9
LOSS
Darwin and Teresa had slept in, only rising from the warm bed when the smell of breakfast wafted in through the open window. It was a habit they had formed in the two weeks they’d been in Chollas.
The room was still cool from the night, and the hair on his arms stood up as he threw off the covers and got his clothes from the other side of the room.
“Wake up, sleepyhead. We might be late for breakfast.”
An inarticulate sound came from the bed as he pulled on his pants.
“You want me to bring something back for you?”
“I’m up.” Teresa’s voice stretched into a yawn. “I’m up.”
“I’ll meet you there, okay?”
Teresa stuck a foot out of the covers and jerked it back in. “Jeez, it’s cold. And what kind of gentleman are you, taking off and leaving me alone?”
“The kind that wants to make sure there’s enough food left for the both of us.” He threw her clothes, half of them landing on the bed and the other half on the floor, and closed the bedroom window before he left, hoping to keep some of the heat of the day away. Their room faced southeast, and even shaded by trees, the sun still warmed the place up to above uncomfortable.
Since coming to Chollas, they’d made a habit of joining Carlos and Mellisa for breakfast. The two were the best friends he had ever had, and being with them made him feel good. It also brought him up to date on what was happening in and around the dam. Carlos got reports every morning along with the person running the second shift. The shifts took turns protecting the QPS at the dam, with Sandra and her group doing the first four months, the other group taking the second four months, and Carlos taking the third. It helped to keep everyone fresh, and gave them a chance to be at home with their families for most of the year.
He also found out that the QPS still supplied most of the power needed by Las Vegas. The city was still against Threaders, but they had woken up to the realization that the two groups needed to work together if the city was to remain alive. Though the no-Threaders-inside-the-city rule had been removed, they still didn’t let them inside the casinos, and the red badges had been moved inside to monitor if Threads were being used to win at games. The black squad had been disbanded, and most of them had either left the city or stayed and struggled to survive with no job and no authority anymore. Mellisa didn’t care for Las Vegas at all and just wanted the whole thing to disappear. She thought keeping it fed with power was the worst thing they could do. Darwin didn’t think she was wrong.
He trotted through the playground and to the end of the cul-de-sac, knocking on the front door before just walking in. He could smell fresh-baked bread, and Mellisa came in from the back door carrying a load of pancakes.
“One of these days Teresa and I will have to host you. Tough to do from the apartment, though.” They’d gotten in the habit of doing all the cleaning after, letting Carlos and Mellisa get on with their day.
“If you plan on staying, we can get a house assigned to you. There’s a couple of empty ones near the corner of Fauna and Indian Fig. Nice and close to a playground.” He nudged Darwin in the side and winked.
Darwin chose to ignore the seemingly regular ritual of teasing about kids. He poured three cups of acorn coffee and put them on the table.
“Where’s Teresa?” Mellisa asked.
“We both kinda slept in. I figured I’d run over while she was getting dressed to make sure this lug didn’t eat all the food.”
They laughed as Teresa walked in the back door, carrying the dirty pancake mix bowl and flipper. Carlos was right, though. They’d been treated like guests since they’d been here, rather than as members of the community. Teresa had already started showing up at the clinic and hospital every day . . . Chollas was still known as place of healers, and her contribution while she was there hadn’t gone unnoticed. She’d been asked to stay as a full-time healer, and they’d both spoken about it last night.
Darwin wasn’t sure what he would do here. He had no abilities with the Threads anymore. Talking with Carlos, he knew they needed another cook while they were at the dam, but that would mean being away from Teresa for four months out of the year. And for the time he was here, he had no idea what he would do. Despite that, they both agreed they’d traveled enough. Teresa hadn’t realized how much she’d missed working every day, and he hadn’t realized how much he had missed being with friends. Always being on the move didn’t give you time to build deep relationships. There were people they would never forget, that if they showed up on their doorstep, they would have a place to stay and a warm meal until they decided to move on again. But those friendships, although deep, weren’t the same as the ones you had with people you saw almost every day.
