Darkside Sun (20 page)

In my mind’s image, Kat launched at me. My imagined-self ducked left, grabbing her arm to pull her off balance and over my outstretched leg. Her own momentum took her to the mat. My true physical body hummed, as if it had the knowledge all along and had waited for my brain to give the order.

As time resumed, it seemed like I had forever to react when she came at me. I managed to duck left, but mistimed my attempted grab of her arm, still a little disoriented from whatever—or whoever—had injected me with knowledge, and she recovered herself, clearly startled that I’d avoided her.

“Lucky,” she said with that evil laugh of hers.

Maybe the universe had heard my plea after all? Nah. “I don’t believe in luck.”

Each time our little battle dance began, someone hit the pause button on the world again, and a martial arts movie played behind my eyes, starring me. I learned more in those two hours than I had in the entire ten days I’d been working with Kat. I needed practice, strength in places I didn’t yet have it, but the know-how, technique, and muscle-memory were all there. By the time Kat left for the day, I had only a few new bruises to add to my collection, and she actually had one on her arm where my foot had connected. A red-letter day.

Sophia came in, stalling in the doorway when she spotted me still standing. Remy came in behind her, his giant half-tattooed self a wall of muscle, dwarfing her slender frame, yet somehow they matched. They both gaped at me.

I laughed, a little giddy with my small success. “Is this the first time you’ve found me on my feet?” I rubbed the ache spiraling out from my ribs from Kat’s parting blow.

Remy glanced around the room, looking for what, I didn’t know. “Something different.” Raising his hands, he moved them through the air, rubbing his fingers against his thumbs as if testing the softness of fabric.

“Something’s different, all right,” I said, then shut up when,
Not yet,
echoed in my ears. Not my words, or my voice, since it sounded male. I wanted to ask why I couldn’t tell them how I came to be standing upright, but I wasn’t sure how it all worked, the silent communication with my strange savior. Not to mention saying out loud that some phantom person had been showing me videos of my own body would have required an explanation I didn’t have.

Shifting my focus back to my training, I let an idea take shape in my mind. “I’m guessing Asher forbade you to teach me anything, am I right?” I asked.

Remy made an unhappy sound between a cough and a growl. “True dat.”

“Yeah,” Sophia said, shrugging. “He’ll probably have me scrubbing his toilet with a toothbrush, but I don’t care. She needs to know this, sensei.”

A smile lifted my lips, my mischief-is-about-to-be-hatched smile. “Did he forbid you from training Sophia, Remy? Since I have a feeling she’ll be leaving the facility a little more now that Asher thinks he can use her against me, she’ll need to brush up on her self-defense techniques. Am I right?”

Remy grinned. I worried that he might balk at touching Sophia, but he appeared eager, relieved. “No, he say nothing ’bout that, or sparring. I make a good attacker. Sophia, too.”

She lit up like a sunrise breaking across a winter field. Ah, because he’d said her name. I hoped he’d say it more often if it had that effect on her. I nodded, gesturing toward the Nautilus equipment, understanding which muscle groups I needed to focus on. “In that case, don’t let me stop you. I’ll just be over here working out while you train Sophia. After that, maybe I could practice with you.”

Sophia disappeared for a few minutes, returning with a long-sleeved shirt and black leather gloves. Remy, who’d also donned a pair he retrieved from the cabinet, swept his arm toward the mat, winking at her. “We go,
ku`uipo
.” I wasn’t sure what he’d called her that time, but the word was intense and so full of affection, it had to be something good.

A grin split Sophia’s face. “Why, thank you,” she said, and all but bounced across the floor with him coming after her. They were so cute together. Whatever kept them apart was wrong. They were stronger together, another of those soul-deep “knowings” I had.

While I worked on my abs, they sparred. I watched both how Sophia attacked and how Remy defended, and vice versa. Where they planted their feet. How they held their bodies. How the most effective moves didn’t need brute force, but how their movements all seemed to radiate out from their backs, creating a whip-like movement of their limbs. Which was good, because next to King Kong, Sophia appeared about as big and fierce as a church mouse. My mind soaked it in, recorded it like a movie I’d be able to play back later.

Kyle wandered in along with a few other soldiers I recognized from the gathering. He nodded as they passed by and ran on the track, and he, too, appeared surprised to see me alive. Were they not allowed to train until my session with Kat ended? Arranged by her, no doubt. Or the Colonel.

