Chapter Twenty-One

I found Iris downing a pond-scum-green protein shake in the common room, her purple hair tucked behind her ear, showing me the sharp angles of her face. “Hey,” I said, sitting on the bench across from her, “you’re looking a little perkier than before.” How had she recovered so fast? It couldn’t have been the shake alone, could it? Maybe I needed to have another. “You did good back at the museum.”

Grinning, she gave a dip of her head.

“I need your help again. Do you happen to know anyone who can act as your conduit? Maybe someone you’ve touched while powered up, who makes crazy things happen in your body and with your tattoos?”

She grinned wider.

Sweet deal, she did. After upending her glass and gulping down the shake, she returned the tumbler to the kitchen and gave me a come-hither finger on her way to the exit. Eagerness seemed to ripple through her, and I could have sworn her eyes had brightened since the last time I’d seen them peeking out through her hair. Like mine had after I fought Marcus. Like Asher’s. But what did it all mean?

She opened every door along the gray corridor with a zap of energy but didn’t even stick her head in. Maybe Caine had been right about her fear of confined spaces. One room held bolts of fabric and sewing machines—where Sophia worked her magic, obviously. The last, once opened, slapped me in the face with the stench of chlorine.

“Wait, we have a pool?” I asked.

She shrugged, slipping inside as Raldad climbed up the steps and out of the Olympic-size pool. The sentinel’s dark skin contrasted sharply with the white tiles, and water poured off his muscular frame and light blue trunks. He turned his brilliant jade-star eyes on me, and then on Iris. He shook his head as she approached, but he couldn’t seem to take his eyes off her, or to make his body move even though his muscles bunched up under his skin.

Bingo. I flashed a smile that didn’t feel particularly polite. “Be dressed to hunt and meet me in the common room in fifteen minutes.”

Without waiting for a response, I marched off to the closet to change. I was feeling aggressive, and for once I wanted to look the part.

Five minutes later, I stood in the wardrobe room dressed in breathable black leather pants, low-heeled black calf-high boots, and a clingy violet tank to match my eyes. I’d drawn my hair up into a high ponytail.

I couldn’t procrastinate my conversation with Izan for another second, so I went to the mirror where Sophia usually made me up and stood there for a while. In my numb state, my heart didn’t pound like it might have any other day. “Izan,” I said. “In my head. Now.”

That squeezed sensation in my brain let me know he’d answered my call. How could he hear me from wherever his energy or whatever existed?

The Aztec boy with raven-black hair that floated around his head appeared in the reflection, but he stared off at something to my left. Or maybe he was avoiding my gaze. Guilty?

“Since you’re in my head,” I said, “I won’t bother asking my questions. You know what Baku told me about the artifacts, and what Caine told us about the king’s centennial slaughter of the Machine. So first of all, a simple yes or no will do. Is it all true?”

A shift of Izan’s feet sent his hair dancing, and he finally looked at me. The discomfort in him tightened my stomach another twist. “A simple answer will not help you understand this.”

I slipped a little further into the abyss. “So yes, then. I’m out of patience today, so give me the bullet points. If I don’t like what I hear, I’m going to march my butt out of here and leave this mess for you to clean up yourself, and if the pages crush my brain while I’m lazing around, then so be it.”

“You must not do that,” he said with urgency. “You are key.”

“Key to what?”

He sighed and wrung his hands together. “Long before I came into being, my ancestors created hundreds of worlds that existed in one grand universe for a study of evolution, including yours. Slightly different planets were seeded with similar potential for life. Centuries went by, and the worlds developed at different paces. Some with ravenous animals, and others with advanced sentient life. When war broke out between the planets, threatening to destroy all the founders had created, they separated the worlds into their own pockets of space and time to preserve life.”

Oh, hell. “Into their own realities, you mean. They put up the veil between them.”

“Yes, exactly.”

“Fast-forward to how Baku got here.”

Izan fidgeted with one of the fine braids at his temple. “When I first came to this project, I was but a child chasing after butterflies. When my elders abandoned this project and left here for their own time and place, I remained, mostly observing Earth as your people were in their most primitive states.”

