ELECTRICAL ARMS EMBRACED ME AS I plummeted into darkness, my mouth open in a silent scream. Something caught at my throat and tore into me, like tendrils and claws and fear and rage, and it was inside, ripping me apart, and there were voices, but not voices, only things, assaulting me and battering me and dragging me into a thousand million pieces.
The memory of Cage’s mouth on mine surfaced. I focused on him: on the touch of his hands, the warm solidity of his muscles beneath my grasp.
Slowly the world re-formed.
The pain relented, but it remained a presence at the back of my mind, threatening with every breath to break free. And there was something else there too, something I didn’t want to examine too closely.
But I had to examine it, didn’t I? I blinked in the darkness. A shudder ran through me. I’d only been in this kind of blackness once before: on the alien ship when Cage left me. Alone. Surrounded by death and decay and despair and …
I forced myself to breathe, but that only made me realize I didn’t have a body to breathe through. I was in the system.
Near panic overwhelmed me. I was thinking more clearly now, but I still didn’t know where or what I was. Rune hadn’t been able to explain the sensation of melding with an electronic system, but somehow, I didn’t think this was it. This system was too alien. There were symbols and lights flickering in the darkness now, none of them immediately recognizable. I’d wondered earlier if I could use two powers simultaneously. Time to find out.
Maybe because my linguistic ability was innate, because it was mine, the alien language was coming back to me. But none of the symbols made sense in isolation, and my brain struggled to associate them with words or concepts. I understood them, sort of, but I couldn’t make them work with my human mind.
I became aware of my body again, my feet standing on seemingly solid, if unstable, ground. I took a hesitant step forward, and the surface shifted. It was like walking on a pool of Jell-O, something I’d always secretly wanted to try until I got a bit older and grasped the improbability of what I had in mind. Of course, this Jell-O was black and cloaked in darkness, which wasn’t quite what I’d imagined in my childhood dreams.
I took another unsteady step, and another. The world shifted around me but remained in shadows of black and flashes of light. Something tugged at the corner of my mind, something alien and primal and aggressive, and I recoiled against it. My body jerked too, and I found myself once more in the shadowed room, the ground solid, the world a sea of ink.
This was no good. A shudder went through me. When Rune said she bonded with the system, she meant she immersed herself in it. If I wanted to get anywhere, I had to do the same thing. But that meant opening myself to something corrupt and more terrifying than anything I’d ever encountered.
I hesitated a moment there in the dark, wishing I had Cage by my side, or anyone, really. Wishing I had Alexei back with me. Wishing for my parents. If only I’d managed to help Liam on the ship, I could have used his power now to save us all. But that was impossible, and berating myself wasn’t going to solve anything, only delay the inevitable—which, I confessed to myself, was probably the idea.
I didn’t know how much time I had. I drew another breath in my nonbody and closed my eyes against the black. I took another wobbly step. Once again, the alien presence lurked at the edge of my mind. I struggled for my strength, settling as always on Robo Mecha Dream Girl. If I could just have a fraction of her energy, her courage …
The alien presence tugged more strongly, an encroaching shadow lurking around my temples. I had to resist the urge to fight it. It wasn’t aggressive as I’d initially assumed, though. As it reached in further, I realized it was more exploratory—or not even that. It was like an amoeba enveloping its prey. It didn’t have the edges of anger or attack; it was merely consuming whatever happened to be in its space. And right now, well … right now, that was me.
I took another step and found myself teetering on a precipice, my eyes closed, my physical and mental selves disjointed. The alien presence lodged in my mind like a foreign slug. If I took another step forward, gave it another inch, it would overwhelm me, swallow me, consume me. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t. The lump in my mind had the same mental feeling as the alien limbs: cold and slimy and harsh. If I let it take over, it would devour me whole.
But there was no choice. I remembered Alexei, his arms spread wide, bracing the door.
And I took the step.
Chaos.
Power and drift and consume and dull and devour.
The scream goes out. The source rises. A thousand splinters within the whole, fragments of sharp and dead and cold.
The source screams.
Rise and fall and die and sacrifice.
Heat and pain.
Agony tearing through the limbs of a thousand souls of a hundred thousand hunt and kill and revenge, find them, find revenge. Find and seek.
It rises. They rise.
We rise.