The orb bore an uncertain weight that threatened to topple her. She held it close to her core, its radiance seeping through her naval.
The children were dancing and jumping around, their chatter full of bravado for battles to come.
She was invisible.
Duy and Lasha walked through her as they whispered strategy to each other. A bright heat grew in her palm and flowed through her veins, accessing every cell of her body. At last, she gazed upon the orb. It looked like a common glass marble, yet it demanded every fiber of her consciousness. Deep down inside, a spark, a flame, a fire, an explosion, a war. She put the back of her hand to her forehead, and the heat seared into her brain. The orb vibrated, and she vibrated with it at a frequency that would shatter crystal, that would shatter sanity. Her arm ached, and she feared losing the orb, feared that she would let it fly up, up, and away, for no gravity could tether it. No person could possess it.
Bringing her fist to her mouth, she slipped the stone inside. She felt it on her tongue, on her teeth. She swallowed hard, forcing it down.
All motion ceased.
The ship city above halted its journey across the earth. Lasha’s jump, full of excitement, frozen in midair. Duy’s laughter caught in his throat, his glittering eyes fixed on his best friend. The Black Scorpion himself paused in flight from the ledge to the floor, a battle cry on his lips, his naked torso rippling with lean, young muscle. A boy mid-backflip, half-transformed from bobcat to human—above the navel he was human, and below still a bobcat, his long, blond hair flung wildly like fire. It was Stefan, who had journeyed with her through the Dreamer’s portal. All of it hung in suspended animation, like a moment captured in amber.
The underbelly of the craft extended from horizon to horizon. An outer hull of a material that seemed a mix of leather, metal, and stone. It was a mammoth, living machine.
She closed her eyes and saw the orb. It blinded her, pulling her into a darkness where she lost her body. In the darkness of the mind, the stillness between thoughts, there was her homeland.
America—the Asiatowns pulsing with light—her new vision takes her down to the very streets and their inhabitants—people who have nowhere else to go because their worlds have been washed away by the oceans—a caravan of Gretas, those women bundled in discarded clothing, holding out their blinking dishes in mute alms for Mother Earth—the Escape addicts from every walk of life popping the little vials of color, taking the spin of their lives, trying to make it rich and famous while they are flying high and, if lucky, making enough to advance on the ride toward the heaven of L21 before insanity leaves them clawing out their eyes in some deserted alleyway—battle lines have been drawn—a woman in fatigues inside her hovel of brick beneath the city streets conducts a final inspection of a rifle before placing it on the rack with the dozens of others, Nazi flag tacked on one wall, Old Glory on the other, the computer on the desk plays the voice of a pastor preaching up a firestorm—the world has changed and it is time to do something about it, shouts a woman on a slummy, ubiquitous street corner of some disaffected city, a red bandanna wrapped around wild hair, her pontifications about the haves and the have-nots reaching out from her sidewalk pedestal to disinterested passersby—maybe it’s her scramble paint and black attire, she looks like the jester in a medieval court, her jacket is lined with plastic explosives tied into a radio detonator controlled by a man at a distant location monitoring her through his VR set, watching her sweat, watching her fear as her diatribe turns to salvation, and she thinks of her sister, whom she will never see again, drops to her knees in prayer, and she is singing now, singing when the fire comes.
The vision shifts.
She is behind the eyes of a predator looking through a snowfall on a sheriff’s station in a little town somewhere in the sticks. There is a great hunger in her heart, a need and desire to get to the boy hiding inside that building, for he has disturbed the Veil with his enchantment. And she is not alone. In the blizzard, there are others. In this mountain valley, there are others. Across the land from sea to sea, there are others, waiting in the shadows until they feel a disruption that they can follow back to the source.
Kids in an industrial town. A teenage pregnancy. Fugitives on the run. A boy with a broken heart. A woman’s fur coat stained with blood—it is not her blood. They are fleeing in an antique car made before the days of artificial intelligence. With them is the Maji and his blue guitar.
These and a ten thousand others surged through her mind’s eye like a wild, unrelenting river. Just as she thought she could bear no more, that sanity and flesh would tear, the sky opened, and the armada swallowed it all.
The orb brought her back to the rooftop. The ship had passed. The children had calmed, sleeping in each other’s arms for comfort.
The girl and the boy spoke in whispers near the pool. They did not notice her presence, as if she were a ghost. He pulled the girl into the water and to his lips. They were young and hungry. Perhaps they did not have tomorrow.
She backed away to give them privacy.
On the other side of the deck, she leaned on the rail and watched the city. The fissure in the sky still cast its glowing blood out among the stars. Now and then, a streak lit up the night. She knew it was something else. The city was quiet. A motorcycle passed. A shout rang out from the darkened streets below, and then a scream. A while later, another scream from farther away, and then another. The night was alive with the sirens of sorrow.
The orb possessed her once more. Her vision magnified into flawless resolution.
A little house surrounded by a white picket fence next to a dark lane. A child sprints down the walk of the verdant lawn and out into the street, where a shadow moves toward it, rips it up, and sinks its fangs into its neck. It sucks the blood until the heart stops, and the beast, half-sated, slouches toward the darkness.
