A Latent Dark (52 page)

“That isn’t the way it works,” said Orrin. “Your concept of gods has been skewed from ages upon ages of misinformation. Just because people might be considered gods doesn’t make them all powerful up there, just here.” He pointed the tip of a wing at Rhia.

 “Where did you go then?” Dale asked.

“Here mostly,” Orrin said.

Rhia interjected. “And to woo the ladies apparently.”

Dale laughed. “I was joking when I told Skyla you probably ran off to find a nice lady raven.”

The stark-white raven looked at Dale. If there was humor there, he couldn’t see it. “Skyla is going to need a lot of help soon, and I can’t stay up there indefinitely. The older gods are growing impatient with this machine she’s hooked up to. They want to see it destroyed.”

“Who are the older gods?” Dale asked.

Rhia ignored the question. “Orrin has been watching all of you,” she said. “He believes that you all might be able to help, although he doesn’t like sharing his plans. I guess I should tell you the whole story. Have a seat.”

“Aren’t we in a hurry?” Melissa asked.

“Time flows differently here, as you’ve probably noticed,” said Rhia. “This will only take a moment.” The room flickered.

One moment they were in the hall. The next, they sat atop a hill overlooking a city similar to Bollingbrook. Rhia began her story as they looked down on the circular city-state, now a model of itself. It was no city any of them knew. This one was nestled in a landscape of humid green jungle.

The room went black, as if a theater play was about to begin.

*

Rhia’s story:

Lynn and my childhoods were similar to Skyla’s. We were tormented and ostracized because we, like Skyla, could see the blights on people’s souls. It made them feel naked and exposed. It was the sort of thing that people would rather not know about. Forced self-reflection doesn’t make one popular.

(As Rhia spoke, the view shifted. Sunlight filled the space around them. They were looking at a tall wide colonial house surrounded by green. Willow trees brushed the sides of the walls and swayed in front of its tall, white columns. Two tiny girls stood at the front door. They were very young with matching brown hair. They held hands as the house loomed over them.)

 We were orphans, raised in the meager facilities that governments provide for the unfortunate. The taunting and harassing was easier for the two of us than for Skyla because we had each other.

A man appeared one day, a preacher. He ran the local churches, huge mega-churches where people cried out and rolled on the floor. He had made his fortune building such churches across the eastern section of the continent.

(The scene shifted to the interior of the house. The front door opened and a man stood outside, backlit by the bright outdoors. He held his white hat over his chest. His hair was still gray, rather than stark white. His face was obscured in shadow except for a humorless grin. He needed no introduction.)

He had come across us by way of a church member who claimed we were witches. I had read the shadows of one of our instructors. She was an ugly person who killed animals by skinning them alive and then selling their fur.

(The woman appeared as if seen through the slit in a door. The fox screamed, bleeding from its stomach. Melissa covered her eyes and the scene was gone.)

I had said some things. She had gotten mad and punished me. In the end, I’d say I punished her more.

(Rhia gave them a dry smile as the same woman trembled in the corner behind a couch. She was curled in a fetal position; hands over her ears, eyes squeezed shut. Dale had a feeling the woman had been that way for a long time and would continue to be that way for longer.)

As popular as witch-hunts were in some regions, it was not as popular to kill young children. However, it was believed that we might be cured. Lyle Summers knew of a lab in the Western Territories that was experimenting with technology he believed would cure us, two poor wretched girls. And if it didn’t, so what? It would remove the problem from his hands anyway.

(A boat pulled into a harbor, its long metal hull gliding through the fog. The twins walked down the gangway with The Reverend Summers behind them. Off in the distance was a dome on a hill. Something long and twisted protruded from one side of it.)

We were delivered to Rhinewall, where we were to help focus a machine, built untold generations ago. Previous disasters had rendered it… difficult to manage. You see, without a person to focus the machine, it would strike out randomly. The result is what you saw in the cafeteria.

(They were inside a dark, concrete-walled building, much darker than the modern version Skyla knew. The two girls, slightly older, were talking with some Tinkerers. Walls of instruments buzzed and ticked in the background. Rusty benches lined a wall near an array of pipes.)

We began to teach the scientists about how they were going about it all wrong. For a collection of the smartest minds in the world, they really didn’t get it. They probably still don’t. To us, what the Tinkerers were trying to do for almost a century came easily. What was a breakthrough to them was child’s play to us. Lynn and I would laugh about how they walked around with their shadows hanging out, completely unaware of it.

 This caught the attention of The Church, who had been funding the project with mild interest. After we arrived, funding doubled. We lived in the labs, assisting the Tinkerers and living as willing prisoners. At least Lynn was willing.

(A young Rhia was sitting in a chair wearing a pair of goggles that looked familiar to Dale and Marley. In another room sat an elderly man.)

I was the first to realize the damage that was actually being done. They had brought in a man accused of heresy. He was a kindly older man with a beautiful soul. I couldn’t stop looking at it, in fact. I watched as his eyes glazed over and his mouth hung open. There was nothing there after that. And I helped destroy it. The machine consumed him.

