“I thought you said you needed physical therapy.”
“You’re my new therapist.”
“I want you.”
“I love you.”
***
The earth fits her like a snug glove. Easy to bend, easy to control, with nothing more than her metaphysical hands and a little imagination.
She nudges the gear a couple of millimeters. The transfer of awareness is immediate, and she gasps, nearly overwhelmed at having a new sense added instantly. Vaguely, she registers Resma charging forward, wielding dual knives. Callista explodes into action and slams a leg into his shins, sending him sprawling. Liam brings the nearest guards to their knees, clutching at their heads while he grimaces against the backlash of his power, eyes pulsing silver.
The porcelain hums beneath Cora’s metaphysical fingers. Unlike the earth, the porcelain is scant, only an inch thick at most on both sides, sandwiching looser materials she can’t directly control. If she rips the porcelain out to fight, the floor will collapse, and they’ll plummet into the floor below. Too much risk.
Cora cracks off slivers of porcelain. They rise, wobble, and suddenly spear toward Resma. He ducks Callista’s punch and sweeps his arm down. Several slivers are struck down, but two pierce his thigh, and another clangs off his armor.
He groans, bracing his weight on his good leg. “We don’t want to hurt you,” he grunts, blocking another one of Callista’s swings. “You’re not the real target. Let us help you, and then we can provide anything you and your friends desire while you remain here as our guests.”
“I trusted you, Resma,” Cora says. She cracks the floor and frees more slivers of porcelain. They float mid-air, orienting their sharpest points at him. Several slivers waver as her focus slips. “I don’t want to hurt you more.”
“Then we can stop the fighting. There’s little point. Let us help.”
“Like you helped me?”
The voice, deep and ominous, emerges from beside him. A hulking, alien figure steps out of the wall. Its carapace flushes deep blue, bordering on black. Two scythe-like arms extend from its front. Four multi-jointed limbs protrude from its torso, armored and lethally sharp. Green membranes flutter between pieces of its carapace, releasing puffs of spores that catch the daylight and sparkle.
Molten gold swishes beneath the armored bones shielding its deep-set eyes like a hood. “Do you think I forgot?”
“You fought for them,” Resma spits out, backing away from both Callista and Raezu until his back meets a bookshelf. “Don’t fool yourself into thinking you can redeem your actions. They told me about what you did to that camp of our soldiers while they slept. They showed me the pictures.”
“I had no choice.” Raezu raises an arm and directs the sharp end at Resma. “Much like you and the rest forced me to obey.”
Several guards break past the doorway and fire searing bolts of fire, light, and electricity at Raezu. He snaps forward like a rubber band and tears into the guards, cutting through flesh with ease. His fluttering membranes twist and release clouds of hazy spores that envelop the guards and leave them writhing.
Callista seizes the moment to strike. Resma blocks two hits and returns a jab that sends her flying back. “Please,” Resma says, grunting as her next kick buckles his leg’s armor. “We can still make a deal.”
“Too late for that,” she sneers. She slams her fist into his chest plate. He’s sent flying out the door, smacking with a thunderclap of metal against the wall before he slumps against the wall, his eyes dimming.
“We need to get out,” Liam says, stumbling into Callista. She props him up as he blinks and extinguishes the silver light of his power. The parasite fades, though it squirms under Cora’s scorching attention.
“Follow me,” she says, turning a gear a fraction of the way and cracking the porcelain floor further. Tens of shards hover several feet into the air. With a simple command, exercised through her metaphysical self, the shards fall into a lazy orbit around her, their sharp points aimed forward. “Raezu!”
He bisects a guard and lifts a scythe-like arm, dripping a purplish milky liquid. “There are more. Let me go first. You showed me that not all the Allies are monsters.”
“Transients are the monsters,” Callista says, but her voice falls quiet when he prods at a mutilated corpse, slashed into ribbons.
“We have to stay together,” Liam grunts, raising his knife. “We have to get down. Callista, you can break the windows and get us out, can’t you?”
She shakes her head and protracts her claws. She looks almost feral, unleashed like a werewolf, teeth bared, hair flowing in a glorious mane of glossy black behind her muscular shoulders, arms raised and claws glinting black in the daylight.
“That’s a drop none of us will come back from. Except you.” She glances distastefully at Raezu, but he ignores her, poised at the edge of the yawning doorway. Curt shouts and sounds of boots mobilizing outside blast into their ears.
It’s almost too calm. The guards should be dumping their gifts into the tight room, or tearing down walls to reach the office, or demanding their surrender in their loud, nasally voices.
Cora freezes. “Where’s Obuch?”