Teresa put the dishes in the sink and came back to the table.
“I think we’d like to take you up on that offer,” Darwin said. “If you still need a cook at the dam, I can do that as well. I’ll figure something out for the time I spend here. I’m not sure about a house by the playground, though.”
The grin that spread across Carlos’s face was echoed on Mellisa’s. She jumped up from her seat and gave Teresa a huge hug before moving on to Darwin. When she’d turned into a hugger, he didn’t know, but he was getting used to them. Carlos got right down to business.
“I’ll introduce you to Eric today. He’s our head chef, and you’ll be reporting to him. He’s the one to say yes or no to you’re coming on board as a cook, so try to be nice to him. He cooks up at the hospital when we’re not at the dam. I don’t know if he needs anyone up there, but if he does, do you think you can handle working so close to Teresa?”
It was Darwin’s turn to grin. One of the worries of staying in one place was that he and Teresa would only see each other when they weren’t working. If they were both in the hospital, then they’d at least have a chance.
“I’ll do my—”
Darwin jumped at a loud banging from the front of the house, his heart pounding. All four of them jumped at the loud noise and Mellisa got up to answer it. She came back with a man who looked like he had seen better days. Sweat ran down his face and his clothes looked like they had never seen soap and water. He looked down at the food on the table and started talking, his hands wringing the bottom of his shirt.
“The dam’s under attack. We knew there was more activity in the area, but we didn’t think they had so many people and Skends so close. We’re holding them off, but Sandra thinks it’s a losing battle. There’s just too many of them. We need help.”
Mellisa took off without a word, leaving the front door open behind her.
Carlos nodded. “Meet us at the District Office in two minutes. Everyone will be ready. We’ll hole right into the generator room.” He stood and walked to the front door with Darwin and Teresa close on his heels. “Where do you two think you’re going?”
“You’ll need healers,” Teresa said.
“And where she goes, I go.”
Carlos continued out the door. “I’m not going to be able to convince you otherwise, am I?”
Neither Teresa or Darwin answered.
“Okay. Just stay with the wounded. The last thing I want is to keep having to look over my shoulder to make sure you two are okay.”
In the two minutes it took them to reach the District Office, at least thirty people had shown up. A woman sat on the ground staring into the distance, and Darwin knew without being told that she was already building a hole. Carlos approached her and stood silently. Darwin wasn’t sure if he was doing something with the hole or just waiting for her to be finished. By the time Carlos stepped through and disappeared, another twenty people had appeared.
Darwin couldn’t see the hole, but he could tell where people were disappearing. He grabbed Teresa’s arm and pulled her along, merging with the group until those in front of him vanished. He fell into the hole.
The cold tore into his skin, feeling as though it was ripping the top few layers off. He sucked in an involuntary breath, the cold searing his lungs, before falling onto a hard concrete floor damp from the melting frost. He was pulled out of the way as another person came through. This time, the cold refused to leave his hands. He rubbed them to get the blood flowing again, fighting the disconcerting feeling of having his insides exposed to the world.
“Healers are that way.”
Teresa ran to where Carlos pointed. Darwin stumbled after her, his feet barely finding the floor. The room fell out of focus and Teresa’s image blurred. He faltered and stopped, no longer feeling his hands or feet. The beating of his heart overrode every other sound in the room. Someone bumped into his shoulder and he spun. His heartbeat slowed along with everyone around him. His eyes suddenly focused on a single object . . . a square box, flat gray with two letters that glowed blue. The QL logo called to him, pulling on his bones and in his chest, a siren’s call of release from his fears, his pain, his faults.
He struggled to pull in a breath. A weight formed in his chest, a dull, heavy rock that wanted to be so much more. He could still see people—shapes—running around him, but all sound had disappeared, drowned out by the steady thump that no longer came from his chest.
