Chapter 16: What’s Inside a Riddle
The fingers flexed and bent just as a human hand should. When he touched his cheek he felt their cold hardness on his face, yet also had sensation at the end of his finger tips. Not as fine a feeling as his other hand had, but still a feeling of touching something malleable. Drifter held the hand up over his face, opening and closing it against the whiteness of the ceiling. He had a strange feeling of disconnection to the appendage, as if someone had said 'look, here’s a hand, try it out’ and he had put it on for a test-run.
Weary, he let it fall to the bed beside him. After resting for a moment, he heaved himself up into a sitting position, swinging his feet off onto the floor. Though he still had the same brown uniform he had stolen from a soldier’s body months ago, someone had taken his cloak away. And his boots. His feet were encased in new socks, stretchy and white. He stared at them with almost as much surprise as he had used on the new hand.
Feeling something odd about his left leg, he reached down and rolled up the pant leg, suddenly wondering how bad the burn scar had become since he had fallen unconscious...or whatever had happened to him. But under the tan pants there was no blackened scar. His leg was smooth and whole, the skin where the scar had been was now unnaturally pale. He stared at it for a minute, before running a finger down the sharp bone of his shin. It was soft, unworn. It was unblemished skin. They had healed him.
Drifter rolled his eyes and slumped back against the wall. “What sort of game are they playing with me?”
After a moment he added another pressing question, “who are 'they’?”
There was no immediate answer. He was not even sure if this room was anywhere in Apex. It did not feel like his home town. He thought back over what had happened before his awakening and furrowed his brow. The last thing he remembered distinctly was opening the Gate of Eternity.
“The world should have ended.” He looked up at the white ceiling and the flat electric light. “Did it? Is this the World to Come?”
It did not feel like a better world. He was tired and felt ill, as if he had been caught in the grasp of a deadly fever for many days and was just recovering. Of course, there had been the phantom-like people who entered the door and bowed to him. A circumstance both bizarre and otherworldly.
“If it didn’t end the world,” Drifter murmured, eyes narrowing, “what was behind the gate?”
He searched his memory doggedly, hunting down any stray thought from that time. All he could remember was a brilliant flash of blue light, blinding him as it burst out of the gate. And a sensation like sticking one’s hand in a light bulb socket but a hundred times stronger. What had happened to the rest of the world when he was struck down? Loran, Bard...the people of Apex Haven.
He sighed and started to brush a hand across his face. But when he felt the cold touch of metal on his cheek he shoved the hand away in exasperation. Drifter was a man of action. He wanted to get up and pace the empty cell, try to find the now-invisible doorway. Beat at it, pry at any crack in the walls or floor. Anything except sit on the bench trying to piece together his memories. But he was still tired by the mere act of sitting up, let alone getting to his feet.
One of the odd things about the room was the complete lack of sound from outside. Except for a faint humming noise from the light and perhaps inside the walls, everything was still. It made it feel as if the cell were deep underground, separated from any passage by a wide thickness of stone.
“Underground,” Drifter muttered, “that’s where Loran said that she hid during the Greenspark fall. Her and her friends...could I have been taken there?”
He imagined Loran coming to the gate a few minutes after him, looking for it in scholarly interest, finding him laying there...and what? Spiriting him away to a place deep underground?
That did not make any sense. Drifter shook his head and decided to do what an animal would do in such a situation. Sleep until he regained his strength, or at least until something new occurred. He lay down on the hard bed, which had a slight cushion for his head, and closed his eyes. On the verge of sleep he recalled the vision of the wheatfield.
He squinted his light eyes open for a moment, remembering the fullness of the golden heads and blue of the sky. “Was it Heaven?”
There was no way for him to tell now. This world could be a nightmare or another vision on the edge of eternity itself.
Sleep sucked him down in its black whirlpool.
He was awakened later by the first sounds he had heard from outside the cell. It was what must have been a loud shouting, though it only came to him as a passionate whisper. Sitting up again, he found that he was not as weary as he had been before. The bit of rest had done him good. He leaned his head against the wall, moving it around until it was at the end of the bed and he could hear the noises a little louder. Shouting, something thumping on the floor and a clatter...then it all trailed away into silence again.
