Broken Pixels (The Chronicles of Mara Lantern, Book 4) (13 page)

Sam spun Cam’s head around so it faced Sam. Looking dazed, Cam’s eyelids slipped half closed. “See the light,” he slurred.

Mara ran to Sam’s side and looked at Cam’s face. “Cam! Are you all right?”

The head shuddered in Sam’s hands, and Cam’s eyes fluttered. “Huh?”

A scream tore through the cavernous room.

“Mara!” Ping yelled.

The old woman launched herself toward Mara, like a tigress protecting her young, talons extended and scratching at the air as she pounced. Ping jumped in her path and exploded into a cloud when the old woman clawed at his eyes. The swirl of dust stung Mara’s eyes, as she leaned away from the woman, while using her body to shield Cam and Sam.

“What happened?” Cam asked.

“Later,” Sam said, staggering backward from the melee.

Over Mara’s shoulder, Sam could see the old woman writhing and swatting at Ping’s particles as they swirled around her. When Mara stepped out of the storm, her heel caught on a dismembered leg, and she tumbled to the floor. Scooting on her backside, she had just about cleared the swirling dust when the old woman stopped spinning and faced her, snarling. Again the old woman pounced. Mara raised her hands defensively and yelled, “No!”

The old woman froze in midair, her feet off the ground, her torso lunging forward with her arms extended, stopped in mid-tackle just a foot above where Mara lay on the floor.

Knocking a couple legs and arms from her path, Mara rolled from beneath the hovering old woman, grabbed the edge of one of the tables and pulled herself up. Sam ran to her as she straightened and brushed herself off.

A few feet away, dust swirled but consolidated into a smaller space. After a few moments it molded itself into Ping’s profile and then solidified into Ping. For a second he was statuelike, and the next he was animated, walking toward them.

“Sorry about that. I wasn’t sure if you saw her coming in time to deal with her,” Ping said. “For such an elderly woman, she has extraordinary reflexes. Although I see my efforts were not completely successful.”

“The distraction was much appreciated,” Mara said. “It kept her from ripping my eyes out.” Mara walked up to the woman and pried open two of the fingers of her frozen left hand. In her palm, Mara found the tiny crystal, its surface reflective, but no light came from it. Using two of her fingers, she plucked the crystal free and turned to Sam. “Give me my book bag.”

Sam turned his back to her, where the bag hung from one shoulder.

Mara unzipped the side pocket and dropped the crystal into it. “We’ll take a better look at the crystal when we get to the repository. Maybe Dr. Canfield or someone else can give us an idea what it is and why these people seem so taken with it.”

She stepped around to face Sam and looked at Cam’s face. “Are you okay? What did that purple light do to you? You fell into some kind of trance or something.”

“I’m not sure, but it felt really great,” Cam said. “Like someone flipped a switch and the world seem to be a wonderful place, and I didn’t have a care in the world. It was … inspiring. That’s the closest I can come to describing it. It was intoxicating, a happy floating feeling.”

“Euphoria,” Ping said. “What you felt was euphoria.”

“That’s what they are calling the drug making everyone so crazy,” Mara said. She nodded to the stilled woman and added, “She might be on it.”

“Perhaps there is no drug. What if it’s the crystal, or rather the light from it, that is affecting everyone,” Ping said. To Cam he said, “How do you feel?”

“I’m light-headed, but I think it’s dissipating. I’ve never felt anything like it before,” Cam said. “It was very pleasant. I didn’t get the sense that it was threatening in any way. Show me the crystal again, and let’s see if we can repeat the experience.”

Mara shook her head. “That’s not going to happen. It might not be a drug, but you were clearly getting some kind of buzz from that light, and we’re not returning to the repository with a drunken head.”

Cam looked disappointed.

Mara narrowed her eyes at him. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

“I’m fine. It looks like you blocked out the light before I got the full effect of what it was doing,” he said.

Ping said, “Apart from the feelings of euphoria, exactly what was it doing? Can you determine what part of your physiology it affected?”

Before Cam could answer, Sam interrupted and pointed at Mara. “Ah, sis, you are beginning to flicker. You better decide what to do with the crazy lady before you fade away completely.”