Izan’s people were from another time? I couldn’t handle any more shocks at the moment, so I didn’t ask.

“I did not understand emotion,” he continued, “how it could cause a chemical reaction in a creature strong enough to make them forgo their own survival instincts to save another. I also did not understand why some creatures became intelligent and others did not. The founders planted the ingredients for life, but some magic or divine intervention beyond my understanding must have granted you sentience.

“During one of my journeys to the other realities, I found Baku’s world. His race could sense me like no others, and he was grieving for his mate and seven of his young who had been on one of the other planets during the divergence.”

“Jesus, Izan. I’m supposed to fight a dead king who’s pissed at you for taking his family away? No wonder the guy’s so driven.” I pulled up the stool and sat down at the vanity, my stomach in knots. “You said you led to their destruction, so what did you do?”

“I wanted to help him merge the realities, but I needed a large power source as I had not evolved into a true founder with the ability to undo what my ancestors had done. I promised to find this source, but not before I determined whether or not the worlds could exist together in the same universe without war.”

I slowly came to my feet. “Tell me you didn’t.” At the drop of his shoulders, I pounded the counter. “You didn’t want to give up your intergalactic ant farm, so you used Earth as your goddamned petri dish, didn’t you? You took stuff from all of the other worlds and planted it here for the earliest human knuckle-draggers to find, then sat back to watch the forming cultures collide. Which means you influenced them in ways I can’t begin to comprehend. The pyramids? Stonehenge? The holy freakin’ Bible? You’re probably behind the whole Area 51 thing, and crop circles, too, am I right? People are out there right now praying to gods that don’t even exist.”

“I weighed the lives of this one world against the possible destruction of all of them. If Earth reacted badly to the mixing of objects from other worlds—which it did within a few centuries—then only it would be destroyed, and I would not bring the realities together. It seemed a small sacrifice at the time.”

“Small. Billions of humans, from babies to grannies. You’ve completely destroyed who we might have been, you jerk. Do you even understand what that means? I’m starting to believe Caine, that you’re just as bad as Baku, or maybe worse.” I’d always believed Earth’s diversity was our greatest strength, except for those who used it as an excuse to start war. Who would we have developed into if Izan hadn’t interfered? Would we have been better off? Or worse? We’d never know, and that pissed me off.

He recoiled and hissed as if I’d burned him.

“Nothing to say about that?” I asked. “How did you destroy Baku’s sun if you were trying to help him? I’d suggest you start flapping those mirror lips of yours before I decide maybe you’re the villain here after all, and Baku is only what you made him.”

He reached for me, and I launched off the stool even though it was stupid to flee from something inside my own head. “This experiment took time, but his race is long-lived… I should have known his patience would run out. He took matters into his own hands, and desperation and ignorance are a dangerous combination…”

“Shit. He tried to create his own power source to merge the realities, is that what you’re saying?”

“The power of his sun, to be precise. He destroyed it, and his planet, in the process.”

His race must have been smarter than I thought to be able to even dream of harnessing the power of their own sun.

Izan hung his head, and even though he said he had little understanding of emotion, he obviously felt shame to some degree. “When I finally returned to him with my findings and found their planet annihilated, their souls ripped from their bodies from the explosion and floating in the frozen void, I returned here to complete my observations of your people. There was nothing I could have done to fix it.”

“Oh, sure. Kill a race, and go back watching the naked apes.” I tossed up my hand. “Makes perfect sense to me. So how did he end up here?”

“That, too, is my mistake. There are channels, highways between the veils that separate one reality from the next that only I and my kind can traverse. Instead of passing only through these highways as is our law, I went through the veil itself when I went to Baku to break the news to him, that I could not merge the realities. In his anger, Baku in his wraith form followed me back through the rift I’d created and demanded what I had promised, the power source to merge the realities again so he could find his family, as I had not the power to take him there myself. I found it in the very people I’d been fascinated with for so long, and in my ignorance, I led him right to you.”

“The power of emotion, you mean.”

“And the power of soul when faced with adversity.”

I scrubbed a hand down my face. “If you can create universes full of planets, why do you need us? Why can’t you wave your magic energy finger and fix everything?”