Drifter drew in a quick breath. Whatever was out there, phantoms, humans or monsters, he was not entirely alone. But why had they left him in this barren cell so long without coming in?
His throat felt dry and he thought sardonically that if they wanted him as a prisoner they would have to bring him provisions at some time. Otherwise, all they would get was a limp corpse.
His head jerked around as he heard a faint clicking and hissing from the wall where the door was concealed. A portion of the smooth, gray surface swung inwards, gradually opening into a rectangular doorway. Beyond it, he caught a glimpse of a hall walled in white. Before he could move, a trolley was thrust in at the doorway, a small wheeled table with what looked like a cup, pitcher and covered plate set on it. There was other small objects on it as well, but his attention was captured by what was pushing the trolley.
It was a young woman. A plain human with dark hair, closed face and downcast eyes. She was dressed in the white uniform of a nurse, even down to a tiny white hat on her head, seeming to hold her tight bun in place. She pushed the trolley in, swung the door shut with a shove of her hip and came over in front of him.
Turning to him with an efficient nod of her head, she said, “good, you’re awake. We weren’t sure what state you’d be in.”
Turning to pick up the pitcher, she poured a gush of sterile water into the cup. She proffered it to him with a pantomime of drinking, as if not sure he would understand her words. Drifter took the little plastic cup and poured the empty-tasting liquid down his throat.
“It’s just terrible, keeping an Othered like you captive, a secret, and doing what they wished with you that way,” the young woman chattered on, in the tone of voice one might use for a dog or an imbecile, “it’s against all the rules of the Dagor council, you know.”
Drifter held out the cup, but when she reached for it he gripped her wrist with the other hand in a swift movement.
“Where am I, girl?”
He looked at her with his sharp gaze and realized that she was not touched by the scorch. Its sign was not on her, in mind or body.
The nurse tried to pull away but, finding his grip unbreakable, put her other hand on her hip. “Now, I would let go of me if I were you. I’ll just call a guard in if you cause trouble, and you’ll be neutralized. We don’t want that, do we?”
Drifter let go of her arm suddenly and pressed the cup into her hands. “I don’t know about you. It doesn’t sound fun to me. But I want my question answered.”
The nurse tossed her head with a shrug, fiddling with some of the other objects on the tray. “In an Akarnan holding cell in their section of the council building. Other than that, I’m not supposed to talk about such things with an Othered like you.”
She picked up a device that looked like a remote controller with a small screen as well as one button on it. “Now it’s time to take your temperature, so you just sit still and be good.”
Deciding that he would get more from patience than violence, Drifter sat still and allowed her to run one end of the object across his forehead. The nurse then insisted on taking his blood pressure with an electronic cuff of sorts, putting it on his left arm, of course. She cast a few glances at his metallic right hand as if she had not expected it, but did not comment. Drifter went through the motions required of him laconically, saying with some roughness afterwards, “what next?”
He had noticed that the instruments were electronic, their cases unmarred and in perfect working order. The woman was dressed and moved in a way he remembered from before the disaster. Wherever this was, it was not the Civitas Apex he knew.
“We’re through with that phase,” the nurse told him in response to his query, “my job is to make sure that you are well and able to leave this room and be taken to the Volka section of the council building. The only thing left for you to do is eat a little, if you feel able.”
“I’m willing.” Drifter knew that the food could be drugged, even poisoned, just as the water he had taken could be as well. But he was banking on the fact that they seemed to want him alive, even alert, rather than in a state of stupor. It was a fine game, where he did not know the rules or the goal. All he had were his wits, which had served to keep him alive through difficult situations before. Though he did not yet feel truly hungry, the food would give him strength and perhaps serve to rid him permanently of the weak feeling that had haunted him earlier on.
The plate she proffered him had a few strips of fried meat and a pile of fluffy yellowish bits on it. It took him a moment to recall the names of bacon and scrambled eggs. It had been years since he ate such things.
They tasted flat and salty, inadequate compared to his usual rough, meaty meals. He ate with his fingers rather than the fork, though he felt the nurse watching him and guessed her thoughts. By how she acted, he was an uncouth barbarian in her mind. It didn’t matter to Drifter. His strengths were not in being refined or polite.