Mara looked at herself. Sure enough, her body was subtly transparent, growing more so each time she blinked into nothingness. She felt the familiar fatigue sweep over her. “That’s strange that it is happening so soon. I’ve not been tapping into my abilities that much.”

“We did travel here from another realm earlier today, and you’ve been lighting this church with that crystal for about an hour,” Ping said. He pointed over their heads and then looked down. “Not to mention the Time-frozen woman here. It might be a good idea to—”

Mara disappeared, and the room went black. The loud thump of the old woman hitting the floor, quickly followed by a grunt, filled the darkened church. The spinning crystal clattered to the floor a second later.

“Mara?” Sam yelled into the blackness.

Next to him, Mara said, “I’m here. No need to panic. We just should keep an eye on our visitor. She might want to get her purple crystal back.”

“I don’t hear her moving around,” Sam said. He turned toward where Ping had been standing and pushed Cam’s head toward him. “Here. Take this so I can dig out the flashlight.”

Following the sound of a zipper, some rustling and a soft click, a beam of light shot up toward the ceiling. Sam swept it to his right toward Mara. “You’re still fading in and out some but not as much.”

A shuffling sound on the floor immediately ahead of them made him jump. Before he could turn and point the light downward, a hollow voice spoke to them, as if from the bottom of a well, “Hey, dude. I see you found my little laboratory.”

The flashlight landed on the face of the crazy woman, who now lay face up on the wooden floor between two of the metal tables. A severed hand reached out from the edge of the light toward her cheek, her features frozen in a mask of surprise, her mouth agape. Though the woman’s lips did not move, the voice continued to come from her mouth.

“Sorry I couldn’t make it in time to greet you personally, but I’ve had a few errands to run.”

Ping whispered, “Do you know that voice?”

“It’s Abby,” Mara said.

As far as Mara could tell, the old woman was either dead, deactivated or in some kind of fugue state. She just lay there on the floor with her mouth hanging open, looking like a tortured soul in the glare of Sam’s flashlight—a soul possessed by a spirit speaking with the voice of Mara’s friend Abby, who had possession problems of her own. Suspecting a trick or a distraction of some kind, Mara grabbed the light from her brother and scanned the interior of the church. As the beam swept across the open room, glimpses of the carnage cast haunting shadows of disembodied heads and hands stretched from the floors to distant walls. While the scene was macabre, she found no sign of the Aphotis, at least not physically. The thing that had taken Abby’s body was not here.

“I expected my unconventional mode of communication might catch you off guard, but I didn’t really think you’d give me the silent treatment,” the Aphotis said.

Mara snapped out of her reverie and asked, “What have you done to this poor woman?”

“Oh, she’ll be fine in a few minutes. I’m just using her to talk to you. Think of her as a sort of human telephone for now. I’m talking into the ear of one of my companions here, and my voice is coming out there. I thought you would appreciate the technical mojo it would take to make that happen, since you’re such a gearhead yourself. These robots are quite handy little appliances, if you know how to use them.”

“These are human beings you slaughtered here!” screamed Cam, his head still in Ping’s hands.

“Ah! I see you got your buddy talking again. Sounds kind of shrill. I would have worked on him myself, but I wasn’t sure if my explorations would negate his usefulness as a trip wire. Lucky boy, I guess.” Abby chuckled from the open mouth of the old woman.

“You mean, you wanted to lure us here,” Mara said.

“Nothing so nefarious, Mara. I wasn’t sure if or when you would show up in this realm. After all, your friend is from here, and you easily could have decided you could do nothing more for him. I wasn’t sure if you would come. Now I know.”

“And what does knowing get you?”

“The question is,
what does it get you
?” Abby asked.

“Okay, I’ll bite. What does it get me?”

“An offer—I’ve got a deal for you.”

“A deal? What sort of deal?”

“Leave this realm immediately and don’t return. If you do, I promise never to enter your realm again. You’ll never see or hear from me again.”

Mara glanced over to Ping, who had a doubtful expression on his face. She panned the flashlight around, looking at the tables and body parts that filled the church. After a moment she asked, “Why did you murder these people? What was the point of tearing them apart like this?”