Someone bumped into him again, propelling him closer to the machine. Without thought he continued on, following the sound. He couldn’t feel himself anymore. There was no Darwin, no dam, no people. There was only the Source in front of him.
Something stopped his forward progress and blocked his view of the blue letters that now pulsed in time with the sound. A diaphanous wisp wrapped itself around the machine, and the resistance fell away as though it had never been. Some part of him knew what that wisp was, knew what had stopped his forward progress, but that too disappeared into the fog of the room, no longer important.
He stood beside the machine, its crisp edges and blue lettering the only thing that mattered. Reaching for it, his fingers once again felt. The tingle started small, becoming almost painful the closer they got to the cold, hard surface. He stopped, uncertainty and fear bubbling to the surface like lava. The feelings disappeared without a trace and he reached for the QPS until his palms lay over the logo. It wasn’t cold or lifeless. Warmth spread up his arms and entered his chest. His breath stopped and the world exploded into thunder and fire and rain. The Source buried deep in his chest didn’t just flicker to life, it woke with the anger and pain of someone whose voice had been silenced for so long, they didn’t even know it had once existed.
The connection disappeared in a sudden rush of air. The first sound that came back was the shouting and running of people as they maneuvered to protect the QPS from Salem. Touch came back next, warmth encasing his hands and soft breath on his cheek. He pulled back, seeing Teresa between him and the machine, worry and fear in her eyes. Soft white Threads wrapped themselves around their hands and he pulled in a deep breath. When Teresa looked at him, he nodded and smiled.
He could See again. Somehow, the touch of the machine had awakened not only the Source inside of him, but had taken away the blocks Baila had placed on his abilities. He could feel both Sources, their connections to him controlled and tight, but both of them wanting more. More than he was able to give. He stared into the abyss and took a step back.
Darwin moved away from the machine. It took everything that he had not to turn around and place his hands back on the cool surface again. It wasn’t what he wanted, but this close to the Source, it was clear that the choice wasn’t necessarily his to make. He could feel the need caress his skin and sink into his soul. The only thing that held him back was the strength of Teresa leading him away. Even that was barely enough.
The machine released him and he tripped as the loss filled his senses, leaning against Teresa for support.
He focused on the Threads around the long room to help him stop thinking about the QPS. After so long without them, he reeled at what he saw. Mellisa and her group had created a dense, steel-blue dome over the machine. As he followed their work, he realized it wasn’t a dome, but a complete ball that encircled it above and below the ground. Inside the ball, the Threads the machine created roiled like angry beasts, trying to find a way out. He could sense their pain at being trapped, if even for a short while.
The Source hadn’t released him, the ball it was imprisoned in was the reason. Logically he knew why they had done it, but a barely controlled rage sat in his chest like an unbridled beast.
Shouting erupted from outside and everyone not protecting the QPS itself turned to face the noise as it echoed down the length of the generator room. It seemed to be coming from everywhere. Darwin slid his hand from Teresa’s.
“Go,” he said.
She looked into his eyes with concern.
His voice softened. “Go.”
She ran to where the wounded were to be brought.
More Threads flew around the room, building barriers against the entryways and around groups of Threaders. Darwin stood alone. He’d forgotten how complex they could be. What he created dancing felt like child’s play in comparison. He knew it wasn’t true, but just Seeing so many Threads made it look that way.
He felt more than saw the team around the QPS lower a bit of their shield, and the room filled with a mad rush of Threads being released from their containment. Along with the rush, the siren’s song of the machine pulled at him, and he took a stumbling backward step closer to it. The first layer of shielding dropped without a sound. Threaders behind it ran as strands as deep and red as blood rushed to fill the newly opened space. They fell, entwined in red as their screams echoed along the walls.
Another shield dropped, and with the red Threads, the first wave of Skends arrived, wrapped in their own Threads of red and blue. It struck him again how the Skends were not evil in and of themselves, but were driven by their prisons and pain to do their master’s bidding . . . good people genetically changed into beasts.
