The crash is like a giant chandelier exploding in my brain. It feels like tiny shards of glass are embedded in the soft tissues of my skull, piercing deeper into my flesh every time I move. I pry my eyes open, bringing my hand up immediately to block the harsh glare of light.
“Get away from here!”
I turn to the voice. I still can’t see clearly, but I can make out the figure of a girl, about my age, crouching to my left. I try to sit up, but have to hang my head to bear the throbbing.
“Are you real?” she whispers, peering at me now.
“Water…”
She eyes me for a moment, then holds her hands out in front of her. A glass pitcher materializes in them, half-full of water. She pours the water into a cup that appears in her hand.
The water revives me a bit. As the throbbing subsides, I sense something. Gayla?
Oh, thank god you’re okay!
I squeeze my eyes shut. If you could call it that.
We were all so worried! We didn’t know what happened to you—where are you?
I look around. I have no idea.
I check out the girl. She has straight, jet-black hair and her face is like a pale, buttery moon. Her eyes are this weird see-through gray. She’s wearing a kind of mesh metal outfit that restricts her movements. I’m relieved to feel the thin scarf feeling over my head as Gayla reads the image.
Pammi, I’ll leave your thoughts alone, but can I share what you see and say?
I give Gayla a mental nod and try to sit up again. This time I almost manage to sit, but I’m still slumped over and weak. I wonder if this is what Etienne goes through each time she channels someone.
“Are you one of them?” the girl asks. Her voice is full of suspicion.
“One of who?”
She doesn’t answer, but searches my face instead. Something about her looks unnervingly familiar. “You’re not, are you? You’re just a simple Able…”
I take in my surroundings. There are millions of points of light around us and we are suspended in space in what looks like a clear bubble. There is not a single sound—just silence pressing in from everywhere.
I struggle to breathe. “Where are we? It looks like we’re just hanging in space.”
She gives me a strange look. “We are. We’re the ones they couldn’t control.”
“Who?”
She gives me another look. “Where are you from? And how did you make it through the barriers?”
“I—I’m not from here. I’m not from now.”
This seems to grab her attention. Her eyes light up. “Tell me.”
“First tell me why you’re here.”
Her face falls. “It’s him,” she whispers. “I know he’s watching. He must not see you because you’re not from here.” Her eyes dart around. “Or maybe he knows you’re here. Maybe he wants you here!”
I follow her eyes and see nothing.
Her voice gets soft. Sad. “We were great once.”
The space in the bubble begins to fill with trees, grass, translucent people walking by with smiles, a vibrant blue sky, color everywhere. Happiness and joy. Everything is so real, but when I reach out to touch, my hand moves right through the mirage.
“Somewhere along the way we got lost,” she says, and everything begins to flicker, then disappear. “We began to believe the wrong people. We put our faith in this family that promised to lead us out of despair.”
I see the family, a dignified and obviously wealthy one, in some sort of vacation home, then gathered in front of a stately mansion. I see news headlines announcing members of the family as winners of elections and landslide victories.
“Over the years, the family began falling apart—in-fighting, deaths, disputes. Eventually, they dwindled down to two siblings who outlived everyone.” She lowers her voice. “This is not the official story, you know. This is the story they don’t tell you.”
As if to emphasize her point, she squeezes her eyes shut and a stream of official documents scrolls past me. And then, immediately after them, there is a stream of alternative news media articles, painting an entirely different picture—rigged elections, corruption, lies.
“We were becoming strong, teaching others to awaken latent abilities. We were building nations again like we once did, hundreds of thousands of years ago…”
I lean forward. “What happened?” I’m fully revived now, and hanging onto this strange, ethereal girl’s words. Two siblings – Mantel, Haram’s future incarnation, and his sister?
“They were better at killing,” she says.
Grief and overwhelming sadness envelope me, pressing in from all sides and squeezing the air from my chest. Around me is rubble, screams in the distance, wailing women holding the limp bodies of children to their breasts, infants crying next to the bodies of caregivers who died sheltering them, grown men crumpled helplessly to the ground.
Her voice is empty. “We fought them as hard as we could, but they took everything. Left us with the worst plots of land and no food. ‘Progress,’ they said.”