Long, rope-like tendrils wrap around her arms and chest. She can’t even scream out a warning before she’s lurched off her feet and past the doorway. Soldiers–not guards, those let the soldiers pass–stream out of the stairwells and set up defenses at the ends of each corridor. Yet more storm towards the room Raezu and her friends are in.
“You forgot about what I can do!” Cora shouts, and shatters the floor. Hundreds of shards join the storm of lethal sharpness orbiting her. Their tips turn serrated, their edges angular, their aerodynamic efficiency increased. Guards raise shields like the Transients had back in the forest, a curtain of invisibility that ripples when the shards strike their boundary.
Yet she peels the hospital floors like an apple, making them stumble right into the shards she wedges into their heels.
Howls and screeches deafen her. Obuch, still invisible, releases his tendrils, and Cora immediately stabs the air where he should be. Dozens of shards swipe randomly, spraying three hundred sixty degrees around her.
“You can still make the right choice,” a disembodied voice says above her before tendrils snatch her and squish her against Obuch’s dense, hardened abdomen as he flies. She shrieks, commanding the shards to graze the ceiling and spear like missiles toward him.
Several guards raise their arms and cast pulses of something that steals her control away. The shards drop lifelessly, shattering on the remains of the floor. Behind her, several guards smash into the wall, coating them in blood.
Raezu emerges first, his anvil-shaped head scraping the ceiling. He makes eye contact with Cora the moment before the positioned guards open fire, twisting tendrils of combined energy that surge into a blinding, suffocating stream of condensed light. It crashes into him and disintegrates his head, limbs, and eats away at most of his torso before the onslaught stops and his cooked remains drop to the floor.
Her heart twinges at his death. That could’ve easily been Liam or Callista, and he chose to go first, enemy or not.
But without him…
Oh, no.
Obuch lurches into the main hospital corridor, clearing the sharp corner, and the last thing she sees are the soldiers storming the room.
“No!”
Cora twists another gear and rips the porcelain beneath them. With a quick twist of her metaphysical fingers, she directs spikes of porcelain upward, straight at Obuch.
Soldiers shoot down the spikes, but she thrusts her awareness into the ceiling, the compact rock making it up, and ruptures the ceiling. Several spikes connect with soft flesh, and suddenly the weightless sensation stops.
Obuch plummets and crashes onto the floor. Cora slams on the ground, banging her elbow and knocking her head against a wall.
The spikes drop lifelessly. Her head aches, her vision swims, and her ears ring endlessly. She crawls a few feet before collapsing on her side, dry-heaving, muscles contracting and tissues rupturing as her awareness slips back into her own body and she suffers the consequences of her power.
Foreign tendrils wrestle her arms behind her back and tie them together. They stuff a balled-up cloth into her mouth and tie a knot behind her head. More tendrils bind her ankles together, the rope scraping her skin raw as she tries to rip her way free. A blindfold is tied over her eyes, and then she truly panics, writhing against her restraints, sobbing like the crazy girl she is.
Her head pounds. Her heart feels like it’s going to explode. She can barely breathe from the blood dripping out her nose, and her mouth is gagged, and she can’t breathe.
She can’t breathe. She screams into the gag, biting down hard, while somebody presses a cloth down on her nose. She slips back into her metaphysical self and reaches for the ceiling, but finds somebody else beat her to the gears, their shadowy profile resting tendrils on the ones she needs and keeping them beyond reach.
Consciousness rushes back to her flailing body, and she’s losing it fast. Her chest burns. Cora can’t breathe, can’t breathe! Tears trickle down her cheeks. She shrieks and strains against tendrils keeping her immobilized while she’s starved of air, precious air that she needs she needs air she needs–
Air!
I need air!
The parasite breaks free. Twin eyes expressing the cold depths of a million oceans blaze to life before Cora’s blindfolded eyes. A heart-shaped face fills the outline, then a sharp nose, high cheekbones, pouty lips, and a scattering of freckles more varied than the stars.
The parasite is every bit as pretty and relaxed as Cora is screaming and panicking. It takes a minute to catch her dimensional breath and calm just enough to open her mouth without shrieking.
You need help, and I can provide that help.
Her words do little to help Cora. She shakes and takes in her rope restraints, the cloth pressed over her nose, the blood that’s blocking her breathing and drowning her in her own blood.
“I’m not–I’ll never give you my body,” she croaks, glaring at the parasite. “I’d rather die than let you kill everybody.”
After what you’ve seen, after being captured and choked to unconsciousness, you dare think I do what I do mindlessly, like some machine? The parasite shakes her head. Her wavy hair bounces over her shoulders. I thought you learned.