A third shield dropped and the Skends were in. Resistance faltered as people fell back. Groups clustered together, throwing shields around themselves as the Skends approached.
It all happened so fast. Not even a minute had passed since he’d let go of Teresa’s hand, and he could already See holes begin to form behind some of the group shields.
A second wave of Skends entered the room, followed by people throwing Threads over their heads and into the groups protecting the Source. If Carlos’s people didn’t start fighting back, it would be over faster than it had begun.
Though he was rusty, he drew the Threads into himself, sometimes commandeering Threads in use by other Threaders. He could feel a tenuous connection with the Source, even through Mellisa’s wall. Without realizing it, his body started to move. It wasn’t a dance, not quite, but the response was the same. The Threads left his body not as Threads, but as images of destruction. The red was so dark it almost appeared black, as bullets and knives and arrows flew outward toward the oncoming mass.
He didn’t bother with the Skends. Though they could do immeasurable harm, it was the people behind them who were in control. His images ripped through bodies as if they themselves were nothing more than gossamer. In the back of his mind, he cowered at the destruction that fell on them, yet a piece of him reveled in it, enjoyed the death and mayhem. That piece smelled of apple blossoms and vanilla, the DNA his dad had placed into the QPS taking on the essence of every version of his mother on every world the machine had been turned on. The layers and depth of her settled on his shoulders like a mantle.
The weight of it drove him to his knees and he released the Threads with an anguished cry. No one heard him over the din of the battle.
She was here with him, and yet it wasn’t her. He felt the warmth of her touch and the tender look of concern in her eyes. Heard the strong beat of her heart as she pulled him into her arms.
She was there in all her hatred and anger as well. The mother that had lost a son and a husband. The mother who saw him as a replicant, an impostor brought here to show her what she had lost. The mother who wanted him dead.
Despite that, he pulled the essence of her in, needing, wanting to remember her before she had died. Before she was no longer his mother.
She was pulled from his grasp like a thing lost, and with it, his tenuous connection to the QPS.
He struggled back to his feet, feeling raw and empty, reliving the moment when he had killed them. The feeling was similar now. Though intellectually he knew she had never been there, emotionally he had been with her just now, as if the world had never changed, never been changed. The sudden loss of her was almost too much. There was only one thing that could have pulled her away from him.
His pain and remorse was almost a decade old. Someone else had lost her less than two years ago, someone who had needed her for support when her father and brother had died trying to shut off the machine. Someone who had been there as support for her when she’d lost a husband and a son.
He scanned the battle at the far end of the long room. She was in there, the sister he had never had. And though she had already fought with a fury born of hate and vengeance, she now had the anger of her mother on her side. He knew it. No one else but Ada could pull the essence of his mother away from him. It would give her strength, and it weakened him knowing he had been abandoned.
One thing he had learned, despite his early teachings from Bill, the Threads responded to emotion like nothing else. Strong emotion strengthened them, turning them into powerful weapons or Threads of healing and good.
Ada would not use them for good.
The Skends broke through another line and the Threaders that remained retreated closer to Darwin and the QPS. Their attacks were still against the immediate threat, against the Skends themselves. Darwin straightened his back and pulled the Threads inward again, missing the pull of the machine feeding the response of the Source buried in his chest.
He sent out another volley followed by another, yet their line continued to advance.
Bodies lay on the floor, blood pooling in thick layers. At some point, the Salem people had stopped advancing, instead sending in more Skends. How many had fallen, Darwin couldn’t say. He only knew that to stop, to rest, was to welcome them further into the room. Yet he had nothing left.
For what felt like the thousandth time, he gathered more Threads, weaving them around his moving body before throwing them outward. He still stood alone in front of the circle protecting the QPS itself. They had not joined the battle, choosing to hoard their strength, save it for when—if, he roughly told himself—the final push came and they were all that was left.
