“How–what is this? Alex, what is this?”

You first.”

Alex…”

“Tada!”

***

Somewhere deep beneath the hospital, a throb of subconscious awareness rattles the bedrock. Fissures split open. Thousands of tons of rock compact into a monolithic slab. Deeper forces push the slab upwards, and the surrounding rock squeezes inward, pushing the slab further still.

The reaction continues, the squeezing and compressing of rock, until the slab shoots toward the surface. Like a cork popped out of a wine bottle, the slab breaks past the surface. Clouds of dirt spray outward. A horrible crack and a dimming of light is all the remaining hospital inhabitants get before the slab pierces the side of the hospital and cleaves it in half.

A nuclear heartbeat of unimaginable power throbs, and light blasts the slab. Rock disintegrates and rapidly regenerates, replaced by the ground spitting out the slab higher still. Several floors start to collapse, starting from the top, while the slab continues its race toward the skies.

Sections of rock flake off the rising slab and cocoon the core source of its new life. As the first sentient people scream and perish beneath debris, or try to escape the crumbling, desecrated corpse of the formerly life-giving hospital, while the floors continue collapsing and waves of endless energy blast the remains of the hospital, the protected core source stirs.

Cora awakens to stifling darkness and oppressive heat. A muffled roar shakes her surroundings. She blindly reaches out and touches rock, warm to the touch. Her limbs hurt. Her head feels stuffed with cotton. Blood dribbles freely from her nose, her ears, and ruptured tissues along her abdomen, but that’s the least of her worries.

Relentless assaults of coruscating energy lash at the rock and crack sections of the compact exterior. Blasts of pressurized air snap chunks off. Outside, the piercing screams of hundreds of tortured souls rise above the static roar.

Each and every one of those people’s deaths are all her fault.

Cora staggers, nauseous and dizzy. Her awareness slips sideways and she becomes dimly aware of the lack of hospital touching her protected cocoon. To her spatial senses, she’s floating in a void.

An abyss. She collapses to the ground and heaves. Bile burns her throat, and stringy mouthfuls of drool droops from her split bottom lip.

Those weren’t her thoughts. For the brief moment she’d manipulated atoms like putty and smashed them together, an alien joy had seized her. She’d watched herself fuse new elements, felt the plummeting temperature and frost beneath her boots.

Her greatest creation. Her ultimate power.

Icy blue eyes twinkle at the edge of her periphery. The parasite purses her lips and blows a mock kiss. The power of unbinding.

Cora lurches. Her stomach spasms, and her back arches, vertebrae crackling. She clenches her hands and shudders while her muscles cramp and her lungs hurt. Her chest aches. Her heart blasts against her ribcage.

“What did–what did you make me do?” she rasps, shutting her eyes. Losing herself amidst the cries, the screams, the rumble of the hospital’s collapse, and the quieting stillness of her consequences. The smashing of atoms. The special, dramatic flair of rage applied over the reaction that made it all possible. “What the fuck did you make me do!”

You did this. You. To Cora’s disgust, the parasite sounds almost proud. She claps her hands and strides toward the opposite side of Cora’s vision. After so much waiting, you’re proving my choice right. I thought you were a lost case. But you have the gift. It means I’m right.

“What are you talking about!” Cora shrieks, her vision blurring. She scrubs at her eyes and growls in frustration. She bunches up the fabric of her pants in her hands, grip tight, heart rate spiking.

Oh, don’t be so melodramatic. I hate how stupid it makes you look.

Cora listens to the fading echoes of the dying. The hospital’s rumbling is quiet. Her cocoon of rock is still holding strong, though the outside is peeling off in layers, exposing more exotic layers of sandwiched materials that resisted the equivalent of a star. She doesn’t want to look any further past the emptiness surrounding her. The hospital should be there, but the emptiness just continues, a vast gulf of nothingness where just minutes ago there had been something.

“It’s all my fault,” she squeaks out, burying her fingers into her hair. “I killed everybody.”

Affirmations require careful observations.

Cora shakes as she feels the last vestiges of power exit her body. The remnant of her strength holds her cocoon together and grants her just enough awareness to register every inch of her protective shell.

“They were right about me. About…” She scrubs at her eyes again and curls into a ball. “About you. About us.”

You have the greatest gift the grid has ever witnessed.

