Karla shook her head, it felt heavy and slow. “Like I said. I’m not interested. Thank you, for the offer, but still, I have never and will never be interested in joining a clan.”
William Stoke sighed, then shrugged. “Then it’s time for me to leave.” He stood from her couch and held out a hand. “Karla, it was nice meeting you.”
Karla glanced at the offered hand. “Is that it? You don’t want anything else from me?”
William smiled weakly. “I want you to live well, Karla Morten.”
She hesitated for a moment, then stretched her hand out, grabbing onto his. As their palms touched, she felt something worm its way through her hand, down her arm, and crawl into her chest like an eel burrowing into her flesh. She jolted and yanked her hand away. “What was that?” She looked over herself but couldn’t find any changes.
“Sorry, and thank you.” He smiled, a genuine, bright smile that looked as if all of his worries had washed away. “I look forward to working with you, Karla.”
Karla blinked as a sudden white light erupted over her vision. The sight of the room faded, leaving spots in her eyes. The room had changed. The small, dingy bathroom from the house in Seattle she grew up in greeted her eyes.
“Karla! Are you okay sweetie?” Her mother’s voice, a sound she hadn’t heard in over twenty years echoed from downstairs.
----------------------------------------
Karla woke with a start, her artificial heart pounding. She never wished to live through that dream again. She glanced around, then up to a figure by her side. Delta stared at a panel he had connected to her I/O.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
“Oh! Good morning!” He jolted upright, managing to look contrite as he cradled the panel. “I, um, didn’t think you would dream!” He stared at her cheerfully. “I saw you twitching, and thought to plug you in to see if you asked for anything, but you were just talking in your sleep. Like a human would…”
“I am human you prick.” Karla wanted to stretch. Hell, she wanted to blink and yawn, but all she could do was move her head as she fully woke. “Where are we?”
“We’re…” he checked a display, “about an hour and a half out from the lab Olivia wanted you brought to. We’ll land and make sure you’re stable first.”
“Then you’ll interrogate me?”
“Uh… I mean, master is very practical. I don’t think she’ll see the value in interrogating you since you don’t seem to remember anything.”
“Dissection then.”
“Well…” Delta hesitated. “Maybe? A bit? But she’ll put you back together!”
Karla looked at him with the most condescending look she could muster. Since she had no face muscles, all she could manage was a blank stare. “How do you know I don’t have some kind of transmitter beaming back my location and everything you say to my boss somewhere? I could be leading people back to your master and you’d never know it.”
He shrugged. “I’d sense it. I can feel electricity and electromagnetic waves, and you aren’t putting off anything. You’re like a self-contained black hole to me. Even humans emit a little bit.”
“I could still bring you harm, you are far too defenseless.”
“You’re a torso.”
“And you’re a child.”
“Hey! I’m fourteen! I’m old enough to fight at least.”
Karla turned that over in her head. Child soldiers, great. America the land of child soldiers and gang warfare. She smacked her head against the seat. She froze, then snapped her attention to Delta, sending the chair beside her spinning. “The moon. What the fuck was that?”
“Huh? What about the moon?” He looked at the chair. “Did you just move that?”
She jerked her head side to side. “The moon! It’s broken!”
“Ah, yeah?”
Karla shook her head in frustration. “What happened to the goddamn moon?
“Uh, my master knows more about it, it happened ages ago…” He thought it over. “I mean, you know the creatures that came from the other side?”
“Other side?”
“Ah, wow. You don’t know anything do you?”
“Just explain it before I headbutt you forever.”
“Fine! Fine. So. The Upheaval. Gifts were introduced to certain people, and so was different types of energies and metals and minerals not seen on earth before. Neutron, electron, proton, and now the K-particle and the Z-particle, right? Whole new periodic table of elements and all that. Well, those had to come from somewhere, and some think that ‘elsewhere’ is another version of earth. A mirror, or a sister planet that existed right on top of our world. That’s why the land masses mostly didn’t change, but trees and beasts kind of appeared. Master believes they were somehow integrated, maybe forcefully merged with our world. Now, if earth was merged, and all creatures on it was merged, perhaps the moon and other planets were merged? Averaged out with this new energy inside of them? Apparently, either on our side, or the other side, something had changed the orbit and exact placement of one version of the moon, maybe both. When the merge happened, the two moons were so out of sync, they kind of just… shattered. The moon mostly kept together, but there are pieces that break off and trail behind.” He thought it over. “Apparently in several thousand years, we’ll have rings like Jupiter!”
Karla absorbed all of this. “Then supers were just… evolved from having new energies around?”