I still didn’t understand why Kyle ended up on cleanup duty. He was a business and computer science major, if I remembered right. Interesting how he’d ended up in Green’s Ancient Civilizations class with me. Probably Green’s doing. Why not have him using his computer smarts to their advantage, setting up surveillance or patterning of Internet users to help identify potential wraith-infected people?

My heart thundered as thoughts formed. The Colonel had put Kyle in the wrong place in the Machine. The right part, an important part, but in the wrong place. How many more pieces of the Machine were floundering, dying inside because they just couldn’t function how they were supposed to? A wheel was great, but if it was attached to the roof of the car, it didn’t do much good, didn’t feel the pleasure of the road under the rubber or move forward.

I’d spent a lot of time as a kid working on old cars with Dad. Maybe that was why I’d been drafted, to fix the Machine. Somehow, the books and artifacts also came into play. Maybe my mystery teacher would tell me that, too.

Chapter 22

As I finished up a set of bench presses and sat up, the ruffling of hairs on my nape clued me in that something was off. I glanced left, right, but only found the soldiers still pounding feet against the track and Sophia and Remy going through martial art formations.

Instinct had me rolling off the bench and miraculously coming back to my feet. Taka stood there in dress slacks and a midnight blue silk shirt, his black hair shining under the lights above. One hand reached toward me, and the other one held a black pistol against his thigh.

“You going to shoot me, Taka?” I asked. Duh. He wouldn’t have had a gun out if he wasn’t at least thinking about using it. My pulse kicked into overdrive.

“You don’t belong here,” he snarled.

“What doin’ T?” Remy bellowed as he bounded up to the man. “Put that piece away ’fore I make you eat it.”

Taka ripped his sneer away from me and set it on King Kong, and even though the Asian was tall, he still appeared childlike beside Remy. “I shouldn’t want … why … I don’t want her here. She’s … wrong.”

Although my feathers got well and truly ruffled, I kept my trap shut since the guy began rubbing his finger over the trigger.

“What talking ’bout, man?” Remy crowded the guy. “Addy one of us. We don’ go after our own. We got ’nough enemies outside the Machine, yeah?”

“But can’t you feel it? I keep wanting to”—he lowered his voice, but my straining let me hear the rest—“touch her. I shouldn’t want to, not after Holly.”

“I think you an’ me take a walk now.” Remy grabbed the guy by the shoulder, snatching the gun with his free hand as he steered Taka toward the door. “Sorry,
kolohe
. We pick this up tomorrow.”

“Yeah,” I said, my voice quivering like the rest of me. “Sure.”

Sophia trotted over from where she’d been watching. “What the hell was that all about?”

I thought it might be part of what Marcus had said about my storm calling to the tall guy, and I said as much. “A few days ago I thought Remy might be thinking about touching me. Do you want to?”

Red flash-fried her cheeks. “I thought that was just because, you know, you’re nice. Friends like to hug and stuff … right?”

I felt like I had a charley horse in my brain as I worked out the possible angles on that one. Even if they could feel some sort of energy from me, why would that disturb Taka so badly he’d want to off me? His girlfriend had died, but it wasn’t like I was trying to grope him or inviting him to grope me. Damn, Remy had it right; we had enough enemies beyond the veil. Now I had to start sleeping with one eye open within the Machine, too?

Before I came up with any workable answer, I had a sudden burning desire to be alone and to have a shower. Afraid and something like eager, I didn’t question it, just went, shouting over my shoulder to Sophia, “I need to go. Talk to you later.”

Energy renewed, I streaked down the hallway, entered the bathroom, and flicked on the lights. The room appeared to be almost entirely made of cement block walls and white tile. One long counter took up the left side, and above that, a mirror stretched from wall to wall. The showers sat through a wide opening on the right wall, large enough I could see almost all of the inner room with its twenty-or-so spouts.

Do not be afraid, child,
the same voice I’d heard before echoed inside my head. Male, young, with a hint of accent I couldn’t place, as if he’d lived everywhere through each era and had little bits of all the world’s languages lilting his words.

I gripped the counter, my knees trying to knock. Even after all I’d seen and done in the last few weeks, I still wasn’t brave. “Who are you? Please tell me you’re not a wraith.” My reflection showed dark circles under my still-honey-brown eyes. My hair, heavy with sweat, lay in thick ribbons across my forehead where it had come loose from my hair tie.