“Even now I’m an adolescent in the eyes of my kind, not yet come into my power to create or destroy as my ancestors can. I can only form objects within false realities and share my will with some humans. Very soon, though, I must go back to my time, or I will die out like one of your stars. If that happens here, not only will your planet be at risk of destruction, but my sentience will die here. Even if I was able to eradicate the wraiths myself, I have disturbed the veil too much, and the ripple effect of my error may still bring more creatures from other places after I am gone.”

Stars lit up my eyes, and I had to force air in or I’d have passed out. “So you need us to be able to protect ourselves. Protect a girl from a wraith, and she’s safe for a day. Teach her to kick their asses herself, and she’ll be safe for a lifetime, is that what you’re saying?”

He smiled, but it flattened when I glared at him. “Yes.”

“So now what? Caine thinks you were creating different configurations of the Machine and brought Baku to test them. If we can’t get along under the flags of a hundred world religions, I’m guessing you’re not actually trying to merge the realities again.”

“No, that would be catastrophic. You are but babes in the evolutionary stages of the worlds. You would be destroyed in a matter of months.”

Even though I couldn’t comprehend races that different from ours—aside from bugmen, of course—I believed him. “So tell me how I shut down Baku without killing him, and how to do that without most of the Machine dying, and how I keep every nasty out there on their own side of the veil for good after you hit the road.”

“I have been testing scenarios, as the sentinel said, and have come up with only one solution.” He met my eyes again, and I gasped at the haunted expression contorting his young face. “You must contain him in the only prison strong enough to hold him.”

I squinted, thinking about what I’d done at the museum. “Do you mean put up an energy grid somewhere? Because that didn’t hold him in New York, and I’m guessing shoving him back through the veil isn’t an option if you can’t hold him out.”

He shook his head, and dizziness crept up on me. “You must confine him in a place of purity and light, a sanctuary that has weathered many storms. I cannot understand how such a place even exists, but I have felt the power of it, a frightening force I’ve not seen elsewhere in all my time. It is a place only you have been to, that offers shelter to others no matter what horrors rage around it. I have no maps to give you, for only you can open the way. You must issue the invitation, not only for the king, but for all of those who have sought its light.”

“Sanctuary? Do you mean like a church?” I searched my brain for anything that fit the bill, but ran into white space beyond two months ago.

“Follow your instincts. Find your heart and all of the pages, and you will have your answer. Glenna holds the final piece of the bible, and the final fuel that will start the Machine. When you are ready, seek it out, and it will call you to the king.” He stared at me for seconds, his expressive face searching mine before he spoke again. “I have spent most of my lifetime planning this, to undo some of the harm I, and my people, have caused. This cannot be done without sacrifice, child. Please trust that I have considered every possibility.”

My throat closed in a bit. “Sacrifice. You’re talking about me, right? Are you saying I have to die to open the path to this place?”

“I hope it will not come to that, but it is possible.”

“Well, that’s just fantastic, Izan.” My attempt at sarcastic humor came out full of panic. How could I know the way to this sanctuary when I had no freakin’ idea what he was talking about? If only I’d been there, then it had to be someplace from my childhood. Which meant that I needed my memories back, but the thought of letting Asher touch me threatened to unravel my last nerve. “What happens if I don’t find this mystery prison or sanctuary or whatever?”

“Then Baku will use your power and that of the Machine to merge the realities, and if he cannot do that, he has threatened to unleash his dead upon your people so they may regrow their bodies on your Earth, and he will consume your mother’s soul out of spite.”

“I’m really starting to hate you,” I whispered, wrestling back an army of tears. “If you don’t understand emotion, then why have you tried so hard to save us, huh? Why not abandon us like your people did?”

“I have begun to understand remorse, and I feel a certain…something for you. It is pleasant in some regards. That, perhaps, is pride. The other brings pain that we shall soon part. I believe I will miss you, as you would say.”

Part as in he was leaving? Or part as in I’d soon be worm food? That cold detachment slid over me as I let it all sink in. “I wish I could say the feeling is mutual, but I don’t like to lie. Have a nice life, energy dude, and thanks for royally screwing us over. If I live, we are so done. You need to go back to wherever you came from like you said, because if you don’t, I’ll come after you next.”

