teenager, but if you could just—”

Scarlett’s eyes would have rolled, if she had any. “It’s… just… a… head!” she said and put it firmly on the stump of Ms. Jance’s neck. Crooked.

The place Pax went was not on the astral plane, as it had been before. Terry wouldn’t go there. Not with Lana already gone ahead to report what he had done. Not with whatever the hell Terry was planning unfinished. No, Terry needed a place to hide that was still on Earth and not in the physical realm. He needed a place where almost no one could find him.

So Pax sent his spirit inward and found the pacha Terry had built inside Pax’s own mind. Pax’s spirit floated through the darkness that was his inner being. Around him, tens of millions of memories floated, waiting to be plucked and used. Everything from his childhood to the fight with the monster was there. Pax let it all drift by, searching for the one that wasn’t his…

There.

Got you, asshole.

Pax stepped into the pacha and found himself standing in the midst of a mountain valley, surrounded by plants and dripping water. The sky above was gray and the clouds were roiling. But all of it seemed slightly wrong, as if each piece was only real when it was focused on and then faded into half-life when Pax’s eyes turned away.

My mind, asshole, Pax thought. He frowned, and the mountain valley disappeared, leaving blank space. Everything you do is a lie, so stop jerking my chain.

“Terry!” he called. “Terkun’shuks’pai! I know you’re here. Come out!”

A man fell out of a thin slice of nothing and landed in a heap in front of Pax. Pax barely recognized the man. He was wearing Terry’s pseudo-Japanese fighter’s outfit and had a bald head, but that’s where the similarity ended. His head was covered with patchy black-and-gray stubble, and there were patches where the hair hadn’t been shaved evenly. There were ingrown hairs on the back of his head. The knuckles on his hands bulged like an old man’s, with dirt under the nails and scabs across the back of his right hand. Like he’d been punching something without gloves.

And he stank. Not just “had a long day” sweat-stink, or even the stink of someone who’d pissed himself, but the kind of stink that smelled like it had been around so long that it had fermented. A rotten cheese kind of stink.

The guy raised his head. It was Terry. What Terry would have looked like if he were actually human instead of just good at building imaginary human bodies.

Long-healed broken nose, hair growing out of his nostrils, eyebrows that grew off in crazy directions and were splotched unevenly with gray. Vomit stains on his robes, and dirt and blood on his knees. One earlobe bigger than the other. Crooked teeth, a split lip. Stubble growing thick and dark in spots, thin and gray in others. Wrinkles. Dark circles under his eyes.

“Scarlett really worked you over, didn’t she?” said Pax. “Serves you right.”

Terry picked himself off the ground and tried to stand upright, to resume some of his old posture. His body wouldn’t do it. His back stayed hunched and he had to crane his neck up to look Pax in the eye.

“Terry. The invaders. Are they real?” Terry didn’t say anything. Pax’s teeth ground together in frustration. “You tell me how to find them so I can find out whether they’re real or just more of your bullshit.”

Pax didn’t add that he was going to kill Terry afterward.

Pax banished it. It was his head. Terry wasn’t going to fill it with images of a fake Japanese countryside that probably had never existed.

“I can’t,” said Terry, his voice shaking. “I have to show you—”

“Nice try,” Pax said. “Just talk. Or else.”

Terry reached out a hand and laid it on Pax’s arm. “This is faster,” he said, and he poured his thoughts into Pax.

Earth was my destiny.

When astrals are first created by our progenitors, we are often almost identical copies, but without their memories and experience. Experience is held to be sacred—only the most monstrous would even consider taking a memory or an experience from another, although we have the ability to do so. We believe our memories hold the essence of our individuality; it is the closest thing we have to the concept of a “soul.” Only species that have an element of genetic randomness in their reproductive system, as do the species of Earth, can have the idea of a soul, that is, the belief that there is something innately individual about themselves. The only real individuality we astrals have is in our memories.

We respect our elders, not because they are wise or share our genetic line, but because they have more memories. Yet youth and inexperience are valued, too. At the beginnings of our existences, our progenitors often assign us problems they found unsolvable, in the hope that their progeny will succeed where they could not.

My progenitor was Ush’shuks’pai. He discovered the Earth near the dawn of your species.

When Ush’shuks’pai traveled here, it was a kind of paradise, with relative harmony between all species. Predators and prey still existed. But predators would sacrifice themselves if they saw not enough prey was available, for the good of their packs. And the prey would do the same, when they had not enough grass to eat. It was no heaven, the way your culture imagines it, but it was more balanced. Microscopic life carried genes across species to mutual benefit rather than killing or making its hosts ill. Competition among and between species did not extend to destroying the environment. Evolution was slower then, and energies more restrained. It was not a planet of great genetic or technological innovation; it was a slow, relatively unproductive backwater.

Ush’shuks’pai ascertained the potential for humanity to access the astral plane, if they continued to evolve. It was something that would take many millions of years.

But.

Ush’shuks’pai thought that perhaps a few minor alterations might increase the tendencies of a few species toward increased innovation. He was hoping to accelerate the development of humanity toward the stars, on both the physical and astral planes.

He succeeded, all too well.

Across the entire planet, he greatly shortened the average lifespan of almost every living thing, as well as made the nature of life on the planet more violent, more prone to draw negative energy toward itself. Evolution sped up, as did humanity’s technological innovations. Earth was a hothouse, a Petri dish under a heat lamp.

He didn’t realize what he had done until later.

He was young.

I don’t say this to justify his actions. He destroyed a paradise and released evil upon it. Later, he regretted his actions. He saw what he had done had prevented humanity—as well as every other possible primary race on the planet—from ever gaining the ability to become citizens on the astral plane. They might reach the stars, but that was all.

He tried to undo what he had done but was prevented by the Council, who did not believe him. When Ush’shuks’pai spoke out against the Council, he was deemed to be insane and locked up.

None of this I knew at first.

I was created against my progenitor’s will, with the hope that I would take his place and find a way to undo the damage he had done. Desperation, and a surfeit of memory of failures past, had made the Council blind.

Many years ago, they sent me to Earth to study my progenitor’s work. Another young astral, Akllana’chikni’pai, was sent with me to study the cultures and spiritual makeup of the planet; her progenitor had been an eminent cultural and spiritual assessor before being nominated to the Council. We were to train and teach and nurture each other, our talents coming into bloom beside each other’s, a rich garden that would help save the astral plane from starvation. The White City would endure, with our help.

They told us nothing we did not need to know.

When we arrived, I became enraptured by the study of the way the spirits and genetics of Earth life were intertwined. I saw the destructiveness my progenitor had wrought and thought I could fix it: give you longer lives and more peace. I dove into my examination of your world, ignoring everything else.

Akllana’chikni’pai became imprisoned within the undying corpse of a young girl, trapped by the spiritual powers of the humans I was so busy studying. A thousand years later, more or less, I remembered her existence and went to find her. On the astral plane, time has a distant quality; one takes as much time as one needs. So, when we travel to the physical planes, events crowd up on us. Time slips through our fingers.

I brought Akllana’chikni’pai back from her tomb, and we returned to the astral plane. My work had not been finished, and the Council was unhappy with us both. Better, they said, for me to have left her there another thousand years, if it meant I finished my work.

By then, I had no intention of finishing it; I realized I could not undo the damage to life on Earth. Humanity was spiraling out of control and would cause more harm than good to the astral planes. Yet I still loved this world.