Laughter rattled around my ears. Weird that it wasn’t mine. I blinked, and my reflection wavered out as if obscured behind heat rising from a highway. Another image appeared, that of a boy no more than fifteen. He stared back from the other side of the mirror, his chest bare and decorated with what appeared to be black native war paint, eyes so dark they were almost black. Something like soft leather wrapped his narrow hips.

His hair was long and black, thick and shiny. His skin held that bronzed brown shade of an ancient Aztec from my books on the subject. How the blooming hell did I end up with a boy who should be extinct in my mirror?

“I am not a wraith,” he said, “I am Izanagi. You may call me Izan.” His voice seemed to be coming from the mirror, but it had to be an illusion since a boy couldn’t possibly be there, right? “I am named Shift by the ignorant, by those of the Machine who hold no …” He shook his head, his hair floating, lifting as if lighter than air. “Word, word … they hold no image, no thought … no, no, no …”

“No memory?” I offered.

“Yes, they hold no memory.”

I stepped back, needing a little space from my most recent
Twilight Zone
moment. “So the Shift … you … are a sentient being? I don’t understand.” How could layers of reality be a person? “Are you really an Aztec boy?”

“I chose the guardians and granted them abilities, that is true. And I have taken this image from your mind, hoping you will not be frightened of me, as I do not have a physical form of my own that you would understand. I am energy and thought. It is … difficult to explain what I am with your limited understanding of space and time.”

“And you’re the one showing me how to defend myself?”

He nodded.

It took every ounce of my control to keep the hurricane of questions from unloading all at once. I settled for the most important ones. “Is it true the wraiths are dead people from another reality? And how many realities are there? Real ones, I mean, beyond the veil, not the fake ones. And do you know how to stop the wraiths from coming?”

The air seemed to pulse around him, a subtle glow backlighting his slender body. “So much to explain and too little time. I will explain what I can, but it will be brief.” Izan glanced away, his hair shifting oddly. “Ever since your kind began gazing at the stars, you have wondered if you are alone in the universe.”

I waited for more, wiggling up against the counter as if getting closer would make him speak faster. “And are we?”

“Yes,” he said, deflating me along with one of my childhood hypotheses, that what lay beyond the veil were aliens of some kind, and then he added, “in this reality.”

A gazillion thoughts spun uselessly in my head. “I’m assuming you’re not talking about the false realities. Holy crap, really? Other people on other worlds? I mean, I guess it shouldn’t surprise me because I already know about the wraiths, but … wow.”

“No, no, those realities I created are false, an illusion, steps out of your time and space, to confuse and deter the wraiths, nothing more. I speak of the true realities that exist alongside yours. Each of those has one planet that can sustain life. Only I and my kind are able to cross realities.” Frowning, his dark eyes full of regret, he said, “Or we were until I encountered the wraiths. When I became aware of the danger to Earth, I came and have remained here.”

“But … are the other planets exactly like ours? Are the people like us, like humans?”

“All realities are different in some ways and similar in others. There are thousands of beings of different descriptions in various states of evolution. Some have barely crawled out of the primordial soup, as you call it. Others are advanced far beyond your comprehension, with abilities and powers you will never possess in this lifetime. And some, like the wraiths, have destroyed themselves and their world.”

“Are you saying we’re some sort of grand Galapagos Island experiment? The same basic ingredients for life planted on slightly different environments?” That would explain why the wraiths appeared sort of like us, but maybe they evolved wings and we didn’t. “If so, who created all of the worlds? And put the ingredients in the primordial soup? Or did we just grow from what was there?”

“I do not who laid the foundation for this experiment, as you call it, as it has existed for millennia before I came into being. Life has come and gone from your world many times, and human beings are young compared to the creatures in other realities. I have no more time for explanations. The one I chose to guide you through this journey has failed me, so I have taken drastic measures.”

Oh.
“So you are the founder Asher mentioned. You led him to me?”

Izan nodded, his hair still floating like a black fog around his expressive, young face. “I have no voice, no eyes or ears, no hands.”

“And I’m to be them for you? Is that why I’m here, why you chose me for the Machine? But … what am I supposed to do now?”

“No time, no time. You must listen to me, for the Misgiver may already have begun to seek that which he needs for history to repeat itself.”

“Misgiver?” I asked. “I don’t understand.”

“Word, word, word … ” He strode back and forth in the bathroom on the other side of the mirror. I had to glance over my shoulder to make sure he wasn’t there. He wasn’t. I hacked in a shaky breath and focused on him again.