When he was through eating, the young woman asked him if he thought he could walk some distance. She offered a wheelchair that was outside if he could not. With a contemptuous flicker of his pale eyes Drifter stood up and shoved the paper plate back on the trolley. “Show me the way.”
The nurse turned towards the door abruptly. “This way. But remember, there will be a guard just outside who will come behind us. Follow me and do not stray.”
Her tone implied that he should be a good animal and heel, even if he had not been taught to. Drifter fell in behind her in a stalking stride, moving without a limp for the first time in years. He still had a hard time taking in the changes that had been done to him, and the strange unscorched surroundings that he was in. But the feeling of weak dreaminess was leaving him. Everything was becoming hard and cold around Drifter, mostly in a way he did not like or trust. The idea that this was some sort of afterlife had faded in his mind. He was still in his body, this was a real and nonspiritual existence.
Outside of the cell was a hallway of white, smooth walls tinted with just enough cream to keep them from hurting the eyes. The floor was gray, the same inexplicable color as the walls of his cell. Electric lights were fit in the ceiling, small, round disks of flat white.
As soon as they had left the room, a man dressed impressively in slick black armor started following them. He was carrying a long-barreled gun slung in one arm and various other devices in his belt. Drifter did not deign to give him more than a glance. His face was soft even if his armament was strong.
The guard’s footsteps echoed down the hall, slightly muffled by the apparent thickness of the walls. Drifter’s were soft in his socks, while the nurse shuffled along in odd shoes that made little sound.
On the way they passed little, lit rectangles of red or green in the walls. Drifter guessed that they indicated doors set in the wall, invisible like the one in his cell had been due to the lack of an apparent joint between wall and door. After walking by a few dozen of these, they became less frequent. As they went, Drifter noted a few odd details. Firstly, a small stain on the floor which looked suspiciously like blood. Secondly, there was another trolley like the one the nurse had brought to him. But it was parked against the side of the hall, tray slightly dinged as if it had been through a fight.
Not everything was at ease in the seemingly strict, ordered halls. There had been a riot in the near past, probably the noises Drifter had heard, and two factions were evidently fighting over control of him. Or at least debating it, heatedly. The question was, why was he so important to them? The nurse seemed to think that he was on the level of a wild animal or a captive savage. But if he was so lowly, what made him so important to have in custody?
They came around a gradual corner in the white hall and Drifter got his first clue as to where they were. It was a sight which surprised him into stillness. There, set in the smooth wall, was a rectangular window of clear glass. It had rounded corners and was placed flush in the wall so that there was hardly a joint between it and the glass. But it was not the construction of the window which surprised him. It was what lay beyond it.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
The sun was setting, purple and gold, on a wide space of green grass like a lawn. Trees stood in it here and there, leaves brilliant and crisp against the clean sky. In the distance, a series of shining silver buildings rose towards the horizon, lights twinkling on them like a dense constellation of stars. Nearby, the building Drifter stood in curved around in an amorphous wing, culminating in a pinnacle of gleaming stone or metal. Windows glittered on it, streams of light pouring from every one.
Drifter was drawn towards the window as if by a magnetic force. He put his hands on the wall below and looked out, gazing at the flickers of movement and light from the distant city. It was alive. The city had not been slain.
“Move.” The guard stepped forward, nudging him with the gun. Drifter twisted his head to look sideways at him for a moment. The guard’s eyes and expression were hidden behind dark glasses. But Drifter saw his exposed face, neck and hands. He saw striking points which he could easily use to overcome the guard at this distance without the gun coming into play.
But there would be other guards and he was in strange territory. He turned and followed the nurse as he was expected to do. She had paused when he did, without looking around, and continued when he did in the same manner. He walked a little quicker to come up almost beside her and said quietly, “what city is this?”
It reminded him of Apex before the disaster, with the wide cityscape and constant movements of life within. The architecture was entirely different or else he might have thought that the Greenspark fall was a dream, he a patient in a mental hospital.
“I’m not allowed to talk to you.” The nurse returned primly.
“Will someone answer my questions honestly where we are going?”
“You will be told what you need to know in good time.”