A news heading scrolls past: A Million Empty Promises. The video playing underneath is of an emaciated child drawing water from a roadside puddle. The water hovers in midair in front of him until he sips from the invisible vessel he’s created for it.
“They took everything, draining the life force from every Able in sight. The ones they couldn’t control, they captured and—and did horrible things to them. The most powerful ones, the ones they couldn’t control or torture, they sent out here. But—” she stops abruptly.
“But what?” I feel her slipping away.
“We were the ones he couldn’t control.” Her voice takes on a dreamy quality. “He sent us out here forever so we couldn’t help the ones who were dying. We were his biggest threat, but he had her, and she could surf. She sent us out here.” She laughs, an eerie, tinny sound. “Unable to die and unable to live. Just watching the horror unfold.”
“But… why?” is all I can manage.
“What?” Her face becomes wild. “Who are you?” she screams.
I stand and take a step back. “I’m friendly, remember?”
“No!” she screams again. Her face is contorted with rage and she’s crouching like a cat about to spring on its prey.
I fight to contain the panic that’s expanding and filling my insides. I remind myself that I’m not alone out here, that Gayla is only a thought away.
But what could she possibly do to help me?
My eyes dart around, looking for a way out—anything at all. The air seems to be getting thinner.
And then her voice goes calm again. She points to a cluster of stars to the left. “That’s where you came from, right?”
I look in the direction she’s pointing and see nothing different from every other direction. “I don’t know.”
She laughs. “You don’t know? How can you surf the Dark and not know?”
“How do you know about the Dark?”
“Everyone knows about the Dark. You can only surf if you know about the Dark. He can’t surf. Only she can.”
For a moment, I see a spark of sanity in her strange, metal-colored eyes. She’s trying to tell me something. But almost immediately, the suspicion comes back. “How can you know about the Dark and not know about surfing?”
I rub my temples to soothe the throbbing in my head. “I’ve never surfed in my life.”
I look beyond the space we’re in and panic floods my limbs. It’s too much space. And we are the only ones in it for what looks like forever in every direction.
When I raise a finger to touch the thin barrier surrounding us, she screams. “Stop!”
But my finger connects with what feels like several thousands of volts of electric current. And then I’m sucked through the membrane of the bubble and into another one just like it that appears out of nowhere.
“They know you’re here,” she says flatly. “You showed them exactly where you were when you touched the skin and they pulled you through. You’ll start floating away.”
She’s right. Already, my bubble is beginning to glide away from hers. I clutch my head, reeling from the pain that suddenly shoots through, temple to temple.
“You can think up anything you want in your own skin,” she says. “Whatever you think up is what will appear. But be careful. Whatever you think up tells them something about you. Everything they learn they use against you.”
A groan escapes from my lips as I try to sit up. Every bone in my body feels smashed. “How do I get out of here?”
“The same way you got in,” she says. Again, there is a brief flash of intelligence in her eyes. And again I get the sense that she’s trying to tell me something. But I’m in too much pain to try to figure it out.
Then she turns to stare at a bright, bluish light in the distance. “It’s not over yet. That’s Luda. She was a simple Able. She visited me once, too. You’ll keep floating farther and farther away until you look like that. Unless you get out.”
I squeeze my eyes shut and try not to imagine what it would be like to be stuck here forever. I listen for Gayla, reach out to her with my thoughts, but… nothing.
There’s movement underneath me. When I open my eyes, I see grass sprouting up and trees forming around me. They are hazy and transparent at first, but then they become real, solid. Then there’s a large building beyond the trees.
The orchard.
I must have thought it up and made it real. Her words come back to me: Whatever you think up tells them something about you.
Wonderful. I’m giving them a roadmap to Miss Maggie’s. Just like I brought the enemy directly to Zanum.
I slash the images in my head. The trees waver, then tear and begin to drip with what looks like blood. I can’t help the images of death and destruction that flood my mind. Thoughts of Dhan.
The landscape becomes real and I’m on a battlefield. There is smoke and severed limbs all around. Lifeless eyes stare at me from disembodied heads.
I look desperately to the girl. “Help me!”
“It’s you,” she says, with a ferocity that yanks me out of my despair. “You have to control your thoughts. But you better figure something out fast,” she adds. “Because they’re coming. You’re not supposed to be here. But you let them find you.”