“You’re not an entity the way I think you are, right?” Cora can barely speak. Her throat is swollen and painful. She feels sick and ugly. Inside her shell of sandwiched rock layers, the silence is screaming at her, a harsh, grating feedback that cuts out to be replaced by the screams, so many screams, she’d heard.

Can still hear. A few screams rise at the edge of perception. They’re so low she could pretend they’re part of the hallucinations, a brain ghost haunting her.

But they’re not. She killed so many people. The events of the past few hours catch up to her and she gasps for air, hyperventilating. “Oh my God,” she whispers, digging her fingers into the cracks on the floor. “What did I do? What did I do?”

What you had to do. What you have to keep doing until your enemies are dead.

“You’re not an entity the way I think you are,” Cora repeats, struggling to breathe. She chokes out the next few words before sucking in deep breaths. “You were just like me. You found the box and opened it thirty-six years ago.”

Your timeline is off, but yes, we are two sides of the same coin. The parasite crouches beside her and stretches her palm out. Small, dainty fingers reach toward her, and Cora lets her grab her hand, lying limp and useless at her side. You are so pathetically weak. But that can change.

“You’re a monster,” Cora says, though she can’t muster any force behind the words. Because she’s a monster, too.

Monsters of a feather flock together.

“No!” She jerks her hand away and moves as far as she can from the parasite. “I’m nothing like you, you fucking monster. You tortured me. You tried to use me. You almost tricked me into giving you my body, so what, you could control me and have a second chance to live?”

It’s not that simple, Cora.

“Wait. Why am I talking to you?” Cora laughs hysterically and tests the connections allowing the parasite to thrive. To project itself outward into her vision. “I don’t have to listen to you.”

Yet you put up with me for so long that I almost forgot you promised to destroy me if I ever made an appearance again.

“I am–”

Not. The parasite brushes her hair back and flicks her hand. Loops of color lash out and catch Cora around the wrist, though she feels nothing. You can’t go back to live whatever lie you want to believe. You have the gift of unbinding, and that makes you the inheritor of a vast legacy.

“Legacy?” She makes no effort to sever the connection. She can’t, anyway. The energy passing through the air is rich and deep, providing currents of safety that the parasite can nestle herself into and resist Cora’s prying fingers.

You have the founder’s powers now. All of them.

“What?” Cora sniffles and balls her hands up. She swallows a glob of mucus that leaves an icky trail down the back of her throat. “That sounds like a bunch of fantasy bullshit you’re making up to let me guard down. Again.”

The screams peter out. Muffled silence takes its place, and with it the memories of the first screams repeat, shrill and dissonant. She winces and massages her temples, but it’s no use. The agonizing sounds loop forever and ever and–

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

You have Arcego’s power.

The screams stop.

“The guy Callista said founded the Empire? The same guy who died and let Marpei ruin all the worlds?”

It can’t be real. Vaguely, Cora registers foreign powers assailing her cocoon. Temperature swings and concentrated blasts of different materials chip away at her shell. Shouts seep through the cracks and tickle her ears. Whatever the survivors are doing, they’re doing a poor job.

He was a god. But even gods are not invincible.

The parasite frowns and runs her hands through her hair. To Cora, it’s like her hands phased through her head, but the effect quickly corrects and the parasite appears three-dimensionally again.

“You said I have all of his powers?”

You should. His powers– The parasite flickers. For a second, Cora glimpses the inner workings of a being much vaster than she could ever imagine. An oily darkness engulfs entire planets. Tendrils reach and caress their surfaces, carving rifts across continental plates and swishing oceans around like tap water.

At the tip of one of those vast tendrils, a facsimile of the parasite dangles like a puppet, arms and legs flopping around like rubber. The tendril contracts, and the parasite waves, before Cora snaps back and the parasite returns, face contorted into an agonized expression.

They’re split.

Cora blinks and tries to make sense of what she just saw. “What the fuck was–”

You inherited his strongest gift. But the rest, they’re split into–

The parasite’s influence fizzles out. But not just visually. Deep inside her brain, the entombed presence hardens and goes still. Cora probes at the parasite’s paralyzed influence. Nothing.

The first shafts of light break into her cocoon. Outside, the streams of directed gifts are relentless, wearing down each layer. Cora slips into her metaphysical self, but the wounds are too severe, and her senses are too clouded.

There’s something else out there emitting pulses of blinding energy that slick the gears and steal their potential. The pulses lash at her battered metaphysical body. She raises her head and glimpses a pillar of light branching across the sky and planting its roots in the soil-less ground.