It was not long before they left that hall and crossed a great, open chamber. Star-shaped patterns of yellow stone were inset smoothly into the dark floor. Banners of blue, gray and gold hung on the walls. To their right stood a huge set of glass double-doors with a pair of giant insignia etched above them. On the left was a raised platform and a podium, indicating that this was a place for speeches to be made. At the moment everything was empty and still.
Across the chamber they entered another hall, this one with reversed colors. The walls and ceiling were gray, the floor white. It seemed to be a mirror image of the other, curving gently back until they reached a door about opposite with the one Drifter had occupied before.
“Is someone waiting in here for us?” He asked suspiciously.
The nurse touched a glowing rectangle on the wall and the inset door swung open. “Please go in.”
Drifter gave one last look at the guard with his armor and gun before stepping through the door. He found himself in a room much like the last, except for that the colors were reversed as in the hall and it was slightly larger. There was a little more furniture too, items for general comfort during a long stay. The bed had a thicker cushion. But there was no one in the room.
“Wait--” Drifter spun back towards the door. It was already swinging shut. It sealed with a solid noise and a hiss, leaving him imprisoned inside.
---
The act of cutting through the cube’s wall was long and painstaking. Elisha would cut a little way, then stop and let it cool. They took it out of the water eventually, so that none would leak in when he rotated it. So far nothing had come out of the line they cut and it was far too narrow to see within. The crystal torch was a precise instrument.
Loran stayed sitting at the table, lost in reverie. Bard joined her after awhile, noticing the abstracted look on her face. He touched her on the shoulder shyly.
“Are you okay?”
She started a little and gave him a slow nod, eyes coming back to the present. For a moment it seemed that Loran would say nothing. But then she spoke in a low tone, only for him to hear. “You asked me the other day if I thought Drifter was happy...”
Bard nodded.
“My mind got an impression of him now. Somewhere with gray walls...and electric lighting.”
The boy gave her a confused look. “But he’s dead.”
Loran drew in a sharp breath. “Wherever he is, he is not happy.”
Bard’s eyes got wide and a disturbed expression came over his face. He was about to say something more when Elisha abruptly shut off the torch and drew the goggles from his head. With a noisy sigh, he set everything aside.
“Ah, well, half way through.” He ran a hand over his face wearily. “But my hands are startin’ to tremble and I can go no further tonight. Sorry m’dears, but I don’t want to make a mistake and I am tired.”
Loran arose with a sweep of robe. “Of course. It’s late already. Thank you for working so hard on it, Elisha. Tomorrow will be time enough to answer our questions.”
“You’re welcome, lady.” He bowed his head to her. “I’ll certainly start early tomorrow, just after brekky.”
“Then I am going to bed in the car,” Loran said, clasping her hands together, “I’m weary myself, though I haven’t been working like you.”
She went out of the shack into the night. Bard got a glimpse of the starry sky and ruins through the door before it closed. He looked at Elisha, hesitating a moment before he asked, “Loran has strange powers. I’ve seen them before. How did she get them?”
Elisha squinted at him, wiping his big, stained hands together. “Well now, lad. It’s none of our business, really. But I’ll tell you this much. Her gift of prophecy she’s always had and it saved my life, or at least my sanity. I was never scorched like so many are, because she warned us weeks before it fell. Otherwise...her intuition and mental powers are also her own. But I think she found a relic that gives her control over other things, if that’s what ye mean.”
“Yes, that would explain it. She was able to unlock a door with a touch, and I wondered.” Bard looked up excitedly.
Elisha did not allow him to ask more. “Like I said, lad, it’s none of our business. Get to bed with ye and let the good lady sleep without questions.”
Bard blustered and tried to get more from him, but the inventor would not talk. Eventually, the boy left the shack and crossed the distance to the car. As he went, he heard Charwings calling to each other through the night and shivered. Loran’s words about Drifter puzzled and chilled him. Before getting in the car, he turned his eyes to the sky and said a little prayer of safekeeping for the dead.
Inside, the woman was apparently fast asleep, curled up in her robe under the steering wheel. Bard took his own corner, as they had for so many nights, and was soon unconscious himself. Neither of them saw the red eyes of a Chardog look in the window. Nor that they faded away peacefully into the night.