Drained body. Lifeless on the cement. The man with the angry gun of battlefield quality kneels over his child. A mother’s cry rips the shroud of silence, followed by the falsetto of a sibling’s wail.
She watches with eagle eyes through hours of silence. The grieving family, at last sedated, sleeps on the living room floor.
The child placed gently on the sofa, covered from head to toe by a blanket. A foot twitches. A finger moves. First one limb and then another, until it is sitting up. It stands gazing down on its sleeping family. Then it peers out the window as if it is being called. It is the same child, risen again, though its once tawny skin now bears the unfortunate pallor of lavender. It moves through the house as if taking in this familial cradle one last time, stops in the bedroom to consider a teddy bear on the bed, but leaves it and slips out the door. Once on the road, it casts a final backward glance, as if relinquishing a memory, the most precious memory, forever into the waters of the past. Then it bolts, like a frenzied animal, into the shadow of the street, vanishing forever.
The vision receded, returning her to her own skin. Jane trembled at the burden of her knowing. Her body quaked of its own volition.
The boy, hand in hand with the girl, garbed in droplets of pool water, helped her lie down on the deck. She shivered for the cold, the dead. They pressed their bodies against hers. The orb rose out of her, into her throat, into her mouth, and she vomited it onto the deck.
The boy cleaned it in the pool and dropped it back into the leather purse.
They slept that night on the rooftop, the scar of heaven illuminating them, indifferent, having disseminated its plague.
The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
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In the weeks following the harbinger’s passage over the city, the wound of Chaos grew no larger, yet Jane did not leave the safety of the Majestic. She used her time to remember her past life with greater accuracy, attributing her vivid recall to her experience with the orb. She wrote her autobiography, including her young girlhood and the fairytales her grandfather would tell her around that Allagash campfire. She detailed her military education, the war years, and the Battle of Tbilisi. And she concluded with falling in love with Christy, her political awakening, and winning the presidency. When she finished, she closed the notebooks and slipped them into the library shelves on the fifth floor.
One of the Maji was always with her. Usually, Duy and Lasha practicing their bestiaries. They’d taken to changing into goats and balancing on the furniture in a frantic game of King of the Hill. The loser was forced to become a tortoise and carry the victorious kid across the room, perched atop his shell while bleating in his ear.
Some nights, when Ciris was not with the Black Scorpion, she would come and sleep on the sofa. Thuy brought them chay in the mornings, and occasionally, she joined them.
Thuy had no marvelous superpowers, aside from her love for Stefan and the ability to divine some tangential aspects of the future from the iridescent patterns that shimmered in the milky drink.
“There is sorrow for everyone,” she said, holding the chalice up to the sunlight. “Ciris, for you, there is also vengeance. Queen Jane, for you…” She didn’t finish.
“What is it, girl? Tell me.”
She shook her head but finally relented. “For you, there is… pain.”
After that, she made them promise that they would never ask again about the future.
Reports of mysterious disappearances from the city began to emerge. The streets grew quiet and desolate. Each night, cries of sorrow would ascend like familiar ghosts. The Black Scorpion commanded the Maji to venture out only when necessary and always in teams for protection. Much to their chagrin, Duy and Lasha were barred from leaving the boundaries of the Majestic, neither by wing nor by foot, hoof, paw, or scale. Ciris took great pains to be explicit.
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“Queen! Queen!”
“M’lady! M’lady!”
It was Duy and Lasha pounding on her door. She flung it open. Tears poured down their cheeks.
She knelt, gathering them into her arms. “Tell me. What happened?”
“He’s hurt! He’s going to die. He’s going to change,” cried Duy.
“Who? Tell me.” She caressed the boy’s face as he tried to catch his breath between sobs.
“Nawt of the night watch!” He sobbed.
Her guardian in the dark, the one who brought her music and songs, who wanted to be a rapper when he grew up.
“Take me,” she said.
The gathering was on the rooftop. The frail form of the dark boy was bleeding within a circle of his friends. They’d been out collecting chay flowers in the fields beyond the bridge. They’d split up to save time. The bloodsucker had come out of the jungle and cornered him in the vines. By the time his friends had managed to penetrate the alien armor and kill it, the creature had already inflicted its damage.
Ciris returned with a doctor who regarded the child lovingly as if he were his own grandson but said, in the end, there was nothing to be done. The poison was at work. He had dozens more cases like this to deal with across the city. Before he left, he warned, “If he rises… Well, some families are choosing to put them down. Others let them go and run off.”
The boy languished for three days. No one slept or ate. During the day, they listened to his cries of pain. During the night, they watched him twist and turn in the throes of nightmares. They gave him drugs for sleep, and they watched the stars and the fissure in space. Nawt, like a thunderstorm on a hot summer day, was loved by all.
The Black Scorpion stood vigil, gently fanning him with his wings. He set the orb on Nawt’s chest, prayed, and waited, but the stone did nothing.