“I’m tired of all this cryptic bullshit,” Cora seethes. “I’m tired of being treated like trash. I thought I could trust them. They’re the same as you. Complete, untrustable assholes. Evil people. Caring only for themselves.”
Then we are two sides of the same coin, no?
She stares off into the darkness, defeated. “What does that mean?”
You tire of the cryptic bullshit. So you went out and consulted sources that flipped your world-view and drove you to rage.
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
I did not tell you everything because you had no reason to trust me. I hated you, you know. The parasite on her back. Her hair falls like a curtain. Her lips part and she releases a slow, heavy sigh, chest deflating and palms turning upward. You were so stupid and weak. So naïve. You blamed yourself for everything and I hated it because I heard every thought you had. I felt every emotion you felt. I hated you because you were a weak, sniveling, pathetic excuse for a girl who thought she could conquer the world. Once you had the rug ripped right under your sorry little feet, you faltered. And I hated you for it. It was disgusting how you kept mourning the loss of your friendship, when you got everything you could ask for. You had the new beginning you always wanted, and instead of appreciating the fucking miracles you were given, you spent weeks destroying yourself, always mourning what could’ve been instead of focusing on what would’ve happened after.
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
Cora stares at the parasite. “Wait… you mean–”
I was there from the beginning, honey. Her lips part wide into a shark’s grin, though Cora glimpses one side. The parasite raises an arm and lets it flop onto her chest. From the moment your sorry little behind arrived at the mine. I was there. She turns her head and flashes a smile, though it doesn’t reach her eyes. They twinkle with smug superiority instead. Every thought, every dream, every ambition and failure you experienced, I was there. I watched you obsess over the box, and you were proving my choice right every day. Before you had that ridiculous fight, I respected you. You had ambition. You had intelligence. I picked you because unlike everybody else in that sorry little party, even your Mari, you reminded me of myself. You lacked purpose in life, and you wandered with a meaningless existence, but you carried those glorious seeds that you sowed after you discovered the box.
“No… I–I’m nothing like you,” Cora whispers, shaking her head. “You’re a monster. You destroyed all those worlds. You’re fucking evil. You were going to trick me and steal my body.” She drops her gaze and focuses on an area of pitch blackness. “I’d never do that.”
Even after what they did to you?
The parasite’s voice is as cold and unyielding as steel. Cora shivers.
Think, Cora. Remember that ambition that drove you to research the box. So much of what you did was ultimately useless, but you learned something important from the rest, didn’t you?
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
You do know. You learned the moment you saw the doctor’s diagrams. Cora suspected it. That seemingly endless well of power had to have had a source. She never found it, but that’s because the source existed inside her the whole time. Not the box. The box was just a vessel, a conduit. With the parasite wrestled under control, that means the source is Cora. Which means the network of Cenarians that conspired to bring her to the governor want her alive. Yes. Good girl. It’s the reason I encouraged you to investigate a little more. It always ties back to the box in the end, no matter what you try.
“You didn’t encourage shit! We were going to fight the Transients anyway, and when Liam suggested it I thought it’d be better to do it right then and there.”
You don’t understand. Without that seed of doubt, you would’ve come up with an excuse to wait. You would’ve claimed it was for his health, or to wait and plan, and then you’d delay the inevitable. You would’ve never found the doctor’s office, and you would’ve never been here. You would’ve been in the governor’s palace instead, blindly following his procedure.
Cora shakes her head. “That’s not true.”
Don’t lie to yourself, Cora. I’m integrated with you, and I know when you’re lying.
Fuck. Fuck. She starts hyperventilating again, eyes growing moist, chest constricting. Her heart hammers against her sore ribs. The parasite’s rooted far, far deeper than she ever expected. There’s no privacy. There’s nothing at all she can do to block it. She’ll always be there, wedged into Cora’s mind like a leech, sucking out her life and experiences, tasting them for herself.
Don’t act so surprised. You felt or knew nothing until I told you.
“And now I can’t forget!” Cora can barely speak. Her throat is tight. She wants to vomit again, purging her stomach and her mind of the parasite’s influence. It’s entrenched into her. “Why? Why did you do this to me? Why are you doing this?”
That is the first intelligent question you’ve asked since I integrated myself into you. Why, indeed? The parasite floats onto her feet. She turns on her heels and paces further away, reducing her outline to a fraction of her actual height. Am I an angel or a devil? A hero or a destroyer of worlds?
“Shut the fuck up!” Cora screeches. She shakes. “I want nothing to do with you! Nothing! You’re the stupid reason why they’re after me!”