I began putting plans in motion to cut Earth off from the astral plane, to make it… well, to make it a kind of pacha of my own, a paradise where I could be free of distractions and obligations. I intended to be worshipped as a god, in exchange for eventually finding a way to return life to its more balanced origins.

Then I met you.

Despite the damage to your body, your soul was closer to the original spirits of the Earth than anything else I had seen. But it was also damaged in places, nearly ruined. I worked to study you and to heal you at the same time, with mixed success. I had not felt such hope in over a thousand years.

And at the same time, I was despairing.

The Earth was being flooded with negative energy. Where had it come from? I told myself it was a byproduct of the damage to your spirits. But that energy did not come from nowhere. It came from a hole in the spiritual plane, a rift as fateful as the damage to your spirit.

The nature of the universe is such that it has its own spirit, its own kind of life. It comes into being; it grows; it reproduces; it ages; it calcifies; it becomes weak; predatory universes consume it and bring forth new universes of their own.

Our universe, as we are able to measure its existence, is young. It is only barely coming of age; it has not yet begun to reproduce. Even on the astral plane, with our looser sense of time, we count the age of the universe as almost beyond understanding. Yet it is barely an adolescent.

It is sick, Pax. And it was Ush’shuks’pai who made it so.

My progenitor’s action pulled open a hole in the spiritual plane, wounding the universe, creating a weak point in its immune system’s defenses, where other universes can infect and damage it.

The monster I created… is a test.

It came from another galaxy, one where a minor rift developed in the universe. The species nearest it was advanced enough that it destroyed the invaders, sealed the rift, and then started spreading spacefaring seedpods that, when they came near the invaders, would reproduce rapidly, gather the resources needed to fight the invaders, and destroy them.

I do not know how to defeat the monster I have created; I do not know how to communicate with it. I only know it will evolve rapidly and launch itself into space and fight the invaders if we cannot.

The rift here is larger, the forces more prepared. I doubt my monster will win against them. Yet I must try.

When the invaders come, they will appear alien and dark and evil. But soon they will put on fair faces and pretend to bring gifts, as they did in the other galaxy. You will find them beyond the orbit of the moon. Some of them are already here; more are coming through as we speak.

I have done monstrous things, Pax, things that would cause me to be destroyed if the Council knew. But even so, I was never able to find a way to defeat what is coming. And I was, forgive me, never able to convince the Council the threat was real.

And so I have arranged for the Council to cut all direct links to the Earth because I want to save my people. I have arranged to give you the best education I could in defeating the coming invaders.

Even so, my gambit has failed. You have learned nothing from the monster I have created; neither have I.

And now we cannot even ask the astral plane for help.

Akllana’chikni’pai had appeared before the Council only twice before—once as an advisor on promoting the primary race on the planet of Shu-hashu to contributor status, and once to celebrate a victory of her progenitor’s. It had unnerved her both times.

This was worse.

The room itself had not changed. It was circular and made of white stone that had been polished to glossy perfection. Around the room were white thrones with high, arched backs; smooth pillars; and tall, arched windows opening onto the White City, far below them. The sky outside was white, except at the tops of the arches, where it was the faintest blue. White towers rose around them, some with long, delicate silver flags flapping in the slight breeze. The floor was polished and inset with a silvery pool of astral material.

Akllana’chikni’pai had chosen to appear in the same form she had used on Earth, that of a human female made of flame. The polished stone floor reflected her flames, turning her edges softer and paler, as though she were a ghost. The Council members, in keeping with tradition, had given themselves identical forms, shimmering balls of light. The lights flickered at each other, exchanging messages. Had she been human, she might have considered herself in the halls of the gods.

Their stares bore down on her with an almost physical weight.

Akllana’chikni’pai knelt before them and laid her swords on the floor in front of her in an asymmetrical crossed shape that reflected her favorite guard position.

On either side, white braziers burned with silver incense. They reminded her of her temple in the mountains but not in a pleasant way. It made her want to bow lower, to kowtow to the Council and do whatever they willed. It was the Council’s way of ensuring those who came before it told only the truth and agreed to what the Council wanted.

A breeze swept through the room, blowing incense smoke into her face. She lowered her head even farther.

A dull, monotonous voice echoed through the room, its direction untraceable. “Your report elucidated much, but we wish to know more.”

“Yes, Progenitor.” The Council had always been addressed as such, whether the members included one’s personal progenitor or not.

“We wish you to explain the behavior of your companion, Terkun’shuks’pai.”

“I cannot, Progenitor.”

The room flashed from a dozen directions all at once. Akllana’chikni’pai kept her face down, seeing only her reflection.

The same voice echoed around the room. It might have been the same Council member, or it might have been another. “Your companion seems to have arranged events in accordance with some plan to remove the Earth’s access to the astral plane.”

“Yes, Progenitor.”

“Why, child? Do you understand him? Has he said anything to you to explain his actions? Even a false explanation might reveal some of his mind.”

A lump rose in her throat. The white incense smoke was making her want to tell the Council members everything Terkun’shuks’pai had said to her. She bit her tongue, tasting black smoke that drowned out the incense for the moment. “My only guess is that he hates them, Progenitor.” The weight of the stares across her back made her place a hand on the floor. “He hates them with a passion that dwarfs my own.”

“But he has always been so cold and passionless. How could one such as Terkun’shuks’pai hate? He loves his research and hates nothing.”

She said nothing for a moment, breathing in the scent of strong smoke. “He blames the humans for his progenitor’s madness.”

“You have heard him say this?”

“No, Progenitor. It is only a guess.”

The room flashed with light. Again, she bit her tongue and inhaled the smoke, trying to clear her head. The girl must have poisoned her soul. Perhaps that was why she was able, now, to betray them, the ones who had raised her, the ones who had nurtured her—

Don’t let them seduce you, Akllana’chikni’pai told herself. It’s just incense. It doesn’t make them right.

She nurtured the thread of dark energy in the secret places of her soul. The lights steadied, and she prepared herself for more questions.

More lies.

“Child… we must know. Do you think he is right?”

She swallowed the last of the black smoke in her mouth.

“The danger is real, Progenitor. If Earth is allowed access to the astral plane, the consequences would be terrible.”

“How terrible?”

“Enough to destroy the White City, Progenitor.”

The flashes around the room were blinding.

“Terkun’shuks’pai forced me to confront a painful truth, Progenitors,” Akllana’chikni’pai said. “Every species on Earth, from the lowliest one-celled organism to potential primary species, is disposed to a state of extreme competition. They rarely achieve any kind of symbiosis with the other species around them and only do so to better compete against the remaining species. This makes them extremely attractive to negative energy, so much so that they have torn a hole in the universe.”

If anything, the light in the room increased. From outside the tower, it must seem as though lightning had struck within.

“A rift!” A voice cried—not the great monotone that filled the room, but a single council member’s voice. “We must destroy the planet immediately!”

Another Council member said, “We must destroy all life on Earth, that is. The planet itself might still be saved and reseeded—” The voice stopped abruptly, as though the speaker had only just realized it was speaking aloud.

The lights continued to flicker for a few more moments and then abruptly stopped.

The Council’s great voice said, “You reported he is in the process of destroying all life on the planet.”

“He has created a monster that is consuming all life on the planet.”

“But won’t this monster itself be a danger?”

“I do not know, Progenitor. He says that when it has finished destroying the native life, it will consume itself, having no real intelligence and no other way to obtain food.”

The voice grunted, an uncharacteristically ugly sound.

“If I may add a few words,” Akllana’chikni’pai said.

“You may speak.”