Too bright. She gasps and finds herself face-to-face with a new window blasted inches away.

Wind whips into the cocoon, stealing her breath away. Below, among the smoldering ruins of the hospital, dozens of armored Cenarians direct their gifts at her. Water, fire, electricity, chunks of rock, and other weapons strike at the shell. She sidesteps a blast of particles that heats the neighboring rock to a dangerous red.

“Are you him?”

Cora jumps. A shadow peels away from the inner walls and shifts into Raezu’s Transient body. She starts shaking again, her breaths harder to come by. He doesn’t mold his arms into scythes or grow into his lethal predatory body. He does nothing at all. Dull gold eyes look at her expectantly, awaiting a response she knows doesn’t matter.

Yet, she has to know. “Did you–did you hear everything?”

Raezu keeps his composure steady. “Who were you talking to?”

“Are you still loyal to the Empire?”

A few seconds pass. More light streams into the cocoon. Chunks of rock continue to break off, crashing with thunderous slams onto the ground far below. The air reeks of burnt ozone and charred wood.

“No,” Raezu finally says, and he leans against the rock. “They forced me to fight a war of conquest. The recruiters told me we were bringing peace and justice to the fringe worlds.” He bares his teeth. “If you really are him, then I will be glad to serve at your side.”

“What are you talking about?” She can’t have her would-be captor switch sides so quickly. It’s impossible, it shouldn’t happen, he’s her enemy. She can’t trust him.

Yet they’re alone, sealed within a shell she made to withstand the power of the atom. And rather than maim or kill her, he’s choosing to talk to her. “Do you even believe what I said?” Cora can’t help the squeak in her voice. She doesn’t want to believe it, either.

“All I had to do was look around.”

The shell groans. Cracks splinter toward the opposite wall behind them. In moments, the Cenarians will crack her last shield like an egg and spill its contents on the frenzied tendrils of their soldiers.

She killed so many people. What will they see her as, if not a monster? She inherited her gifts from a former god, and rather than do good, she struck down their people like they were nothing. Who wouldn’t be whipped into a ferocious rage and want to execute the mass murderer hiding inside her little shell of glued rock and torment?

“I didn’t mean to do it,” she gasps, shaking while the opposite side begins to crack open. Wind whips into the interior and whistles in her ruined ears. “I swear, it wasn’t me, I’d never do something like this.”

Raezu’s body starts to shapeshift, turning into an indistinguishable blob below his neck. “Was it the person you were talking to? This entity?”

“I don’t know,” she whispers, wind gusts drowning her response.

The rock cracks. Both halves split asunder. For a moment, she’s suspended in midair, hanging above the soldiers like the false god she is. Raezu glues himself to one of the falling halves and shapeshifts to match the rock. Cora gets one precious second to scream before plummeting the short, lethal distance to the ground.

Chunky arms and interlaced tendrils cushion her fall. No sooner does her momentum stop that her arms are wrenched behind her back, bound together. Another cloth is stuffed into her mouth and her bloody drool soaks into the white fabric. Her feet are then bound together, though this time they wrap rope around her thighs, too.

They make quick and effective work of putting her down before several soldiers project shields around her. A single soldier carries her like she’s nothing, holding her across their chest with both arms.

“Why?”

Cora would recognize that voice anywhere. She trembles and furiously blinks away her tears. Aspa, poor Aspa, is cradling her like a baby, gentle to keep her tendrils around her torso and legs to balance the pressure.

“I know you can’t respond. I don’t know if I want you to respond.” Soldiers bark orders and Aspa starts moving. Their escorts follow, layering shields over each other and enclosing the two of them. “Look at what you did. Why?”

They stop at the edge of the path descending into the city. Aspa turns and forces Cora to witness the damage she wrought, the calamity the governor warned her led to the sundering of worlds.

Piles of rubble created miniature hills that release plumes of acrid smoke curling high into the bruised sky. The land is shattered, filled with miniature canyons that various soldiers are careful to navigate around. At the centerpiece of the mantlepiece, however, a monolithic slab pierces through the earth and past the heaps of smoking rubble, looming so high she can’t see the end.

A monument to her sick actions.

It reminds her too much of the stone obelisk that pierced an alien machine and grounded it. At the time, she couldn’t imagine how deadly the fight must’ve been, or all the blood spilled at the hands of an insanely powerful magician.