Oh, honey.
“Shut the fuck up! Answer the stupid question!”
I did not tell you everything there is to know because I wanted you to find out and experience what I experienced thirty-six years ago. I wanted you to experience the betrayal of the Muschians.
Cora’s anger snuffs out. She stares at the dim profile of the parasite, whose back is turned, arms clasped behind her back.
We are two sides of the same coin, Cora.
And then the bubble bursts.
Cold dread drowns her failing lungs. Burning white anger fights back, rushing past her bloodstream and seeping into every cell composing her entire being.
Cora howls, straining against her bonds. Skin chafes and burns beneath the taut rope. Muscles cramp beneath her tremendous strain. She wrenches her head away and gasps before the cloth clamps over her nose, but she pulls and pulls and pulls.
Her muffled hearing catches a series of shouts and then the quick discharge of numerous gifts bombarding some unknown assailant. Screams follow, and chunks of flesh thump on the ground. The tendrils pressing the cloth down suddenly disappear, and somebody cuts the ropes free.
She rips off her blindfold and undoes the knot before throwing the gag onto the floor. The light is bright and startling. It takes her several moments to realize that the figure looming over her is none other than Raezu, newly regenerated, flicking off streams of pale blood clinging to his scythe arms.
“Raezu?”
He lowers his anvil-shaped head. “Liam and Callista are trapped. They need our help.”
“Why?” Her head throbs at the memory of the parasite. That’s a lot of unpacking she’ll have to do later, though she curdles at the reminder that the parasite has been there since the start. That it’s always been there. But more important matters await. “Why are you helping us?”
“You saved me from my bindings. So now I save you.”
He sounds too similar to Callista. She spoke similar words back in the forest, though the circumstances had been different, and she’d originally only attacked out of paranoia, fear, and self-defense.
Too disgustingly similar to Callista. Cora shouldn’t empathize with the Transient that spied on her and participated in the sick network of Cenarians aiming to capture her.
But she does, and she resigns herself to the fact he’ll be there.
Cora glances at the bodies and snarls. “Then let’s go.”
The hallways are slick with the same pale blood of the Cenarians. Bodies are heaped against the walls, diced open, organs protruding through slit body cavities and heads lolling where lethal blades had nearly decapitated them. A few times, she kicks lifeless mushroom heads aside, and her resolve weakens.
The gruesome display is sickening. Nauseating. The stench of death sneaks past her clotted nose and makes her recoil. It’s so much death. These people spent their lives trying to capture her.
Maybe they thought she was a world-ending threat. Maybe the people who want to capture her lied to the guards and soldiers, convincing them that she had to be captured at any cost.
Cora had impaled their heels with porcelain shards, and then she’d only reinforced their beliefs, proving them right that she is the monster they set out to stop.
She feels sick.
Distant shouts grow clearer as they approach the stairwell. Back to back, Cora finds Liam and Callista trading blows with the swarms of soldiers rushing up the stairwell. Several times, his knife slashes open Cenarian faces, only for armored root-balls of fists to swing and narrowly miss his chest. Callista shoves soldiers back, denting armor where her hands connect, and slicing open exposed flesh where she drags her claws.
They’re both panting, chests heaving, eyes frenzied. Callista notices Cora first, her expression lighting up, giving a soldier a fraction of a second to close the gap and shove her back. She’s sent sprawling on the floor, seconds before the Cenarians rush up the stairs and descend on Liam like wolves.
“Stop!” Cora bellows, dipping her awareness into her metaphysical self. The figure is still there, blocking her access, but she stomps her foot down and elbows it out of the way. Her nails scrape against gears and twist them.
Immediately, her sprawling awareness returns, and it encompasses the entire hospital. She’s dimly aware of the hundreds of feet pounding the hospital floors, rushing toward her location. She’s just barely aware of the hundreds more waiting outside, generating shields and enclosing the entire hospital in several layers of glimmering protection.
But that’s not what matters at the moment. She rips the handrails out of the walls and bends them at ninety-degree angles, then shoves them between Liam and the soldiers and yanks.
The bars propel themselves backwards, and soldiers are thrown backwards by the sudden change in momentum, crashing down the stairs. The unlucky few caught by the handrails are bisected against the walls, the handrails blowing chunks out of the walls.
“You’re not going to capture any of us!” She twists the handrails and snaps them into foot-long segments. “You’re not going to hurt me or my friends ever again!”
Dozens of segments spear downward and impale the soldiers stupid enough to attempt a resistance. Their bodies go flying, pinned to the walls, losing tons of blood that splatters out the puncture wounds and drips into a rapidly growing river flowing down the stairs.