At some point, they had pushed the steel-blue shield past themselves, so they now stood inside its protective circle. They had also created another layer, making a mesh so dense he wondered how air was able to pass through so they could all breathe.
Only two of their groups were left to fight. One had retreated to where Teresa and the other healers tried to tend to the wounded. There were a surprising amount of them, considering the carnage that lay on the floor of the generator room, and they were losing more people in triage, pushing the dead out of the way to make room for the injured. Carlos was with her, his team being the one that retreated when they had lost more than three-quarters of their complement.
Darwin moved to join them when the Skends broke into a run. It didn’t start as a trickle, with one or two breaking through a tiny gap. This was a wall of the inhuman beasts, pushing a wave of heat ahead of them like an early warning system. Darwin stumbled back as the sweat was sucked out of his skin, and it began to crack. One of Carlos’s group began to build a hole.
Instead of running to Carlos and Teresa, he stepped forward.
The wave swelled and crested, elongated bodies and skin-covered eyes and mouths rolling over each other in their need to follow orders. This close, he could see the red Threads that were part of their being, part of their making, had sunk below the sallow flesh. They didn’t bleed.
A wall of red snapped into place ten feet in front of him and stretched across the room. The effort to create and hold it almost drove him to his knees. The wave hit it and moved right through, those in the back pushing the front row. What came through the other side of the net was quivering cubes of flesh. They didn’t bleed red. Instead, a yellow ichor as thick as gelatin covered the concrete floor, mixing with the red of those that had stood against them. The Skends had changed yet again since Baila’s conversion.
Every hit against his net felt like a physical blow, pushing him back to where he had stood only a moment earlier. His head bowed and he went down to one knee. The air was thick with death, and each pull into his lungs felt like a coating of evil had been left behind. And yet they still came.
His wall shattered.
The horde advanced as he staggered to his feet to face them. The wave parted like the Red Sea for Moses, surging around him as his skin baked into a dry crust. One of the beasts hit his shoulder, searing his skin and spinning him around.
The wave hit the blue shield around the QPS and passed through as if it didn’t exist, a simple mirage to fool a simple mind. As those inside it died, the shields crumbled and fell. Darwin stood alone as the Skends continued out the other side, running to the far end of the generator room. Their goal wasn’t to reach the QPS, it was to get to the other side no matter what. A simple goal, and one that they had achieved.
He knew Mellisa was in the circle as it fell, knew that there was no chance of her or anyone else getting out. His first friend in this strange new world that he had been forced into was no more, and there was nothing he could do about it.
The Skends stopped moving, and silence fell on the room like a blanket.
Footsteps echoed behind him. He turned again, slowly and deliberately, to face the one person he knew was there.
Ada led her army the final steps to victory, ignoring Carlos’s group as a hole formed and they vanished. Darwin thought he heard Teresa’s scream. It tasted exactly like the one that had brought him back.
His sister stopped, still two generators away from Darwin, and another away from the suddenly quiescent QPS. It was as though it knew the two that now stared at each other were as much a part of it as his mother was. And hers.
Darwin still stood. Ada had aged since he’d last seen her. Her face was so much like the mother he had known, but instead of love and compassion, hers was filled with hatred that sucked the air out of the room. He barely saw the mass of red and black Threads moving toward him until they were as thick as a human body. He smiled; instead of his face reflecting her anger, his showed only sadness. He closed his eyes as the mass entered his chest, and a thick link jumped from the QPS into his back.
He felt no pain. There was no pressure or force pushing him back. Instead, it felt as though he was in free fall, balanced on the tip of a pin as he waited for death to take him. His mind opened to the Source in the machine and the one in his chest, expanding beyond the room, beyond the dam. Beyond this world. He had felt this twice before. The first time, he had no idea what had saved him, what had stopped him from becoming a quivering mound of flesh unable to take care of the simplest of tasks. The second time, it had been Baila who had stopped the connection that now flowed through him, her touch not only melting his skin, but removing his ability to use Threads.