I ejected Izan from my head, enjoying his sharp stab of agony that accompanied his quick exit. There were aspects of being part of the Machine I was actually starting to enjoy, like traveling through the Shift and having some company in Crazy Town, but I should have known the crappy honeymoon would end. I was freakin’ Frodo, but instead of marching into Mordor and throwing the ring into Mount Doom, I had to throw myself in. Only I didn’t have Gollum to lead me to the Black Gates.

Awesome.

Die or bring on inter-dimensional war. God, my life sucked sometimes.

I hightailed it out of the closet to find the last items on my scavenger hunt—Kyle and Sampson. Part of me mourned Asher. If he’d been beside me for the last ten minutes, I might have taken the news of my imminent doom better. No, screw that. I’d show him what I was worth by saving his ass yet again. I’d find a way to survive so I could thumb my nose at him.

“We ready to go hunting again, Addy?” Remy stepped away from the wall he’d been leaning on. The way the big guy eyeballed me stirred thoughts that Sophia had said something to him about me, and he was worried.

“I am, with a few others.” I kept my focus pointed down the hallway, gripping my leather-covered hips. A war went on in my head, all of his kindness and acceptance on one side, and what he’d said earlier on the other, that Asher had been wrong about me. “You need to work things out with Sophia.”

King Kong swung his bulk around in front of me. “What with the leather an’ the hair, kolohe? You don’ need to prove—”

“Don’t I?” I said with flint, finally meeting his eyes. “Don’t presume to know me, sentinel, because you don’t. Just do what I asked you to, and get the hell out of my way.”

Frowning, he took a step back, his giant fists drawn up tight at his sides. “Talk to me, Addy. You look like someone break you heart. Whatever happen, you tell me, and we work it out. Is it that Caine guy? I pound him if he hurt you.”

“Nothing’s wrong. Everything is freakin’ peachy. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have shit to do. If you see Caine, tell him to meet me in the common room.”

“Wait. You need to know the Colonel missing. Don’ know how he got outta lockup, but Asher can’t feel him out there with those senses of his, an’ some of the false reality collapsing. The one that hold the Colonel’s mansion gone, and all the outer layers of the Shift have disappeared.”

Just what I needed, another prick on the loose gunning for my head. Why were the realities disappearing? That meant there was less of a buffer between Earth and the wraiths’ void, and they could come through to the true reality easier. Maybe the veil itself really had thinned, and that was why it felt so cold out there now.

“Once I’m done tonight, I’ll talk to Izan again. For now, keep everyone here until I get back. If you find out who let the Colonel out, you bring them to me.” So I could lay down a few laws on their head with my fist.

“Yeah, I do that. Don’ you worry, kolohe. Asher watch you back.”

“No he won’t.” I marched away without looking back. The voices shouting in my head to go back and apologize for being an ass could shut it.

A short search turned up Sampson and Kyle arguing beyond the door to the men’s communal shower.

“I’ve seen the way you look at me,” Sampson said softly, shifting closer to the other man, “and I like it.”

Kyle stepped back and crossed his arms, giving a bitter laugh. “You haven’t seen shit, and I told you, I’m not into dudes, so don’t even think about me that way. It’s disgusting.”

“Shut up,” I barked from the doorway. “I don’t give a monkey’s rainbow butt what your bedroom preferences are. Nobody’s judging you. Hell, nobody even cares. None of us chose this life, but people are dying, and I need your help to stop it. You can draw each other’s power with touching anyway, so don’t stare at me like I’m asking you to hold hands or kiss. All right?”

When they both glanced at each other and their shoulders started to drop, I turned on my heel, talking over my shoulder. “Be ready and in the common room in five minutes. Don’t make me come looking for you.”

Once I’d have been mortified about being so harsh, so demanding—so like Asher—but not today. I no longer had time to hand-hold and soothe egos. To live. To fall in love. To wake up in someone’s arms. Asher had always told me there was no room for softness in the Machine, and he was right. If it took my life to save us all from extinction, then I’d set my personal values aside and give it up. Gladly. It had to be better than the hurt trying to eat me alive, anyway.