“Every drop of astral energy sent here by the Earth, in my opinion, is a drop of poison. It is, and always has been, tainted by negative energy. In addition, I do not trust Terkun’shuks’pai. We must protect ourselves from him. I hope the Council cuts the Earth off from the astral plane and, meanwhile, travels there using other means to seal the hole—this rift, as you say—to assess the damage he has done and to find out what else he is up to.”

“This could all be part of his plan,” the Council member said.

“It may be,” she admitted. “Nevertheless, I see it as the more favorable risk.”

The incense intensified, swirling into her face until she could barely see the floor, and she coughed. Lights flashed back and forth across the council chamber as its members argued.

“Child, you will return to Earth to lead our armies. You will defeat and capture Terkun’shuks’pai and return with him as a slave while our troops eradicate the danger from the planet and reseed it.”

Akllana’chikni’pai bowed her head lower. “Yes, Progenitor. I will lead your armies against Terkun’shuks’pai.”

Pax stared into the distance, watching the sun pull up over the horizon of the pacha’s valley. Somehow, while Terry had been sharing his story, he’d taken over enough of Pax’s mind that the whole valley had been recreated without Pax really noticing it.

Fucking Terry.

After a moment he put his hand in front of his face, blocking the light.

He blinked. The sunlight. It was getting brighter. Too bright. Even for a pacha. It felt like it was flooding him with energy—which couldn’t be happening.

Except it was. “What have you done?”

Terry kept kneeling on the ground, like he was waiting for a sword stroke to the back of his neck.

Pax shook Terry’s shoulder through his robes. “Terry. The sun. It’s getting brighter. What have you done?”

“There is one other thing I have done,” said Terry.

The sun grew brighter… brighter…

And then something stopped.

What it was, Pax didn’t have a clue. It was like a buzzing noise he’d been hearing all his life, like the sound of an oxygen machine, something he’d heard so constantly his brain filtered it out because it would have driven him bugfuck insane to hear it all the time.

“What did you do, Terry?”

Now that the noise had stopped, a burning, hot feeling was in Pax’s chest. Not unpleasant. Just weird. He put his hand over his chest. It felt warm to the touch.

Terry raised his head, slowly.

“It worked. Despite everything that went wrong. All the unexpected elements that intruded. All that manipulation and evil and hate and destruction and murder. It worked.”

“What worked, Terry?”

Terry turned his bald, sweating head toward Pax. Terry’s skin was loose and sagging off the sides of his face, dark under his eyes. He looked like a cancer victim on the downhill slide.

“The Council has cut Earth off from the astral plane. There is no longer a direct route to this world.”

Pax’s throat ached. He didn’t want to know. He had to. “How?”

“I used Akllana’chikni’pai. I spoke to her, before the last time she saw you. I told her as much of the truth as there was time to give her, and then I sent her to the Council.”

“What did you tell her?”

“Much of what I told you.” Terry looked down at his fists, balled up in the fabric of his robe. “You will probably never see her again.”

The warm heat in Pax’s chest turned into an ache. Damn it. He didn’t need to feel anything now. He didn’t need to have to think about her now. She was a one-night stand. A stupid crush. He didn’t have time to—

Pax took the old man’s hand off his arm. “How I feel doesn’t matter. First up. The monster. Tell me the monster was all a test and really you have that all under control. Because I could really use to not have that on my plate right now.”

Terry swayed. “I do not have the monster under control.”

It came without thought. Pax lashed out at Terry, backhanding him across the face. The old man’s face twisted under Pax’s hand. He barely felt it. “You asshole.”

Terry’s hands swung up to cover his face, but they were spider-thin and hid nothing. His cheek reddened, and his face turned back toward Pax, mouth open and a trail of spit on his opposite cheek.

“I suppose I deserved that,” Terry said in a thin voice. A red splotch bloomed on Terry’s wrinkled, sagging cheek. It would have been a hell of a bruise, had they been in physical form.

“I don’t want to be responsible for saving the universe!” Pax yelled. “I don’t want to be trained to fight powerful monsters that will destroy all life on the planet! I don’t want to do this!”

Terry’s eyes were black pits, like they held all of Scarlett’s negative energy and then some. “Then what is it you will do with your time? Lie in bed, dying?”

“Those aren’t my only choices.”

“They are. Because if you do not help save this universe, you can do nothing else except die.”

Pax turned away. The super-bright, nuclear-level sunlight in the pacha was tossing more energy at him than he could handle. No, that wasn’t true. He was handling it. He was absorbing it, everything that touched him, with no more difficulty than a slowly building warmth in his chest. It was easier to handle the energy.

Terry smiled. “You feel it, don’t you?”

“Feel what?”

“I could not have you stop my monster, Pax. Not before it was mature and ready to take on the invaders. So I crippled you.”

“What?!”

“Have you not noticed how much less powerful you are than me or even Akllana’chikni’pai, whose power was reined in by the girl’s negative energy? I held you back because I knew that, given full access to your astral self, you would have been too powerful too soon and would have stopped my monster.”

Pax frowned. “And now?”

“Now, when you return to the physical realm, you will have the full use of your power. And to ensure you are more powerful than any other, I set off a solar flare when we began talking. Your body has absorbed the extra energy.”

“And if you use it to send the monster to the rift, it will no longer attack the Earth. It may even be enough to fight off the dark beings who live on the other side and help save our universe.”

“Asshole,” said Pax. “Asshole, asshole, ASSHOLE! How many people died so your monster could grow up! How many did I have to have Scarlett kill?! And why does it just have to be me? Why aren’t you going to help? It’s your fucking monster!”

Terry looked ancient now. Covered with wrinkles, stooped forward, his bald head speckled with brown spots, his eyebrows completely white.

Fuck, he’s dying, thought Pax. And even though right now he hated Terry more than anything in the world, the thought send panic through Pax. “You don’t get to die on me, Terry. Not now. You have to stay and fix what you screwed up.”

The old man shrugged. He might have been very slightly smiling. Terry looked up, toward the tops of the trees around them, at the blue sky. He watched a couple of birds glide between the trees. “I am not a good person, Pax. I am not a good progeny or a good citizen or even a good mentor. I served a purpose. When I discovered that my purpose was evil, I tried to repair what I had done…”

“Is it evil to create the necessary tools? More importantly, is it enough?” Terry looked around the forest.

It wasn’t a Zen garden anymore. It smelled musty, like rotten, wet leaves instead of just pine sap and a fresh breeze. The tea hut was nowhere to be seen.

“I have something the invaders want, Pax. If they capture me, it will be a very dark time. So I must abandon you now, before too many of them arrive.”

“What the fuck do you mean?” Pax demanded.

But Terry turned away and began limping down a narrow dirt path that hadn’t been there a second ago. Pax watched, unable to move, as Terry stepped to the entrance of a black cave partially hidden by boulders and weeds. He looked even older and smaller than before, practically a walking skeleton. His knuckles and forehead and teeth looked like they were about to burst through his paper-like skin.

Terry stopped and looked back. “In case we do not see each other again, good-bye. It has been, as you say, good to know you.” He limped into the cave and disappeared as soon as he hit the darkness.

The sky turned lighter blue and then white. Slowly, the trees and the rocks and the ground faded out until there was just Pax in an empty pacha.

Fuck, thought Pax. Now what?

He was free to do whatever he wanted. Ditch the Earth, anything. Humanity could go fuck itself. Death could go fuck itself.

Except something out there was ready to destroy the universe.

If Terry was right. If he wasn’t lying again like he’d been lying all along.