He nodded. “Kind of. A gift is almost like a random genetic mutation that allows one to utilize various energies in the atmosphere now. My Master says if this merging had happened in the middle ages, we would have had guys with flaming swords, or wizards and such. But with a gun? Well, nobody lives with a bullet in the head.”
“So technology made us all equal, huh?” Karla chuckled. A certain revolver creator would be quite happy at that.
“Kind of. There are plenty of people who utilize cybernetics to strengthen themselves, but only the gifted get the full effects. Our bodies are stronger, more adaptable to modifications. I mean, I’m talking to a torso right now.”
“I will bite you.”
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“You don’t have a mouth.”
Karla tried to look at her face, unsuccessfully. “I don’t?”
“No, you have like, a grill? An exhaust?” He leaned over. “Yeah, it’s piped into your artificial lungs. It’s like you are a brain, lungs, and heart, and that’s it. Really impressive honestly.”
“How so?”
“Well, that you seem to be taking this quite well. The other Inner Circle members all kinda freaked out when they woke up and blew themselves up. We’ve never been able to talk with one at length before. There was one a while back that apparently talked, but once they realized where they were, they detonated their bomb in their head.”
“It’s a shock to realize you’ve been alive for over two hundred and fifty years.”
Delta blinked for a few moments, then jumped to his feet. “Wait, you mean you were alive during the Upheaval? You were there as a… like, regular human?”
“Yes I was a regular human! I lived through the Upheaval, and was doing fine till William Stoke came to my apartment. I thought he was there to recruit me into his hero group, the Southern Priests.”
“The Southern Priests was a hero group? Not religious?”
“I mean, they had the priest in their name, but they seemed pretty upright. Nothing too strange from them at the time. I thought it was just an edgy name.”
“So you were around during the second Upheaval… What was that like?”
“Second?”
“Like, when the other beasts came. They crawled out of the ground, breaking buildings, highways and such?”
She shook her head. “I was alive, but not conscious. I only remember yesterday when you guys shot me to bits. Since Stoke apparently died.”
“Ah, some news about that. Apparently the Church has made an official statement about it. They’ve confirmed he’s dead.”
“So he is dead…” she sighed in relief. “Thank fuck for that. If he was still around, I don’t think I’d be able to rest.”
The two sat in a cramped silence for a while. Karla focusing on the hateful bastard Stoke, Delta on the hundreds of questions he wanted to ask. “So…” he started. “Before the Upheaval—”
He was cut off by a heavy lurch of the ship. A small alarm began blaring. The ship tilted down, gaining speed as it dropped towards a wide forest below.
Delta punched in some command and the ship leveled off. He looked over several gauges, all flashing red.“Oh no… I think the other tank was hit. We weren’t losing pressure too fast, but maybe there was a leak.”
“Will we make it?”
“I’ll have to glide it in and hope the last of the fuel can get us into the canyon safely. Alright, buckle up! Oh, right.” He looked her over, then cinched the straps tighter. He climbed into the forward-most seat and buckled himself in. Once he had control, he began keeping the craft in an uneasy drift, floating the shuttle towards a sharp drop-off in the distance. As they drew closer, the drop grew wider, and branched into a wide canyon.
Karla squinted. “Is that the Grand Canyon?”
“Hey! You know it!”
“Of course I do! I went there as a kid.”
Delta frowned. “It’s hard to imagine the Witch as a kid, honestly.”
“I’m not a boogyman.”
“You kind of was when I was growing up. You were one of the strongest soldiers in the Inner Circle, and the most feared. When we heard you were on the battlefield for the first time in years, many clan members second-guessed coming up here to defend, probably thinking this was some kind of deadly hammer blow come to put an end to the Clans. Turns out, it was just Stoke going senile and committing his best forces into a trap.” He shrugged.
Karla felt a bit of strange pride at his description of her. She knew she had telekinesis and a perception power, but how those could be used on the battlefield she didn’t know. Her abilities were always better suited to construction or heavy-lifting than combat. When she was first exploring her powers, she had swung around a group of sticks as if they were swords, she imagined herself as some kind of wielder of many flying weapons, a terror to her foes. Their slow, awkward movements put an end to that fantasy rather quickly.
The shuttle shook again. A digital voice spoke up. “Airspeed. Airspeed.”
Delta edged the nose down slightly, holding onto as much height as he could. The craft drifted down, just over the rim, and then into the air above the canyon. Below, the land opened up, suddenly dropping from the highlands that surrounded it. She had hiked into the canyon with her parents when she was young, complaining the entire way, but she remembered how beautiful the rock formations were, and how barren the walls were of life aside from the occasional bird. As the drifted lower, she saw the canyon had undergone a drastic change. The rocks were the same, but all along the canyon walls were large, white crystals. They seemed to grow out of the cliff faces like a moss, the smaller, finer crystals gathered around larger, massive pieces.