On the night of the third day, Nawt passed into the stillness. The older boys had constructed a pyre on which they placed his body. It was the Black Scorpion who agreed to strike the match.
There was an edge in the air as he approached. He looked down on the child, trying to be brave and not to cry.
“Who were his mother and father?” asked the winged boy.
“No mother. No father,” said someone from the crowd.
“Who are his people?”
There was a prolonged silence before Duy spoke timidly, “We are his people.”
“Yes,” said the Scorpion.
The young congregation sat or stood and looked on, some of them strong and stoic, some of them wiping their tears.
“Do not let him change,” shouted a strapping youth. “They took his life. They cannot have his body!”
The Black Scorpion stepped forward, a candle in his hand. Everyone held their breaths. He lifted the flame and then paused. He looked up at the hostile sky and tossed the candle into the pool.
“No,” he said, “I don’t know the mysteries of the Veil. Perhaps there is a cure. Maybe some Maji out there has a chant.”
At an indeterminate hour between midnight and twilight, Nawt’s body jerked.
All eyes were awake and unblinking.
Slowly, each limb began to flex, and the boy thrashed his head. Violet veins spread beneath his skin. He sat up and looked at all of them, his eyes completely black, like two dark voids.
“I need to go,” he said, his voice full of panic.
Nawt began pacing the rooftop, staring up at the sky. When he approached the exit to the stairs and elevator, the big boys blocked him off and wouldn’t let him pass.
“I need to go!” This time, his voice cut shrill against their ears. He lunged like a bullet through the air, his fangs going for the neck of little Duy, but he was intercepted at the last moment by his brothers.
Ciris was at this throat with a blade, but his jugular was already mangled.
“I… I don’t want to hurt my friends. Oh, God! I can feel the hunger of death! I am the hunger of death,” he cried. He covered his eyes with his hands, his fingernails grown long like spikes. “Please kill me. Please kill me.”
More blades materialized. Someone brandished an ax.
“Back, all!” shouted the Black Scorpion. He approached Nawt. “Let me take you away from here, little brother.” The boy was wide-eyed with fear. “Where can I take you?”
Nawt pointed out into the darkness beyond the city to the distant hills.
“Come, little brother. It’s me. How many times have I lifted you?”
“I will miss it,” said the boy. “I am afraid.”
“Come here. Don’t bite me.” He gathered the boy in his arms, and with a graceful flap of his wings, he was aloft and flying into the night.
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One morning Jane awoke to a rainbow of silk hovering in the air.
When Duy saw her, he exclaimed, “The Dreamer dreams!”
“The cellar, that’s where you need to be,” said the Black Scorpion. They took the stairs together from the top floor to the basement.
“The watch,” she said, “There’s something about it. I feel it beating in my heart.”
“It was a perfect crime,” he said, a smile on his face.
In a corner of the basement was the old, leather chair positioned before a crackling fire.
“The Viking,” said the Black Scorpion. “Please!”
She grasped his hand. “I will find him.”
Duy and Lasha clung to each other for comfort. She kissed them both, the changeling, and the tongues of fire.
Ciris stood proud. “Go, be a queen,” she said. “The promise is kept.”
Jane Allgood sat down in the chair, the fire hypnotic in her eyes. She could almost hear the shouts of the protesters.
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A solitary flame waved its last surrender from the bed of coals in that fireplace, in that little room of the Stalin Building. She was naked and the air was winter-cold. She stood; there was a familiar pain in her right leg. On the floor lay the tatters of her clothes, the briefcase beside them. She stooped and picked it up. A tingling circled the center of her chest, traveled to her shoulder, continued down her arm, and focused on her palm. Her vision blurred momentarily, then cleared, and the sensation passed.
The briefcase was heavy, a burden she would carry for the rest of her life.
She stopped at the archway to the hall and looked back at the room, barely lit, its peeling paint and crumbling architecture. She went to the door next to the fireplace, turned the knob, and pulled it open; the black, jagged face of that mysterious wall greeted and forbade her. She tried to remember, but all she could recall was a great blood moon rising over a darkened city populated by the faceless figures of a fading dream.
She limped her way down the long, dark hall. She needed to keep moving or she would freeze to death. She wandered through the nighttime dismal streets of the contamination zone until she stumbled across the sign with lights flashing over a skull and crossbones. She circled it for warmth. Her feet were numb, and she was drowsy. She knew her time was limited.
The vehicle approached. It pulled up next to her and rolled down its window.
“Madame President,” said the grizzled voice of a handsome soldier. “We’ve been looking for you, ma’am.”
She covered her breasts with her hands.
He wrapped a warm blanket around her and helped her into the vehicle.
“How long?” she asked.
“Forty-eight.”
“Weeks?”
“No, ma’am, hours. It’s been forty-eight hours since we lost contact. But you’re here now. You’re going to be okay. Let’s get you back to base.”
She looked up through the windshield at the starry sky. There was no fissure, no tear, no galactic armada ripping into their reality. A moon, nearly full, was rising in its silver light, and the world was still asleep.