Pax stepped out of the pacha and opened his eyes to the outside world. His body, still lying on the ground, was thrumming with astral energy. Now he knew why he’d been so weak compared to Scarlett. But no more.

Pax sat up.

The sun was still too fucking bright, even here in reality. Pax couldn’t even imagine the solar flare Terry must have sparked. The world would be lucky if any working satellites were left. At least the brightness was fading. The naked island shimmered with heat waves off the black rock.

Terry’s and Scarlett’s bodies were gone.

Pax wondered at that but didn’t have time to do more. The monster was still struggling against the hamster ball and was still trying to escape.

Pax hefted it into the air. It was easy. Probably a billion spores were left running around—the ones it’d spat into the ocean, for example—but at the moment, he really just wanted to get this fucking thing out of his hair.

The monster had curled up in a self-protecting ball. Pax floated the giant ball over to his hand and balanced it just over his shoulder, as if it were nothing more than a beach ball.

And then he heaved it.

It sailed into the sky—then beyond.

Hope there’re no satellites in the way, he thought. Then he grinned. Fuck it; they’re fried anyway.

Pax bent his knees and jumped after the monster.

Chapter 18

Scarlett carefully balanced Ms. Jance’s head on top of her neck and then let go. Scarlett half expected it to fall off with a thump, but no, it stuck there, and white astral gunk oozed out of the seam between the two parts.

Ms. Jance opened and closed her mouth several times, and a weird whistling noise came out.

“You don’t have her head lined up,” Mrs. Black said, sounding exactly like Scarlett’s teachers. Gawd, it was like being back in school.

Scarlett’s stomach clenched, and she was ready to tell Mrs. Black to fuck off, but a closer look at Ms. Jance’s neck showed Mrs. Black was right. For once. The windpipe was off center, and one side of Ms. Jance’s head was lower than the other.

Scarlett tried to turn the head back on straight, but the more she moved it around, the worse it seemed to get. The woman’s ears felt fake, probably from all the astral material in them. Her hair felt surprisingly fragile. Ms. Jance watched the entire time. Her eyebrows began to pinch together in that way Scarlett took to mean I’m going to kill you if you don’t knock this off in two seconds.

“Sorry, sorry,” Scarlett said. She wanted to shout, Look, I have stuff to do; did you know a monster is eating everyone in the Caribbean?

With an exasperated “move,” Mrs. Black pushed Scarlett’s hands away. She grabbed the head, lifted it off, and settled it back on the neck, straight and proper.

Ms. Jance closed her eyes and let out a long-suffering sigh. A line of silver astral material rolled out of the woman’s mouth, and her shoulders relaxed. “Thank God. I thought I was never going to be able to breathe again.”

Scarlett started to say, “Uh, you don’t need to breathe—”

Ms. Jance gave Scarlett a look that stopped any other words from escaping her mouth except “sorry.”

Ms. Jance inhaled, staring pointedly at Scarlett, and exhaled slowly. “Yes, that’s lovely,” the woman said. “Now let me out of this chair, please.”

Mrs. Black stripped off her gloves again and shoved them in a red box on the wall with a biohazard symbol on it. “You know we can’t do that, Ms. Jance.”

Ms. Jance pressed her lips together and lifted her chin. Clearly, she’d had enough of Mrs. Black. Scarlett wondered how long this whole strapped-to-the-chair thing had been going on. “I know no such thing. I do know it’s highly likely someone’s about to break through the cleanroom door, and things will go much better for you if I am not taped to a chair, Mrs. Black.”

It was true. The banging and crashing they had heard before had grown quite loud. At the top of the weird lecture hall, the metal door was bulging outward, like it was being punched by a relatively weak superhero. Scarlett looked around the room for another exit but didn’t see one. Unless she really wanted to freak them out, she should probably leave by the door. She looked down at her hands. They were metallic white. Shit. Incidentally, she was naked. She looked into one of the monitors and realized she still didn’t have a face either.

She grew herself eyes, nose, ears, and a mouth and then skin to cover it all. I’ve never done clothes before, she thought. A thought gave her a pair of tights and a fuzzy purple sweater. She looked in the monitor. “Shit!” She’d forgotten hair! Eyebrows. Eyelashes.

A burning heat was rising in her chest, a feeling like she was going to puke fire, even though Lana was nowhere nearby. Scarlett’s fingers were tingling, too. Too much astral energy. Too much of fucking Lana. She needed some balance.

She reached out for some negative energy. Shyly, as though it were just slightly scared of her, a few strands of negative energy slithered across the floor toward her. She bent down for them, letting them wrap themselves around her wrists and then letting them pass through her skin.

Ms. Jance cleared her throat.

Mrs. Black was still glaring at Ms. Jance, making no move whatsoever to get scissors or a scalpel or anything to help let her out. Scarlett sighed. Ms. Jance could probably break through the tape all by herself; she just wanted to know who her allies were. So… it was Scarlett’s job to make herself into one.

Scarlett flicked out a thread of negative energy toward the tape on Ms. Jance’s arm.

Ms. Jance grunted and pushed away from it, making the chair slide into the exam table with Pax’s body on it. “Oh, God. That… thing coming out of your arm. It’s a Loricati tentacle.”

“What?” Scarlett looked at her arm. “I don’t know what that is, but don’t worry, it’s just me.” She threaded the negative energy up through the tape and slit it on both sides. “See? You’re loose now.”

Ms. Jance leaned forward and tried to lift her arms, but they were still taped along the front of her chest, and she only succeeded in untucking her shirt from her skirt.

“Hang on,” Scarlett said.

Ms. Jance slid one hand in a flat, straight line between them and began peeling the tape from her blouse. “Keep that away from me, please.”

So much for making an ally.

A fire ax burst through the metal door at the top of the lecture room, slicing the metal open like a spoon through an orange peel. The ax pulled away, and a boot kicked the pieces of metal apart.

A man with a chubby face and a small black mustache looked through the door. “Ms. Jance? Are you all right? We need to evacuate the building immediately.”

Ms. Jance stood up and straightened her skirt. Her eyes looked hollow. The astral material pulled back into her skin, leaving it unblemished and unscarred, even around her neck. “I’m fine,” she said. “What about the AI? It isn’t, by any miracle, confined to the classified side of the network?”

“It’s everywhere, Ms. Jance. We need to get out of here now.”

Ms. Jance blinked, wiped her hand against her neck, and checked it. “Ms. Black? Are you able to walk up the stairs or shall I assist you?”

“Don’t you touch me!” Mrs. Black snarled.

“Then please start going upstairs.”

Mrs. Black started walking stiffly toward the stairs. She hesitated beside Pax’s corpse and pulled the sheet away from his face.

“Miss… Scarlett?” Ms. Jance said, but Scarlett’s couldn’t look away from Mrs. Black’s terrible expression. She looked like she was going to spit on Pax.

Ms. Jance snapped her fingers. “Miss Scarlett. We only have a moment. Please pay attention.”

Aside from the tape still stuck to her arms, Ms. Jance looked a hundred percent normal now. But, really, she was a bunch of astral material puppeting her own corpse. Just like I was. Ugh. “Yes. I mean, I am.”

“I know what you are, Miss Scarlett. We call your kind Loricati. I have seen what they can do—and if you act against the interests of humanity, I will find you and kill you.”

Scarlett’s skin went cold. “What?”

“Don’t play games with me.”

“I swear I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.”

The door finally smashed open. Ms. Jance held up a finger. “You will keep silent. And know I will be watching you every second. We’ll discuss this later.”