This time he knew.
His connection to the Source was stronger than the link with his mother, stronger than the link he had with the Source embedded deep in his chest. It was more than the two combined, almost as though the QPS knew that he had helped build it, helped bring it into this world . . . into every world, so it could send its Threads out.
He remembered Teresa, could still taste her scream and feel her fear. He knew where she was now, knew the sense of loss she felt—not for the first time. He couldn’t let that happen, couldn’t be the reason for her pain. The only way to stop that from happening was to be with her. He didn’t build a hole, didn’t feel the cold that permeated your skin as your body disintegrated at the quantum level and was rebuilt at the other end.
He jumped.
Darwin appeared at the edge of a lake. Trees reached for the sky, throwing a constantly moving pattern of shade on the ground, and water lapped at the shoreline while birds chirped from farther away. No one seemed to know he was there until he moved. It took almost a full minute before those that surrounded him recognized who he was.
He walked away from the water alone, the people who had met him disappearing as fast as they had appeared. The sound of people talking rose from the small clearing ahead of him, and he paused, fighting a sudden wave of dizziness. His connection to the machine was gone, evaporating with his jump here to Sunnen Lake, but part of him had stayed behind with Mellisa. Her death hadn’t hit him fully yet, he knew that simply because he was thinking about it without emotion right now. He’d been through someone close to him dying before. More than once. At least he knew the process.
From what he could see, there were only about thirty people here. With the ones that Carlos had brought with him and those stationed at the dam, thirty didn’t seem like a lot. Including the carnage he had seen in the generator, it felt like they had lost well over a hundred.
They didn’t have a chance. There were more Skends than he had ever seen grouped in one place. The huge space had made them look fewer in number, but they had easily doubled or tripled the number of people trying to protect the QPS. If that many had made it inside with their human handlers, how many were outside waiting to come in or fighting whoever was left out there?
Sandra approached him from the clearing.
“What happened? Carlos won’t talk and Teresa is running around looking for you instead of healing the people that managed to escape. We’re a mess.”
Darwin shook his head.
“For Christ’s sake, someone has to talk to me. I left behind twenty of my own team in that room when the first group of Skends appeared. Just tell me what happened.”
“We lost.” He sighed as Sandra opened her mouth to ask again. “There were just too many of them. It felt like we were fighting a hydra. For every one that fell, it seemed as though there were two or three more Skends to take their place. I . . . I tried to attack behind them, tried to take out their handlers. Maybe it was the wrong thing to do. If I had helped to thin out the front line, maybe things would have turned out different.”
“Yeah, maybe. And maybe not. There’s nothing you can do about the past.” She paused, looking over her shoulder to the clearing. Her shoulders sagged and when she turned back to Darwin there was defeat in her eyes. “Go find Teresa, we need her to get back to work. Once we’ve taken care of the worst of the wounded, we’re getting out of here, heading back to Forsyth in two holes.”
“Do you think that’s a good idea? They know it’s one of our bases.”
“What do they care now? They have what they want.” She walked back to the clearing, ignoring anyone that spoke to her.
Darwin found Teresa far away from the lake. She had slumped to the ground under a tree, her head resting against the bark and her eyes closed. She had been crying, her cheeks still wet from tears. He kneeled down in front of her.
“Hey,” he said.
“Go away.”
He reached out and held her hand. “Hey.”
Teresa’s eyes flew open and she threw herself into him. Her entire body shook as she held on to him. He pried her away after a minute, and she wiped at her face.
“Look at me,” she said. “I’m a mess.” She stared into his eyes. “I thought I’d lost you.”
“Not this time.”
“What?” Her tears flashed over into anger. “What kind of stupid thing is that to say?”
He stayed quiet for a while. “We lost Mellisa.”
“Oh . . . oh, damn. We need to find Carlos.”
Darwin nodded.