In the morning Elisha was already working on the cube when they arose. A personage strange to Bard was waiting in the shack to meet them. Loran introduced him as Jeroam, another of the people who had survived underground during the Greenspark fall.
He was young, in his early twenties, with a fit, tight energy to all of his movements. His hair was dark and long, held back by a bit of leather tied at the nape of his neck. Brown eyes twinkled with life in a quick face, marred by a shallow scar on one temple. His clothes were dark as well, bound by a leather harness holding up a pack and bedroll. A machete hung from the harness on one side, while the other supported a metal flask for water. He greeted Bard by clasping his hand briefly, then whipping away to say a few words to Loran. His speech was swift and vibrant, always getting right to the point. Bard liked him right away.
As Elisha continued to work on the black box, Jeroam explained that he had been wandering the city ever since they left the shelter. He had not learned much about either phantoms or relics, but he had talked to many people and gathered their stories about the Greenspark fire. He had even run into a band of adventurers from another continent, who had crossed by boat hoping to find Apex less ruined than their homeland. In this they had been disappointed, and left for another place across the seas as soon as they re-provisioned.
The scar had come from a fight Jeroam had been in with a gang. He had survived and defeated his enemies, but received a cut from a spear to remember it by. Loran insisted on checking the wound, but it had already healed, leaving only a dark line behind. Jeroam laughed at her for fussing over him and said that it wasn’t the only fight he had been in.
“Luckily I was always a fighter, even before the disaster.” He grinned. “Growing up on the streets, I had to be.”
Breakfast was waiting for them on the table. Elisha had already eaten, so they began without him. As they ate, they talked and the inventor worked, so that all of their stories were understood by the time breakfast was over. It only took another hour for the metal cube to be cut entirely in half. Elisha had set the two pieces in an empty pan and now moved it carefully over to the table. As they all watched, breathless, he pulled the halves apart.
Inside there was a hard, metal ball set with short metallic wires like spines. It was suspended in the center of the cube by longer, slimmer wires connecting to four of the metal walls. All around this orb was a thin, spongy netting. It filled the rest of the cube. From the gaps in the netting spilled tiny grains of some material, colored green and blue. It poured out into the pan with a musical sound when Elisha lifted the cube and tipped it. The grains built up into a little heap, shimmering peacock colors. Bard touched them gingerly with the tip of his finger and found them hard, almost chalky in texture. Each bit was about half the size of a grain of rice.
“There’s hundreds of them!” Bard exclaimed, “but what can they be?”
“I don’t know.” Elisha set the opened box down and pried the orb from the center loose, breaking the long wires. “But we’ll find out, along with what this device is.”
It seemed like a difficult job to Bard. Though Elisha evidently came equipped, finding out what the grains were made of would be scientifically tasking.
To begin with, Elisha made sure that all of the grains had come out of the spongy material inside the cube onto the tray. This was not hard, as the netting ripped easily, spilling the bits of chalky material out. Once the box was empty, the tinkerer set it aside on his bench. For now it had no further use for them.
“The thing to do is find out what sort of device this is in the center. If this is a type of bomb, the orb should be its detonator,” Elisha explained, carefully picking up the hairy thing and holding it in his hands. He went on to add that finding out more about the orb would not only be the quickest way to start guessing at the grainy material, but the safest. Otherwise he would have to subject it to tests such as dropping it in chemical solutions and crushing it with other powders to find out how it reacted.
“As far as I can tell,” he finished, “these grains are something I’ve never seen before. But there are many chemicals and chemical compounds in the world. We’ll see.”
As the young men crowded around and Loran waited calmly at the table, playing with the grains, Elisha set the metal ball on his workbench and began inspecting it. It did not take him long to find a small joint running all of the way around it, a sort of crack or line cutting it in half. With some small pliers and a screwdriver he was able to wiggle it so that the crack widened and the object came apart. It fell in two parts reluctantly, a spiderweb of fine wires holding it together on the inside. Elisha peeled it sideways so that they could see the interior without breaking anything. What looked like electronic chips or other electrical parts were fastened to a smaller globe inside, which then had all of the fine wires connecting to it. These went out and fastened to the stiff, short wires bristling on the outside of the orb.