Jesus Christ, thought Scarlett. What was up with that woman?

Mrs. Black jerked the sheet back over Pax’s head and began limping from the room as though her body were a broken toy. She grabbed onto everything she passed—the robots, the cart full of medical supplies, the wall, the side of the plexiglass shell.

Ms. Jance walked toward Mrs. Black, glancing back once to look significantly in Scarlett’s direction, and then caught up with Mrs. Black and began helping her up the stairs. Mrs. Black tried to shake off Ms. Jance’s arm but didn’t have the strength.

Fuck, lady. I’m not evil. It’s just negative energy. Not the same thing.

But was she really able to tell the difference anymore?

She’d killed. Everyone. At. Her. School.

No, I didn’t. Lana did that.

But I let her, didn’t I? I let her take over.

Scarlett looked down at her hands. They looked human. But they weren’t. Not really.

The robot beside her twitched and reached one thin hand toward its chest. Scarlett backed away quickly.

“Miss! Are you coming?” the guy from upstairs shouted. Ms. Jance and Mrs. Black were going through the upper door, and the guy was waving at Scarlett from this side. Come on, come on.

A small door opened silently in the robot’s chest. It reached in and pulled out a thin square—a USB memory stick.

The robot froze again, the stick held between its two pincers.

“Miss! Are you all right?”

Of course she wasn’t all right. She wasn’t human either. Or normal or good or anything like that.

But for the sake of humanity, she’d pretend.

Scarlett grabbed the chip and absorbed it into her palm. “Coming!”

Two shimmering blue spheres rose out of the atmosphere and drifted into low earth orbit. The larger of the two caught the reflection of a nearby communications satellite: a box covered in golden foil and two fragile wings to catch the sunlight. Its two long antennae—rigid, ugly plates—were positioned to talk to Earth, but the waves around it were silent. It had been fried by the solar flare. Pax couldn’t help hoping it could be saved.

Inside its hamster ball, the monster had braced itself against the walls with I-beams ending in giant, chicken-like claws. It was rebuilding itself within its armor plating, too, but Pax couldn’t tell exactly what it was doing. Strangely, the air inside the ball was free of spores.

Once Pax had established that he didn’t feel like being a superhero, he found he didn’t actually want to destroy the monster. It was too fascinating.

He looked down at the Earth.

Fuck, it’s gorgeous.

White, puffy clouds hovered over the long blue expanse of the ocean. Funny how when you were on Earth, the sky looked blue, and the water seemed to reflect the sky, but in space, it was the other way around. The ocean lit up the atmosphere from below. The masses of land were mostly brown with streaks of green across them. Specks of clouds threw shadow on the ground thousands of feet below. Some storm clouds were rolling over the eastern side of the planet; the tops of them were so huge they seemed to jut above the atmosphere, like islands on the ocean. On the western side of the planet, where the sun was just starting to set, he saw a shimmer of light, as whole cities’ worth of streetlamps lit up.

Pax opened his senses not just to visible light but to the whole spectrum.

That, too, was fucking awesome.

What got him was the sound of it. It was like what he imagined being in the deepest part of the ocean would feel like: the sound of the currents moving past each other and over the ocean floor, the sound of the earth turning. The sound of the moon pulling on the oceans to make the tides. Those were the sounds of the lower end of the spectrum, going down so deep it was impossible to hear them all. The sound of the universe at work was constant background noise nobody really heard.

The visible light spectrum was like the sound of whales calling to each other.

And, above that, the crashing of waves, far distant—a faint, high-pitched susurrus—was the spectrum from UV to gamma rays and upward.

He let it all flow through him.

Peace.

No one but an astronaut could even begin to understand how he felt, and even then, they’d miss most of it.

Human? He wasn’t human. Not anymore. You couldn’t hear this sound and stay limited to one species, one planet.

He’d spent his whole life in battle: A battle against his disease. A battle to remember his father. A battle against the doctors who were constantly telling him that he only had two weeks to live, then kept moving the date forward. A battle against time. Against death. Against obscurity. Against Internet trolls. Against allergies… against predatory microbes that viewed his weakened state with relish.

Now he felt peace.

Beside him, the monster had changed inside its bubble. It wasn’t an armored beetle anymore but a shape almost like a manta ray, thicker in the middle, with stubbier, trailing “wings.” On its hind end were what almost looked like tailpipes.

A spaceship.

Terry had said the things had evolved to track down the invaders across deep space. Somehow, that didn’t make it any less surprising to see it actually happening.

Warily, in case Terry had lied again, he popped the bubble around the monster’s ship.

A few tiny blue lights flashed. It retracted its support beams, and the ship started moving. It was using some kind of plasma propulsion system it had not used while on Earth. Maybe it hadn’t reached critical mass at that point—maybe it hadn’t needed it. But now that it was in space it had no reason to hesitate.

It was definitely headed somewhere. It gave itself a few more course corrections and then accelerated.

Pax studied the stars in that direction. What was even over there?

It was an unfortunate gap in his education. Humans had been stuck planet side for so long, without any real hope of moving into space, that the study of astronomy had receded from a “need to know” into a “nice to know,” on a species-wide basis. For Pax, it had never been more than a passing interest.

The sky was full of more stars than he’d ever seen before, and with his general lack of knowledge, any hope of finding a recognizable constellation approached nil. He could have been looking right at the Big Dipper for all he knew. There were just too many stars.

Except in one spot.

Below and to the right of the Milky Way, from Pax’s perspective, the stars were spread more unevenly than they were elsewhere—they looked crushed together, as if in tangled ropes or a kind of bent web. If the stars had been on the surface of a balloon, the balloon would have been in the process of being bent and popped simultaneously.

And the plant-monster ship was headed right for it.

Shit.

Shit, shit, shit. Terry was telling the truth.

Pax was looking at a rift in the universe.

Once they reached the clean room, Ms. Jance handed Julie over to two men in combat gear, complete with smoked visors that covered their faces, leaving Julie with the impression that under the shielding, they might be robots or astral beings. Or maybe werewolves. Nothing would surprise her anymore.

Ms. Jance was hustled out of the room. Julie could hear the woman demanding information all the way down the hallway. When Julie’s escorts discovered she wouldn’t, or more properly couldn’t, move any faster, they swung her up in their arms as though they were a kind of human chair.

“My purse!” Julie realized. Of course she’d left it behind. Of course it had all her meds.

“Forget it, lady,” one of the men said. “Replace your IDs later.”

“It’s my meds—”

“You’ll just have to get your prescriptions refilled.”

They rushed her down the hallway. Their jolting run made her bones ache and her stomach turn. Her heart raced even faster than their footsteps.

Oh, my God, she thought. What if it’s not just the heart attack? What if there’s something else wrong with me? What if I’m dying, really dying?

Scarlett’s voice echoed in the hallway behind them, asking a question. Someone snapped an answer at her, and she shouted, “Fine! Whatever!”

Running feet came up behind them, and the girl and the other men passed around them. The girl’s face was streaked with tears, just like a typical spoiled teenager.

Except she’s not a teenager. Not anymore.

Nothing was left of the security door at the end of the hallway but glass pebbles on the floor. Scarlett slipped on them, was jerked upright, and was dragged to the door of the emergency stairs, complaining at the top of her lungs.

The door had been blown open. The top and bottom halves of the door were bent at angles to each other, with a twisted, soot-streaked mess of metal shards between them.

Julie’s escorts slowed as they passed through the entry hall, glass crunching under their feet, and started descending the stairs. The air was still acrid from the explosives.