Now she knows. Maybe the parasite had pierced the ship herself. But Cora will never know, because the parasite’s entombed presence is silent and she won’t get to live long enough to talk to her again, anyway.

“Liam and Callista are alive,” Aspa says quietly. “They will be tried in a military tribunal, and I do not expect the council will look on them favorably.”

More muffled shouts breach the shield barriers, and she starts moving again, matching the pace of the soldiers surrounding them. Every face is turned away, though a couple of flinty eyes glance her way and they narrow, tendrils stilling, bodies tensing for a fight.

“I don’t understand why you didn’t trust us to help you. We could’ve captured the Transients ourselves. You didn’t have to kill them by killing everyone.”

Cora shakes her head and utters a guttural whine. Did they not tell her everything? Does she not know that Resma, Obuch, and other guards threatened Cora and her friends first?

Aspa glances at Cora’s desperate face and winces, beady eyes snapping toward some distant target. “You could’ve trusted us.”

I’m sorry, she wants to scream, but can’t muster the strength.

From the direction of the city, several blips in the sky rapidly approach. Their size swells until she realizes they’re more of the pod-shaped machines. They glide to a smooth stop at the edge of the path. The largest takes the center, while four more position themselves around the center pod like silent sentinels.

Just this morning, she and the others had been escorted inside them into the palace. They’d been welcomed and embraced with open arms. Then the governor trapped her. Then she learned about the box’s destructive nature. Then she learned about Liam’s past and his struggle to live. Then they faced off against the Transients, raided Eporsa’s office, fought, and Cora murdered everybody.

It’s too much. Over the span of a Cenarian day, the truth of her easy life shattered and now she’s going to die.

Panels retract into the metal bands supporting the teardrop-shaped pod. Glass slides down. Several soldiers storm out of the center pod and grab Cora, then toss her into the pod like the useless waste of flesh she is.

She curls into herself and struggles to keep her eyes from tearing up. The floor is so cold, chilling her face and bare arms. The soldiers return to their seats around her and train their attention on her. She whines softly as the pod encloses itself and levitates upward, then glides toward the distant mushroom cap of the palace.

It couldn’t have been more than twelve hours ago that she first visited the palace. How did so much happen in so little time? Her stomach is a churning pit of dread. She clenches her teeth and compresses the cloth between her teeth. At least this time they left her able to see, though there’s nothing she can do.

Was this how Mari felt when the Transients took her away? Alone, afraid, at the mercy of monsters who wanted her for purposes beyond any sane person’s imagination?

What about Liam and Callista? Aspa said they’d face a military tribunal. What will happen to them?

Cora scrabbles uselessly at her metaphysical self. There’s nothing worth moving that can hope to turn one of the near-insurmountable gears. She only gets a brief respite from her real body’s wounds and discomfort before ethereal reality spits her back out.

The palace looms overhead. Rather than descend toward the entrance, the pod glides toward the dome. A tiny rectangle opens near the bottom. The pod gently eases its way inside the entrance, its surroundings plunging into darkness before sconces light up and bathe the hangar in a warm glow.

Panels and glass retreat into the metal bands. The soldiers pick her up and carry her outside, where more await, their faces hidden behind helmets.

“Do you have the sedative?” one of the soldiers carrying her says.

Sedative? Cora writhes, buckling to free herself from her captor’s arms. Tendrils squeeze against her limbs and bite into her skin. She screams, a muffled noise that startles the nearest soldiers and prompts them to raise shields.

They won’t do anything! She kicks the nearest soldier. The next moment, she’s laid on her back, pinned in place by several soldiers. A gurney squeaks toward her, with a bag of clear liquid sloshing around on a pole and a thin, metal needle.

The doctor behind the gurney is none other than Eporsa.

Cora growls. She grinds her metaphysical self’s bones against the gears and prompts the tiniest of movements. Just enough to give her a fraction of the power to ram a spike through his head.

He hurries and starts probing at her arm, probably searching for suitable veins. She concentrates her willpower on the floor, gathering bits of rock together to explode into a spike and ram through his eye and spear his brain.

Suddenly, shields layer themselves over the ground the same moment she summons the spike. Its lethally sharp point snaps, and the rest of the spike grinds against the shields, sparking and fizzling, the invisible barriers holding strong.

No! No!

She can’t move. Eporsa moves a cold, metal needle over her arm and plunges the tip into her flesh.

The world fades soon after that.