(She held up a hand.)

Now before you ask, yes I looked for him here when I died. It was one of the first things I did. But he was gone. Erased. When I realized what they were making us do, I planned an escape. It was… ill-conceived. I tried to convince Lynn to go with me. We had gotten to the door before we were captured.

(A group of guards hauled a young Rhia off into the hall. Lynn stood at a doorway, crying.)

What they had planned for me was much worse than shooting me. They decided to make me a subject. I remember Lynn sitting in that oversized chair. She was looking at me through the window, completely unaware of what she was about to do.

Now, consider this: we never really read each other’s shadow, out of respect. We did when we were younger, the way children will sometimes look at each other in the bathtub. It was curiosity, very innocent. But as older children, we respected each other’s demons. It seemed impolite to do otherwise.

Well now I was strapped to a chair, and Lynn, well, Lynn was holding the gun, so to speak. I could feel her eyes on me, reading me. It felt wrong, incestuous. Knowing what I knew, and knowing that there was little chance of escape, I did the only thing I knew how to do at the time. I left that world and took Lynn with me. The shadows that people like Skyla and I see are more than just images. They are windows. Some of us can travel through them. The fabric of reality is thin.

 Lynn believed that she really was doing the right thing there in that room, a sort of penance. Lynn was very earnest about it. That was back before my great escape. I was stuck in that chair, you see. I couldn’t get up and just run to a shadow and walk through it. The machine was humming and I knew I had seconds before it popped me. So I stepped out of my body… of course, it died.

All this time, Lynn was still arguing with me.
I’m only trying to help you,
she yelled. I pulled her with me into the shadows, but Lynn refused to leave her body. So I took that with me as well, between the cracks and atoms.

That was probably a mistake.

You see the spiritual mind is vast. We tap into the universe in ways that no corporeal brain can. Time is pliable here; a nanosecond can feel like a year if you want it to. You’ll learn how to do it—you have no idea what you are missing. But the physical brain can only process so much. When I pulled Lynn’s physical body into the void, I think I broke her a little. She screamed a lot. And when I say ‘a lot’ I mean that she never stopped screaming.

(Screams filled the chamber, echoing from walls and pillars.)

Seeing my mistake, I immediately created a tunnel and returned her. It took me what felt like a day; it was instantaneous to everyone else in the lab. She simply popped back into her room, scared, but alive. And changed. From what I understand—and what Orrin tells me—the staff at the lab found her to be slippery to their vision. She was there and not there.

I tried to visit her, help her escape. Each time I’d do it, we would pop a little further away, but she would always come back, like a dog returning to its owner.

(Two young women walked out of the woods. Something black and shimmering opened in the air and Rhia stepped back through.)

 Much like this world, if you know a place—can visualize it—you can go there. So, I would visit Lynn and try to take her away. Each time we would walk a little further until she would slip away, returning to the lab where she felt safe. Over the course of time, we left a trail from Rhinewall, through Lassimir, and up to Bollingbrook. Many people are still scared of those patches of pseudo-reality. They are right to be. We left them unstable in our haste.

Eventually, Lynn became pregnant. I don’t know how. I wasn’t there at the conception. Part of me thinks an orderly might have taken advantage of her. Either way, she would never tell me or anyone else.

Our hops away from the lab had gotten as far away as Bollingbrook, or at least just outside the walls. She was about ready to burst and I had finally convinced her that the lab was no place to raise a daughter. For once she believed me.

I left her some tools, equipment we used in the lab, things that she could use to help herself with. There was a coin that a shaman I met here considered to be magical—it is just a chunk of inert soul that slips through the shadows in the way we do. They were really nothing more than gimmicks, but I guess she thought those were cursed, or evil. She never used them, but at least she had the common sense to throw them into an old box that used to contain Skyla’s toys.

(A woman with dark curly hair shoved a small box beneath her bed. A baby cried in the background.)

So here is where you come in, Melissa. Orrin warned me that The Reverend had returned, looking for them. When Orrin told me that they had been invited to Skyla’s house I created a rift, an escape route. I tried to bring both Skyla and her mother here for their own good, or to open a bridge somewhere in The Wilds where they could escape to. It was sloppy, but we were out of time. Unfortunately when you make a tear in the shadows, things can sometimes leak out. Lynn and Orrin did their best to try and lure them back.

(The scene shifted to the night Skyla’s home was destroyed. They watched as a massive creature leapt from the shadows and destroyed the house. It burst through a bedroom door, lumbering at Lynn, who dove into a shadow in the corner of the room.)

Lynn, in her questionable wisdom, had never told Skyla any of this. Lynn healed people like an illegal doctor, but never told Skyla. There was no way Skyla could have understood what was happening in her house that night.

Just like what happened in the lab, this was a disaster. Lynn didn’t understand what was happening and neither did Skyla. I had no time to explain. I could only use Orrin to try and distract the shadows until the rift closed on its own. Lynn is here now, with me, recovering.

Now, I know that seems strange when I say it, but you have to understand that what they would have done to her was worse—much, much worse.