The sounds of the others running down the stairs had become distant; shouted orders echoed from somewhere on the first floor.

The only ones left in the building—the only ones left alive in the building—were her, her two escorts, and a single guard behind them that she only just realized was there as they turned the first corner on the stairs. He had a rifle in his arms and was backing quickly down the stairs, covering their rear.

Nothing followed them that she could see.

Can’t you understand? They don’t need to follow us. You’re not just fighting robots. You’re fighting… a kind of god. If it had wanted us dead, we would be.

The stairs below her echoed with the sound of running boots coming toward them.

Julie’s escorts pressed themselves into a corner, squeezing her embarrassingly between them, as a dozen men passed. They were all dressed in combat gear and holding rifles. Their boots sounded like an oncoming train. All of them except the first and last carried heavy-looking, green tin boxes as well as black duffle bags strapped to their backs.

As soon as the men passed, her escorts picked her up and started carrying her down the stairs again. Faster. She clenched her teeth to keep from biting her tongue and swallowed repeatedly to keep from vomiting.

A man with a radio was waiting for them at the bottom. “They’ve reached the bottom of the stairwell,” he said into his radio. “Over.”

“Initiating Operation Clean Slate,” the voice on the radio responded. “Over.”

By then her two escorts had been replaced by a different, yet nearly identical, pair of men. All of them streamed out of the front doors and into the back of a large black military truck. It had two benches in the rear and two additional guards. As the last of the group entered, each guard reached outward, grabbed a door handle, and slammed the doors shut.

“All clear!”

The truck began moving. Julie was pushed onto the barely padded bench seat, panting and shaking. Her chest ached; cold sweat was rolling down between her breasts, across her belly, off her face, and down her neck.

I’m having another heart attack.

I’m going to die this time.

She leaned against the wall of the truck, which had a stiffly padded black headrest attached over a row of cabinets and other equipment she hadn’t noticed at first glance. Toward the front of their compartment was a green metal container strapped to the wall and marked with a red cross.

The man beside her slipped off his helmet. He was older than she expected—her age, maybe even older. “Are you all right, ma’am?”

“I need my meds, which are in my purse. Back in the building.”

“What do you need?”

“Nitro spray. Four hundred micrograms. Fast.”

Something outside the truck thudded, and everyone hesitated for a moment.

“Operation Clean Slate completed,” said a voice over the radio.

“Shit,” someone whispered.

Julie gasped as pain seared up her chest. The troop in the truck went into action. Men crowded off the bench to clear a space for her. Two of them helped her lie down. The one who’d spoken to her opened the kit on the wall and pulled out some nitro spray. She gave herself a couple of sprays under her tongue and waited. Her heart felt like it was hiccupping. A stethoscope slipped between the buttons of her blouse.

“Irregular rhythm,” the man who’d removed his helmet said. “We need to get her to a hospital.”

“She won’t be safe there, sir. Their systems are compromised.”

“What other chance has she got?”

“We have to take her to the bunker,” said the other man. “She’s the one who knows the most about the physiology and psychology of the two initial subjects. We can’t take chances with her.”

“Not taking her to a hospital right now is taking chances with her.”

“I’m sorry, Captain. We know the AI is after her specifically. I mean, we can’t take the chance it will take her from us.”

“Then get us there faster.”

The medic’s order almost made Julie laugh. The truck was already lurching and heaving with reckless speed. The other soldier, however, nodded, He opened up a metal panel at the front of the compartment and called through it. “Cap says to move it. Passenger having a heart attack back here.”

The nitro was doing its job, loosening the tightness in her chest. She was still sweating like a pig, though she felt like she was in a refrigerator. She put her hand on her forehead. It felt waxy and cold.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“Secret bunker,” the medic said. “I can’t tell you how long to get there because I don’t know. There’s a full complement of ER-level medical equipment there, though. I know that much.”

“Good.” She closed her eyes. The vehicle jounced underneath them, rattling her body around on the seat. “I’m feeling much better now, thank you, but I certainly wouldn’t slow down anytime soon.”

A radio overhead gave a burst of static. “Seatbelts, people.”

Hands touched her, strapping her to the seat with webbed belts that snapped shut and then tightened across her clothing and her legs. She kept her eyes closed. Thank goodness they weren’t asking her to sit up. By the sound of it, everyone was trying to squeeze together on the other bench, but a couple of the men were going to have to stand, no way around it. She let herself drift.

“Bump.” The radio announced, and the vehicle jerked. The road underneath them now was rougher, either an old asphalt road full of potholes or a gravel road, or some such. The driver barely slowed down.

“ETA one hour, fifteen minutes,” the radio voice announced. “If you gotta go, piss out a window. We have strict orders not to stop.”

She felt the presence of someone leaning above her, saw a shadow over her closed eyelids. She frowned and opened her eyes. “Yes?”

“Is it true what they’re saying?” asked one of the soldiers.

“I don’t know. What are they saying?”

The man above her hadn’t removed his helmet, and her own face was reflected back to her, an ugly distortion. “World War III. The Chinese sent an AI after us and it went rogue… it’s taking down systems all over the planet. Destroyed our satellites. Blew up an island in the Caribbean. And maybe a couple of places in New York City. A school.”

She sighed. The man bending over her wouldn’t be the only one who was worried. Everyone who had the slightest clue what was happening was probably terrified by now.

Julie could have told them the person who’d destroyed the school was in another one of the vehicles, traveling to the bunker with them. She had no love for the girl, but since Ms. Jance seemed to be willing to handle that problem, Julie was willing to leave it alone. For now. The island had been the monster attacking Pax—but the satellites or the AIs? She had no idea.

In short: she knew nothing that would reassure these men. Nothing.

So she shook her head, closed her eyes, and let herself drift as the truck rattled down the road.

Pax is dead, she told herself. She’d seen the body, hadn’t she? All that was left of him was a sick mockery. You’re free now.

You’re free.

Like a crack in a window, the rift distorted the light around it, making it look like the stars were being sucked down a hole. It was close. If what Terry had said was true, it was near Earth’s orbit. Part of Pax hadn’t really believed Terry until then. Old human habits die hard: seeing was believing.

But just because Terry was right didn’t mean Pax had to forgive Terry. If he had been honest from the start, they could have shown people and the entire planet could have been working on finding a solution. Pax wouldn’t have had to waste time learning to be the world’s worst superhero.

But no. Terry had to act like a complete lunatic, and now there’s a cosmic bathtub drain in the solar system. Fucking Terry.

The plant-monster was still accelerating toward the rift when something came through from the other side. It was a distant speck that only showed up because it blocked the light behind it. The fact that Pax could pick it out with his naked eye meant it was either immense… or very, very close. He wasn’t sure what was worse.

As it came closer, Pax could see it was indeed a ship of some kind. The ship seemed to be made of floating plates supported by some kind of shimmering purple force field. It passed across the face of the moon.

Fuck.

It was too fucking close.

The ship was shaped like a bird with wings held close to its body. As Pax watched, a dozen sharp-edged wings made of the same plates spread out, facing the sun. The ship began to maneuver. It looked like it was going to settle into an Earth orbit.

Or land on the surface.

The plant-monster’s ship threw out a pulse of acceleration, closing so quickly with the invader’s ship that it splattered onto that nearly invisible black surface, plastering it with pinkish-brown goo—a suicide mission that didn’t even seem to knock the larger ship off course.

The plant-monster began reforming itself into blister-like shapes, partially shielded by some of the remaining metal plates. The vacuum of space didn’t affect it at all, as near as Pax could tell.