“You did better than I ever could,” Raezu says, unfurling his arms. “I lost a lot of body segments, but there were plenty of meals to fuel my transformations.”
Cora ignores the implications of his statement. “There’s a lot more coming to us. I don’t think they’ll stop until they capture us.”
“Those lousy bastards,” Callista snarls, and Liam grabs her shoulder, furrowing his eyebrows.
“We have to fight smart. Our best bet is getting the fuck out of here and into the woods.” He scrunches his nose and toes at a nearby body, slowly oozing fluids. “Scratch that. It’s our only choice.”
“They’re here,” Cora says, moments before the first soldiers appear at the far end of the hallway.
“They’ll never stop.” Raezu positions himself before everybody else, raising his scythe arms, and unfurling his legs into a crouching stance. “It was like this in Uklut. The Muschian division of the Allies fought ferociously, no matter how many of their numbers were cut down, until they achieved their objectives.”
“I don’t think we’ll need to worry,” Cora says. She thrusts her full self into her metaphysical body and pours every last bit of strength into turning as many gears as she can. Her bones shatter, fingers split, muscles tear, ligaments snap, and nerves flay, but the system is set into motion.
Somewhere deep beneath the hospital, Cora seizes control over a vast chunk of land.
Torrents of information flood her tiny, insignificant skull. The overflow is almost too much to handle, straining her consciousness to the edge of its limits, losing her sense of who she is and what she’s observing. The observed takes the property of the observer, and the observer becomes the observed.
Unity. Duality. Boundaries blur. A twitch of her fingers may as well be a quake in the bedrock. The gentle pulsing of groundwater against earth particles is indistinguishable from the rush of adrenaline sustaining her heart at over two hundred beats per minute.
She is everything, and she is nothing. Even the vast mycelium networks entrenched into the earth can’t hope to spread into the impossible enormity of the planet. Rock goes deeper and deeper, plunging past her zone of awareness, and it scares her. She still bleeds, and she still seizes on the floor, but if she had no physical body to constrain her, Cora can’t imagine how much further still her awareness could go.
She could try to push herself farther, encroach upon the earth beneath Cenari.
Too much. Too much! Her metaphysical self jerks back burning fingers. While she lives, her limits will hold her back. She can be stronger than any sentient on any planet, and she can fight against the Empire, but it will never be enough.
The parasite laughs, though it sounds strained and sad. All that poor facsimile of mocking glee shreds Cora’s metaphysical eardrums. She lurches back into reality, real reality, trembling with wasted potential energy. She can feel it threatening to blast her cells into puree. The power is too much for her feeble, failing body. It has to go somewhere, but she can’t aim it at the floor, it’s too much, nor at the soldiers, the power will blast straight through and collapse the hospital.
The soldiers launch a blinding assault of heat, light, and sound. Callista and Liam rush into the stairwell behind Raezu, who spreads his arms to cover the worst of the blast. The rest hide behind their armor, the cowards, while he and Cora stand out in the open, ready to fight the world.
Armor. Metal. The creation of metal is a fine process, extracting the base elements from mountains of rock. Cora controls the earth. The earth includes the trace elements that compose the earth and form the metal protecting the guards.
Her awareness shrinks to the atomic level. She can feel it more than see it, the tightly woven patterns of elemental atoms interlocked into the illusion of metal.
Because that’s what it is. An illusion, at least to her power.
A slight adjustment of a gear, and the brimming power flows out of her body and jumps into their armor. She twists the molecules like putty, breaking their bonds, and the armor changes, rippling and wavering. The metal becomes something else entirely, but it’s not enough. She needs to hurt the guards, kill them, before they capture her. So she reaches into the mess of molecules and combines the pieces into something better, something stronger, something nobody in the world will be prepared to witness.
Except for the fathomless icy eyes watching a miracle unfold.
Cora’s ultimate creation, her ultimate power, the power to
Unbind.
Something must be wrong, because the air plummets tens of degrees. Liam raises an arm toward her, his breath puffing out in white clouds. “Cora–”
Callista grabs Liam by the waist, twists on her heels, and shatters the stairwell’s window. She leaps out, holding him to her chest, but she’s too slow. Everybody is too slow. The armor condenses, the atoms within smash into each other and reach a higher density, and the excess energy has nowhere to go but out.
The soldiers are engulfed in a storm of blinding white light.
Cora doesn’t get the chance to snap back into her body before the unbinding completes and the power of the atom and her rage incarnate unleashes their fury.