Misgiver?
“Liar?” I offered.

“Liar, yes, terrible, devious liar, and more.”

“A traitor? There’s a traitor in the Machine?” Ice rushed through my veins. “You don’t mean the same person who betrayed the Machine before when you said history would repeat itself. That this person is trying to destroy the Machine again?”

“Yes, a traitor, and I do not know for certain his plan. I believe the traitor wishes to do greater harm, deadly, deadly harm, though I do not know what. For that, I need you.”

“Me?” I burst out laughing, frantic and psych-patient loud. “I think you’ve made a mistake. I mean, I can barely keep conscious around one of the sentinels. Another was just thinking about blowing my head off, and if I hadn’t moved when I did, he probably would have. How am I supposed to find this person?” Was Taka the Misgiver? The Colonel? “No, no way. You have to choose someone else.”

“No other guardian can hear me as you can. You are the one I have chosen to trust with my knowledge and imbue with the power to make the Machine function. You only need to embrace that which lies within you.” Izan leaned on the counter on his side, angled toward me, his eyes flashing furious and proud all at once. “This is your first task, child. The Machine cannot be healed while the dagger remains in its heart. Take out the dagger, this traitor as you call him. I beg of you.” It seemed totally wrong for this kid to be calling me child, but I put that thought on the top shelf for later when I wasn’t nudging at the crazy door.

Other than that storm Marcus mentioned, what else lived inside my head that I didn’t know about? I so did not want the answer to that. “But why can’t you find this traitor? I mean, you seem to know a lot, see a lot. You’re the Shift, everywhere, all the time. Aren’t you?”

“I cannot see this traitor. I … feel through the layers, sense the guardians and the wraiths. Some I sense their spirit, the richness of soul. Others are … quieter of mind, subtle in presence. Only you do I sense completely. Blind, I am blind to him in every way as he is skilled in hiding his own darkness.”

“Or her,” I said, a little offended that he’d discount anyone just because they happened to have boobs.

“Yes, or her. I meant no offense,” he said, as if picking up on my thoughts. He probably was, considering he spoke from within my own head. It wasn’t as if he could really be in the mirror.

“But I thought everyone from the last Machine died. Only the Colonel, Marcus, Remy, and Asher woke up in the chamber. Does that mean it’s one of them?”

“No, no, child. Do not let history lead you astray, or sentiment. Someone in the Machine is not who they appear, not who they claim to be. It could be any, from the meekest, weakest, of what you call soldiers, up to the strongest of the sentinels. The newest inducted to the first.”

My brain cramped as I tried to crank all of the new information through my head. I’d seen the Colonel having his daily pow-wows with Kat while giving me the flaming eyeball. Taka had almost shot me. Still, Kat kept crawling to the top of the suspect list.
Um … what?
Was I really considering going after a person who’d killed most of the former guardians?

I rushed around the room, tearing the tie out of my hair. “Why are you telling me this? I’m just one person. What do you think I can do? I don’t even understand what I am yet or why you chose me when I’m the polar opposite of the rest.”

“You have possessed from birth all you need to prevent the tragedy that threatens your people. I will teach you the skills required to defend yourself, but the rest must come from within you. Embrace your gifts, child.” His form wavered at the same time a sharp pain ripped across the top of my head. “I cannot remain this way. It takes great energy to project myself in your mind, so that you may perceive me as something physical, something you will believe real, so that you may listen. Find the Misgiver, child. Find him, and we may yet save your world.”

Izan’s reflection dissolved like mist under sunlight, fading until only my image remained. I closed my eyes, hugged myself, and waited to wake up. Kat must have knocked me out, and I’d dreamed everything. Yep, that was it. Totally. I did not just have a conversation with an Aztec boy in the mirror who gave me a mission impossible.

Just a dream.

“Come on, wake up,” I said, repeating it while I pinched myself. What did that mean, that I had within me what I needed to prevent the wraiths from eating us all for breakfast? Or only to find the traitor? Did he have to be so flipping cryptic?

I wanted to slip back into glorious denial and shrug off the last few minutes as a mental episode, but if other realities existed, wraiths, men who could touch my soul as Asher had done, was it such a stretch to believe that some greater being watched over us? Was it such a stretch that my entire life had a precise purpose? To heal the Machine so it could function again? Why could Izan get inside my head but nobody else’s? He said I was his chosen, so did that mean he simply spoke to me and nobody else? There was still too much I didn’t understand. Where did I start?