The purple field between the large black plates on the invader’s ship rippled and began to dissolve. One of the wings twisted and bent until it jutted out at a crazy angle.

The plant-monster was disrupting the ship.

Pax threw a bubble around both of them and tethered it to the moon with a thick blue cord. The invader’s ship’s momentum carried it around, swinging it toward the moon in a short, fast arc.

Pax popped the bubble, and the ship slammed into the moon, right along the sunrise line. He couldn’t remember whether they were on the side of the moon visible from the Earth.

I fucking hope not. Otherwise half the amateur astronomers’ telescopes on the planet would be watching him right now, and he could just imagine the panic that would set off. The ship’s solid plates rebounded off the surface; Pax tracked them down and tossed them into another bubble.

When Pax had captured all the pieces large enough to be tracked by radar (he hoped), he looked back toward the rift, watching it for a few long seconds. He couldn’t see anything else coming through. That didn’t mean others hadn’t already, though.

He pulled himself toward the crash site and landed carefully next to the largest mass of the ship, setting the broken pieces down next to him.

A blob of armored sludge was dragging itself across a massive obsidian plate in front of him. Root-like appendages crept out from a small bubble of water, protected by what looked like part of a refrigerator door. Behind it was a thin line cut into the obsidian. Pax put his hand on the plate of obsidian: it vibrated as the plant-monster cut through it, probably breaking it up to make a better ship of its own. The cut wasn’t perfectly straight, but it went all the way through the twenty-centimeter wing plate, and it was moving pretty fast. Puffs of dust disbursed into the near vacuum.

The ship wasn’t large, at least as far as evil outer space alien invader ships went, maybe five times as tall as Pax’s approximately human-sized form, and the whole thing seemed to be made of something midway between astral material and obsidian. Some of the bigger chunks of the wings had split into smaller, curved pieces. Pax pulled them out of his way. He wanted to get at the hull of the ship.

See what was in there.

And, if possible, kill it.

Pieces of the ship collapsed onto the moon’s surface as the plant-monster tore them apart. But some of the wart-like mini-plant-monsters were dragging themselves toward the hull, just as Pax was.

First I was killing it, now I’m helping it. Pax shook his head. My life is way, way too weird.

He dragged aside parts of the collapsed wing sections, being careful not to crush the mini-monsters, until he reached the hull of the ship. It was a stretched teardrop-shape that was nearly ten meters across at its widest point. Not huge or anything. More like a fighter jet than a warship.

The hull had cracked in a dozen places, exposing an inner structure that was completely packed with solid, octagonal chunks of smoked-quartz crystals. A couple of the crystals had broken open, leaking dark fluid out from the hull onto the surface of the moon in thick pools, making the surface of the moon look like a blood-spattered crime scene as it boiled away.

Nothing seemed to be moving inside the ship.

Pax found a split in the hull wide enough to allow him entry. He lifted one of the plant-monsters out of the way, setting it carefully on another part of the hull. The hull was about forty-five centimeters thick, sharp as hell, and was made of the same obsidian material all the way through.

Balanced on his stomach, halfway inside the ship, Pax pulled thick shards of broken crystal out of the way. The obsidian hull soaked up the sunlight shining on the surface—probably to help shield it from detection, Pax thought. Even after adjusting his eyesight, Pax could hardly see. The inside of the ship was pitch black.

Cold, dark fluid leaked out over his hands and onto his chest. The pieces of crystal ground together like broken glass as he dug at them.

He pulled out a handful of shards and flicked a chunk of crystal off his fingertips. The liquid inside the hull had started to boil right in front of his face, making visibility even worse.

He reached in again, sticking his fingers through the steaming fog into the black ooze, and his hand scraped something solid under the crystal shards.

He pushed on it. A hard plate of something gave slightly under his fingers.

It slid away and something wormlike touched Pax’s fingers.

And bit down.

Fuck. The word came out silently in the near vacuum. Pax jerked his hand back and felt about a hundred sharp things dragging over his fingers. At first they skidded over the astral material…

But then they bit in.

Pax jerked his hand again, but it was stuck. Something smacked on the inside of the crystal octagon when he yanked his hand. He made a fist and pulled even harder, trying to knock the fuck out of whatever was biting him.

The wormlike things crawled over the back of his hand, trying to find an opening. He jerked harder, pulling whatever was inside as far forward as possible, grabbed at one of the wormlike things with his other hand, wrapped it around two fingers, and then ripped it free.

Whatever was inside the crystal let his hand go. He brought up a pinprick shield and floated it toward the mist.

A black angular shape thrust out of the fog.

It had an insectile face, eyeless. Twisting black threads that almost looked like negative energy tentacles surrounded its mouth. One of them was limp and oozing greenish-black gunk.

It bared long, silver-stained dagger-like teeth at him.

Pax jerked back, slamming his head against the hull and swore. Loudly.

He swore again. Because he realized that he’d heard himself swear. The purple field had come up again, covering a small space under several of the plates. It had filled with air—close enough to Earth-normal atmospheric pressure that his voice sounded normal as he swore steadily: shit, shit, shit.

The triangular bug-head was heaving its way toward him. Gouts of the black fluid were oozing out from the crystal, splashing over the edge of the hull. It was trying to climb out.

Pax started crawling backward out of the hull and dropped to the moon’s surface.

The shape coming out of the octagonal crystal looked like an elongated beetle. Its longer limbs were pinned by the narrow quartz, but the shorter claws up and down its sides were able to heave it forward slowly. Shoulder-like lumps thrust back and forth as the creature struggled. Black fluid splashed on Pax’s face. He wiped it off with the back of his hand, and it stung.

The wounds on his hand were pulling inward in deep dimples. His fingers were getting stiff.

The first two of the alien’s long legs slipped out of the crystal. At first Pax thought they were holding canisters. Then he realized what he was seeing was part of the legs, made of dripping black exoskeleton. With a wet slurping noise, the alien slid out of the crack in the hull. Gray moon dust puffed up and stuck to its shell.

It had an abdomen that looked more like a centipede’s than a beetle’s, but with dozens of claw-tipped, wormy legs running up and down its sides. It had wings, too, three pairs of sharp ones that looked more like weapons than like something that would help it fly. It buzzed them and black fluid splattered everywhere.

The back of Pax’s hand was burning now. The dents had become pinprick holes—all the way through his hand. He still had the wormlike mouthpart wrapped around his fingers. He dropped it.

The monster hissed at him, its mouthparts spreading to show its teeth.

The holes in Pax’s hand were wide enough to put a finger through now.

Pax pinched the fingers of his other hand around his wrist, weakened the astral material inside the wrist, and pinched it off. He tossed the hand onto the moon’s surface. The holes stretched until the astral material appeared to pop and then collapsed into black sludge.

He grew another hand.

The monster shook its wings one more time and raised the two arms with canisters on the ends. Like they were guns.

Pax pushed a hand against the purple field and punched it with a fist. It didn’t budge.

The canisters started to glow purple. Pax threw up a shield.

The first shot dissolved the shield. The second slammed into his chest, knocking him on his ass under an overhanging plate.

Fuck.

The surface was already pulling inward.

The alien was walking toward him on black, chicken-like feet.

Pax kicked backward, pushing himself farther under the overhanging plate, until his back was jammed between it and the moon’s surface. He grabbed for the bottom edge of the purple field—

Please don’t be a sphere. Please don’t be a sphere.

—and slipped a hand under.