Elisha began to inspect the parts on the inside, tracing out wires and looking at the electronics. After a bit he pulled a device from his drawer which he said was for testing to see if the electronics had power running through them. They did not, though with more poking around and testing Elisha decided that the tiny ball in the center was a sort of battery. The electronics, he guessed to be remote receivers of some sort, as well as a few things he was unfamiliar with. Through this, he came to the conclusion that the short, bristly wires were to convey an electronic spark to the grains of material from the central orb, upon a remote command. But, because of a burnt-out chip or faulty battery, the whole cube had become a dud.
“Which means,” Elisha waved a hand at everyone watching him, “that to find out what these grains do, we shall have to hit a small amount of them with an electrical spark. Luckily, I have some batteries and wires around here somewhere...”
“Be careful, friend,” Loran said quietly, “this may yet be a device for creating Greenspark.”
Jeroam nodded his agreement. “In fact, it’s even more likely now! Elisha has proved that it is some sort of bomb.”
“Not exactly, lad,” The inventor chided, “it could be that these grains do something entirely peaceful when they get sparked. Like...hm--”
“End the world?” Bard suggested.
Everyone paused for a moment, remembering where the box had come from. If the Gate really was something to activate the End of the World, could it have a machine inside to carry out that plan? And if so, could it have malfunctioned?
But Loran dismissed it out of hand. “Nonsense. This cube and machine were made by men. It has nothing mystical about it. Jeroam is right. It must be a sort of bomb.”
“Then I’ll test a little of the powder outside, where no harm will come if it does burst into Greenspark or explode.” Elisha picked up the tray of grains and took it outside. He returned a moment later to have the boys help him gather a handful of various items, including a spool of insulated wire. These they took outside, into the center of the courtyard. After being inside, thinking of wires and electronics so long, it was strange to come out and see the dry fountains, cracked tiles and ruined buildings of Apex. But the city was still all around them, watching with its dead eyes as they delved into its secrets.
Elisha set up a battery, run of wires and a way to activate it with a switch. At the other end of the wires he took a pan and set it on the ground in the center of the courtyard, away from both of the vehicles. He put a small pinch of grains of both colors in it, perhaps three or four of each. They did not know how powerful a shock had been used on the grains in the bomb. Elisha had not discovered what all of the devices in the box did. But this would serve as a first, basic test of the grains. If it did nothing, they would try others alterations until it worked.
Everyone stood back from the pan, over by Elisha’s steam truck. He crouched down and lay a hand on the switch.
“Ready?” He glanced up at Loran. She gave a small nod, hands in sleeves and face intent under her hood.
Elisha threw the switch. There was a faint clicking sound from the end of the wires as a spark was generated. It was followed immediately by a peculiar sound, a mixture of fizzing and hissing, with a blast close on its heels.
Whistling like fireworks, something green streaked up from the pan. Four streaks in fact, shooting into the sky. Once they had attained a level far above the buildings around the courtyard, the sparks burst into miniature explosions of their own. There was a sound Bard had heard once before. A terrible noise, which made him shiver and clutch at his arms inadvertently. It was a hissing and crackling, set at a particular pitch which seemed to worm into the ears like a living thing.
Out of the sky four objects came falling. Three of them dropped somewhere beyond the ring of buildings around them, out of sight. The fourth came down just beside the pan where it had started. It was a lump of material like a tiny meteor, about the size of a large man’s fist. Green sparks danced around it, flaming with an unholy light. It burned and crackled until it hit the ground. As soon as it struck the hard surface, it seemed to melt, turning into a sort of shockwave moving outwards. Ripples ran through the ground. The buildings around them shook, pieces falling off and dust rising. The battery next to them cracked and bubbled over, acid hissing onto the tiles. The pan was a bent bit of melted metal and the wires blackened for yards.
Bard stood with tears running from his eyes. Everyone else stared in amazement. The boy nodded once, voice pinched. “That’s it. That’s the Greenspark.”
He was the only one there who had seen it before. The brush of scorch in his mind twinged and he started sobbing.