They both stood, Teresa still wiping at her face trying to remove all traces of her tears. They found him organizing a group for the next hole. Darwin could already see the Threads beginning to gather.
Carlos looked up as they got closer, his face lighting up with hope as he recognized Darwin, replaced with a flash of pain that cut Darwin to the core. Carlos knew. He didn’t need to be told. The truth of it marred his face with grief. He turned his back on them and continued to organize people, burying himself in his work, avoiding feeling the loss that Darwin knew yawned like a dark chasm deep inside of him.
It was a feeling that was all too familiar. When Teresa slipped her hand into his, he gently pulled it away and turned his back on Carlos and her. As he walked through who was left from the dam, he could see that they were defeated. Not just expunged from Hoover Dam, but defeated emotionally and physically. The fight for the QPS hadn’t been a true battle as much as it had been a uncontrolled slaughter.
He didn’t know how many were there, but the men and woman he saw here had to have been a very small portion.
Even though he’d seen what had happened to the group protecting the machine itself, it still hadn’t sunk in that Mellisa was gone. They were just having breakfast this morning and talking about finding a place for him and Teresa to stay permanently. The reality of it hit him like brick wall and he slumped to the ground, suddenly exhausted.
“A hole. We have incoming.” The voice rose from the side of the clearing, rippling across the people as they surged to their feet.
Darwin could See Carlos’s hole ready, and as the first Skend burst from the trees, the first person jumped into it. The sky filled with Threads. He ran against the mass of bodies and the fear that drove into his gut like a blade, toward the oncoming horde.
Three others stood with him. Two built a rough mesh wall of red while Darwin and a woman built one of blue. This one was finer, though the individual Threads were as thick as Darwin’s thumb. The images came without warning, and he built on them. The wall became steel, inches thick and over a mile high. He didn’t notice when the woman stopped working with him and joined the other two.
The red mesh came into focus. He could taste the Skends pushing against it as it flexed under their weight. The Threads cut into their flesh, though they didn’t seem to care. The mesh, too, became an image. One of vibrating and humming sticks of light that sparked when they touched each other. Millions of lightsabers spinning and clashing and cutting. Any Skends that pushed against them were sliced like butter left on the counter on a warm summer day. The Threaders Darwin had joined stood and gaped. He wasn’t sure if they saw the images or the Threads, but they had all stopped working with him, their input and help pointless compared to what he had built. His rage and loss fed the Source in his chest, and there was no one that could stop it.
Ada appeared behind the Skends. Filtered through the Threads and images that coursed through him, Darwin didn’t see her as the young woman he had seen in the generator room. She had become rage and loss and agony, a swirling mass of hatred that churned a path through the Skends and slammed into his lightsabers with a force that knocked him to his back. He fed the images with the despair that swelled inside of him. She stepped back and charged again, unhurt.
He felt someone grab his arms and drag him backward until his body was lifted off the ground by the three that he had come to help. They ran stumbling along the uneven ground toward Carlos’s hole, dropping him down when they reached it. He felt them disappear and knew without looking that the only two left in the clearing were him and Carlos.
“Go!” he yelled.
“I’m the last one through, always. I don’t leave people behind.”
“You’re not leaving me behind.” Darwin’s words came out mumbled, as though speech was an afterthought. He felt his lightsabers shatter and all of Ada’s fury slammed into his steel wall, the sound echoing like vinegar on his tongue. Carlos took a step toward Darwin and stopped, watching the wall Darwin had created. He shook his head, and his voice cracked.
“Please come through. I . . . I can’t lose someone else today.” Carlos disappeared.
The steel wall bulged and split, the crack running from ground to sky. Ada threw herself against it again and the opening widened.
Darwin dropped the wall and stepped into the hole, disrupting it at the same time. He knew it would be gone by the time anyone got close. A single gray Thread pulsed in the hole with him.
Along with the cold, he could feel the edge of the hole following him through, catching up, and the gray Thread just in front of that.