The alien seemed to ooze under the overhang, its centipede belly flopping forward and easily changing the monster from two main weight-bearing legs to four, with the front two still pointing the canisters at him. The alien roared at him, stretching its mouthparts wide. This close, Pax could see the teeth weren’t teeth—they were saw-edged beaks that opened onto tubes of black ooze. Digestive material.

He was being shot with stomach acid. Great. Just great.

He threw a pinprick force field into the alien’s open mouth.

The alien snapped its mouth shut and covered it with a plate. Pax set the field to bounce around on the inside of the alien’s shell. The small, wormy tentacles around the plate scrabbled at its skin. Had the alien had eyes, they would have gone wide.

In about a second it fell over, stirring up dust. It thrashed its legs. Its canisters went off again but only hit the obsidian panels. In a couple of minutes, it would be dead.

Pax had other problems.

He shoved his hand under the purple shield as far as he could—about an inch past the wrist.

Then he melted his arm.

I’m not human anymore. I’m really not human anymore.

He said it over and over, like it was a prayer. The arm melted into a silver puddle that disturbingly reminded him of Scarlett’s pool of negative energy. Doesn’t matter. He let the fluid drain out of the rest of his body, sluicing around his dissolving chest, until just his head and the big, white, metallic ring of his chest were left.

Then he bent his head against the last thread of his arm, dropped it off his neck, and let it melt under the force field. His eyes seemed to drift everywhere, seeing everything, without the ability to focus.

He hated every second of it.

I’m not human anymore.

It didn’t help.

It was still the most horrifying thing he had ever done, and once outside the shield, Pax reformed himself as quickly as possible. He was shorter, skinnier—he’d lost a lot of mass. He started absorbing sunlight. He was pretty sure he could figure out how to convert energy to mass, but probably not in the next two minutes. On the other side of the purple shield, the alien was still thrashing around on the ground.

The inside of the ship is packed with the crystal octagons—crammed with these things, all of them with weapons that could dissolve astral material.

It boggled the mind. Worse, for all he knew, a thousand ships had come through the rift and were already hiding out in the galaxy.

He looked up, trying to spot the rift, but he couldn’t. It must be on the other side of the moon.

Gray moon-hills ringed the horizon, and the sky was a black field of stars, ending abruptly at the edge of the hills. Until he’d been in space, Pax had never really paid attention to the night sky, not really. Plus, he’d basically grown up in a hospital bed in Manhattan. It wasn’t like there were a lot of stars to see in the first place.

From the moon, space looked a lot less friendly.

The plant-monster bits were still digging through the obsidian plates. The purple field flickered and went out again.

The alien lay still on the moon’s surface, leaking black fluid. Pax bent over and dragged a finger through the liquid. It didn’t eat through him as quickly as the stuff from the canisters, but it still chewed through the tip of his finger by the time he straightened up. He pulled off the finger and tossed it away.

One of the plant-monsters dropped off a plate and landed next to the alien centipede—it crawled right through the black gunk and started eating the invader. It steamed a little when it touched the gunk, but the plant-monster quickly neutralized the material and began absorbing it.

Some of the other plant-monster fragments had already ditched their tin, steel, and fiberglass shell materials and were plating themselves with cut panels of obsidian.

One thing was clear: he should be helping the plant-monster, not killing it.

Fucking Terry. He could have just said something.

He pulled a couple of the plant-monsters off the obsidian plates and fed them through the big split in the hole, being careful not to step in too much gunk. He ducked out of the shadows into the bright sunlight. The surface was getting hot, too hot. He peeled off the bottoms of his feet and left the plant-monsters to their work.

Time to go.

Pax pushed off the moon gently, getting far enough away from the surface that he could see the rift. The moon’s gravity tugged on him, but he resisted it easily.

He didn’t bother with the hamster ball this time.

He wasn’t human. He didn’t need it.

He’d known it, but he hadn’t really believed it until he’d oozed under the purple force field. He didn’t need protection from space. And he didn’t need to use the balls for propulsion if he didn’t want to.

Not anymore.

He jetted a thin stream of superheated, ionized gas out of his feet as bright blue plasma, aiming himself toward the rift.

When he looked back, he saw the plates of the ship had been mostly destroyed, and the plant-monsters were crawling all over the hull, pulling out chunks of crystal and dead aliens.

Fucking Terry.

He hadn’t come to Earth to save Pax or be his mentor. Terry had come to Earth to turn Pax into the perfect tool for saving the universe, even admitting it. But, again, it wasn’t something Pax had been able to believe until now.

It felt horrible being used…

But also it felt kind of great.

Because now that he wasn’t really human, he might be able to do it.

Onward to the rift.

Epilogue

The monster clung to the bottom of the Caribbean Sea, a place the primary race rarely visited, and even then only on distant black boats that crawled over the surface of the water, a long, shimmering distance away. It grew tendrils through the coral canyons surrounding it and hid under the large, waving leaves of underwater plants. Fish crawled over it and through its tentacles.

It resisted the urge to consume them, to consume everything on the planet.

The monster had received a message from the part of itself that had been carried into outer space. The emissary from the primary race had encountered one of the Enemy and had helped destroy it.

The primary race of this planet might become an ally. It would be inopportune to destroy the entire ecosystem before it established whether the primary would be a help or a hindrance. With greater mass had come greater intelligence, and now that it had reproduced its core spores, it felt calmer, more able to reason.

The rift had grown to an appalling size, even larger than the one in its ancestral memory, galaxies away.

It had drained its other universe, then. Consumed it.

It was trying to bring the Dark City through.

The monster tried to communicate with the fish swimming in and out of its tentacles. You should fear what is coming, it told them, or tried to.

The fish didn’t answer.

It needed to learn how to communicate with the primary species. The plant-monster had stored the genetic codes of all the species it had consumed since it had been awakened; it had plenty of material from the primary species, but they seemed to be powerless, ignorant.

Terrified.

It wondered whether or not the primary species was, in fact, the primary. The plant-monster identified some of the material it had taken from the emissary, the one who had hurled most of its mass into space. That one, at least, would be worth communicating with.

The material was odd stuff, very similar to the material from the Enemy, yet fundamentally different—based on astral material rather than dark matter. The monster created a small, relatively stable pocket in its body, placed the emissary’s material inside, and then regenerated it. Some of the emissary’s memories had been destroyed, but it looked like the sample had remained, more or less, holographically intact.

The monster reawakened the material, setting its consciousness into motion, and studied it carefully. It appeared to communicate primarily via visual and auditory cues, assisted by verbal coding. Its memories were easiest to access; they appeared to be mainly visual. The plant-monster generated multiple eyespots and triggered the emissary’s material to begin reviewing its memories.

Pax blinked and the world changed.

The plant-monster watched everything, slowly beginning to understand what had been done to them: to the emissary and to itself.

It went through its own stored material and found the one member of the primary race that had not been terrified of it. A musician. It reawakened the material inside another pocket, recreating the place where it had been sitting, the table and ethanol next to it, and its instrument.

Play, it said, testing out the new form of communication.

What do you want to hear? the primary said.—The man. It was called a man.

Anything, the monster responded. Just play.

The man began strumming the instrument, and the monster’s tentacles moved with the ocean waves, as if it were dancing.

Bad day? the man said.

Not as bad as it’s going to get.

Well, shit, the man said and played on. It was almost pleasant.

Dear Reader

Thank you for reading I Am Titanium!

It was my honor and pleasure to write for you. I appreciate every moment that you spent with Pax, Scarlett, and yours truly. We hope to see you for book two — coming soon!

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