I clench my fists and do my best to tune out the sounds of violence and bloodshed around me. I breathe the way Miss Maggie taught me. For a moment, she glimmers in front of me and I immediately shove aside any further thoughts of her. I close my eyes and focus, instead, on the Dark.
But I can’t. I hear a moan that sounds like Dhan and my eyes flutter open, searching for him. Soon, I begin to hear something in the distance.
Sirens.
A few seconds later, there are blinding lights. So bright that even closing my eyes doesn’t help shield them from the glare.
Everything happens in slow brutal motion. A screaming siren sound cuts through the space in front of my bubble and a laser-like beam strikes the girl in the center of her chest.
She looks like she’s expecting it—wants it, even. She turns to me to say something, her mouth forming a limp ‘O.’ But her body blasts into a million pieces before any sound comes out. Her bubble turns deep red, dripping with opaque bits sliding in pink rivulets down the membrane.
And then my own body implodes.
When I open my eyes again, I can’t move. At least not without excruciating currents of pain slicing through the length of my body. There is screaming everywhere.
I feel my body convulse, then lie still.
The screaming is me.
I’m alive.
My heart is beating in my chest. Relief rushes through my veins like ice water, soothing the burn I feel everywhere else.
The girl. What happened to the girl? She was trying to help me, trying to tell me things. I bite back the bile that threatens to send my body into convulsions again and switch off that line of thought.
I lift my head slowly and see that I am lying on a kind of hospital cot that seems to be suspended in midair. The room is dark, but there’s a blue glow. Where it’s coming from, I have no idea, but it allows me to make out the different shapes in the room.
I cast around in my mind for Gayla, or any sign that I’m not alone.
Nothing.
I am alone.
“Ah, she wakes,” says a voice from the corner.
What looks like a pile of laundry—no, more like a mound of garbage—elongates into something with tattered skin and oozing sores, and moves toward me.
I try to scramble back, but I’m immobilized.
It laughs, this thing, in a voice that is neither male nor female.
“What—who are you?” I ask.
It stares at me, bending over the cot and leaning close to my face. The eyes are deep vacuous pits. Not human or animal—not alive.
“I take many forms,” it says, studying me. “You don’t look like you’re anything special. I don’t see why we had to launch an all-out hunt for you.”
I follow its eyes and, for the first time, notice the small, sharp triangular peaks jutting out from just beneath my skin on my forearms. I jerk my arms without thinking, and bullets of pain whiz through my limbs.
I scream again.
“No, no,” It soothes, stroking my fingers. “Hush.”
I quell the impulse to jerk away, the pain from the last movement still strong.
“Those are very important and must stay,” It says. “They monitor your thoughts, let us know how much force is present. Right now it is strong.” It raises one tattered eyebrow in mild surprise. “The strongest I’ve seen, in fact. Now I can see why Master would want you.” It opens its mouth in an empty grin. “After all this time, you led us directly to you. Now we begin harvesting your serpent fire. This is what Master has been waiting for. He will be very happy.”
I swallow hard and steady my voice. “Why? Why does he want me?”
It raises an eyebrow. “Mace couldn’t neutralize you. He has always been able to neutralize Ables, even the most difficult ones. But you.” It squints its gaping eyeholes. “You kept wriggling free. Master thinks you have some sort of potent serpent fire from living among the Zanumites, and he wants it. But he has other plans for you, too.”
It leans closer to me, its voice rising in excitement. “And I will sip from your fire, too, increasing my own power exponentially. Nothing will stop us then.” Its voice drops into a whisper. “Master and I will do as we’ve planned for so many years! We will move through time as effortlessly as you, materializing wherever and whenever we wish! And I will take back what belongs to me. I will be free.”
I struggle to keep up, to understand what I’m hearing. “How will you take my… serpent fire?”
It seems to have lost interest in me and turns to the peaks jutting up under my skin. It touches one on my left wrist and a searing pain blazes up through my shoulder.
I open my mouth to scream, but can only wheeze as beads of sweat wriggle down my face.
It doesn’t seem to notice. Instead, it keeps poking different peaks, moving on to my ankles.
Each peak seems to correspond to something inside me. I feel little balls of fire detonate inside me and I can’t breathe. Can’t breathe enough to scream, to move, to think.
I’m relieved when darkness blots everything out and I fall. Fall. Fall.
Into the lap of nothingness.