As the ship began to dip beneath the edges of the canyon, she could now see creatures who perched and circled the formations of crystals. Birds. Thousands and thousands of birds. Some were small, others the size of a sedan, but they all flocked around these crystals. Their beaks sturdy and curved, designed for breaking up the hard rocks. She watched a large orange bird breaking into a crystal the size of her old apartment by slamming a bony forehead into the side over and over like a woodpecker.
“This is the Grand Canyon? You’re sure?” she texted. Delta didn’t notice, he was entirely focused on controlling the ship down a specific branch of the canyon.
He eased the craft between the walls, bleeding airspeed as they approached what appeared to be a dead end. He pulled a lever and was rewarded with a clunk. “Oh, the landing gear was partially out, and also maybe broken…” He turned back. “This will be a bumpy landing.”
Karla couldn’t do anything, so she just sat there, shaking in her seat as the air buffeted the small shuttle. The cliff face drew closer and closer, but Delta didn’t let up, seemingly ready to smash it into the cliff to stop if need be. He waited till the last moment to flare the wings and bleed of the last bit of speed, touching down with the rear landing gear and promptly tumbling the craft over onto its side. Softball-sized stones ground against the shuttle’s side, tearing a stubby wing off, as well as half the craft’s skin. Karla watched as the ship was ground down around her, waiting for the craft to stop. It did, once it hit the cliff face.
Delta coughed at the dust and smoke that filled the cabin. Karla got a minor warning about air quality, but her lungs seemed able to handle it without trouble.
“Kuack!” Delta coughed as he waved dust away from his face. “You okay?”
She nodded. It wasn’t like she had limbs to break or organs to damage. “That’s your landing?”
“The ship was already damaged!” He unbuckled himself from the pilot’s seat and promptly fell to the side of the cabin. “I landed it in one piece, which is more than some could say!”
Karla rolled her eyes mentally. How was he so competent with mechanicals yet so inept at just existing?
Delta pulled on his harness which he had tied down to one wall, keeping it from becoming a heavy projectile in the crash. Once suited up, he unstrapped Karla and carried her to the rear cargo hatch, or what was left of it. The sheetmetal was crumpled and twisted, but a quick kick with Delta’s harness and it opened.
A deep red valley greeted her, with looming cliff walls that reached far overhead. She couldn’t be sure, but the walls seemed taller than she remembered. Down here, there were no crystals, only the shrubby grass and small trees she remembered from her youth. Delta looked around, stumbling as he turned.
“Did I go down the correct branch?” he looked up. “That should be right, this should be it, but…” He turned once again, finally finding what he was looking for. “There! Ah, good. I didn’t want to hike all day trying to find the right place.”
He jogged over to a small overhang in the cliff edge and set Karla onto the flat, grassy soil. It was hard. What looked like a soft wash of sand and gravel was actually a hard platform. She looked at the blades of grass that extended up through her chest, projections. Delta tapped at the back wall, searching for something.
“She’s changed it a bit…” He huffed. “There was a panel around here? But now… oh.” His hand found a small hole. He pulled out an I/O cable and plugged it in. There was a moment of silence, and then the platform began to lower. Delta scrambled to pull his cable out of the rock before it was ripped out. “Ah! She always does this! Why does she have to make it so complicated?”
“Security, little boy.” A thin voice called out below. Carla peered to one side, only seeing a small room with multiple benches and displays. One had the wreck of the shuttle frozen on its screen. “And that, is a complete mess. You just left the wreck outside? You were supposed to bring it inside via the lift.”
“Well, yeah, you said that.” Delta rubbed his head. “But the shuttle’s so damaged, I’d have to drag it piece by piece.”
“Then that’s what you’ll do. Place the specimen over here, then bring the remains of my shuttle to B4. I’ve placed a bin for you.”
Delta huffed, but picked up Karla anyways. She could now see the owner of the voice. A short, thin woman who looked to be in her late thirties, though that would be deceiving as her face was entirely mechanical. A mask of metal and synthetic flesh, she looked beautiful, yet haunting as Karla drew near.
“Um, this is Karla, and she—”
The woman held up a hand. “Go, you have your task. You will fill me in after.”
“Guh, fine.” Delta deflated as he trudged back to the lift.
Once the lift was out of sight, the woman finally looked over Karla with a grin. “Hello there, Karla Morten.”