“Murder? These
mechanisms
may have fooled themselves into thinking they are actually human, but I assure you they are much less. Oh, they’re a decent facsimile—they can walk and talk and even feel emotions well enough—but, deep down where it matters, they lack true passion. They
know
everything but
believe
nothing. Don’t get all weepy over that tangle of gizmos and fiber here in the church. You’re standing in the middle of a junkyard not a graveyard.”

Cam made a sputtering sound and was about to say something when Mara raised a hand and shook her head at him in the ambient glow of the flashlight.

“These are people who did what they needed to do to survive a deadly disease,” Mara said. “How can you justify committing such an atrocity?”

“It’s no more of an atrocity than you commit every day at that pathetic little gadget shop where you work. Is it an atrocity to take apart a computer and to see why it won’t boot up?”

“So you punched holes in the heads of these people and dismembered them so that you could figure out why they weren’t working in the way you wanted?”

“Let’s just say it became obvious that they were not meeting their full potential, and I was committed to helping them achieve that,” Abby said. “Of course it took some hands-on exploration to figure out exactly where the barriers were placed, but I’m confident we have overcome them.”

“To what end?” Ping interjected.

“Ah, you’ve brought with you the baker who moonlights as a dragon. I assume the little brother I nearly took from you is there as well?”

“You didn’t answer the question,” Mara said.

“That is not your concern. However, if it will make you feel better about leaving, I can assure you that I have completed my research, and I no longer need to conduct further explorations on the people in this realm,” the Aphotis said. After a pause it added, “It would be prudent for you to go home now. I won’t be making this offer again.”

“Somehow I’m having trouble believing you. One minute you’re talking about having a battle with me to determine the nature of existence, and the next you want us to go to our separate realms so everything will be just hunky dory. I’m not buying it.”

“You may need more persuasion.”

Mara’s eyes narrowed, as she stared at the open-mouthed woman on the floor. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

The old woman’s cheeks sunk in as she gasped for breath and awoke with a start. Her features twisted into a snarl as she squinted into the flashlight beam and hissed. Lunging from the light, Mara tried to track her but took a minute to locate the woman, as she scampered under the tables, kicking away body parts. Once she cleared the tables, she stood and looked at Mara while continuing to run backward toward the front of the church, presumably to the door. Her heel caught on a loose plank in the floor, and she tumbled to the floor, where she writhed and screamed, “They stole my light! They stole my light! Get them!”

Out of range of the flashlight, Cam said, “Mara, I’m picking up signals. People are approaching outside, a lot of them.”

“What does that mean? Are they carrying pitchforks and flaming torches to burn down the church?” she asked.

“I don’t know, but their signals are erratic, similar to those I’m getting from the old woman. We might want to look for an exit other than the front door,” he said.

A loud crash sent the front doors off their hinges and crashing to the floor just a few feet from the head of the old woman. Skittering onto one of the fallen doors, she made her way to the open frame—quickly filling with silhouettes of people pushing their way into the church.

Mara felt the book bag smack her in the shoulder as Sam turned and said, “Okay, time to find the back door. Shine the light this way, and let’s get out of here.”

Mara pointed the light past the tables to the front of the church where a low mound of rubble most likely indicated where the altar had once been. From behind her she heard Cam’s voice but couldn’t make out what he was saying.

“What’s that?” she asked over her shoulder to Ping.

Ping answered, “He says the old plans for this building indicate there might be an exit in the left front corner of the building.”

“Got it. I don’t care what Abby says, the way these people can access information through the Sig-net is totally cool,” Mara said, swinging the light to the front of the church. She could barely make out what she thought was a door frame.

“I thought you didn’t want us to call the Aphotis
Abby
,” Sam said.

“Yeah, it’s hard to hear her voice and not think of her though,” Mara said.

“I’m sure she would understand,” Ping added.

Mara stumbled and paused for a moment. Looking down, she said, “Some studs or something are sticking up from the floor here, so watch your step.” She rounded the pile of rubble and headed to the corner of the building. When she glanced over her shoulder to confirm Sam and Ping were following, she caught sight of the crowd shuffling into the church through the front door. More than two dozen figures stood just inside the entryway, each of them holding up a tiny purple light.