Episode 4 - Cold Fusion

  Chapter 30 - Teeter

  Everett grunts as he drops the child-sized, vacuum insulated Dewar at my feet. Above the lid is mounted a variety of dials and meters, monitoring the state of the internals.

  I sit on my bed, legs tucked to one side next to me. Pooka is perched on my shoulder clicking his beak impatiently in my ear in the form of an Aquila. I can feel his talons shift, gripping me with restrained strength, never breaking my skin. He leaves goosebumps on my flesh and sends shivers down my spine when his feathers brush the side of my neck. I play with the laces of my boots as I wait for Everett to leave.

  Today was our fourth day of the audit. I'm already exhausted from the long days. In three more days, we will make our drop. Then remain for three further to ensure the full amount of the Erratic is completely dosed into the potable water supply and all traces of our presence removed.

  “It’ll need chilling again, it was on the train unsupervised in the cargo areas,” says Everett, tapping the thermometer on the vacuum flask and then straightening to stretch out his shoulders. He has the upper body and sleeves of his pilfered Diabardi branded maintenance overalls tied around his waist, a tank underneath. I watch the side of his torso as he stretches one arm overhead, including a glimpse of coffee dark armpit hair. Pell hangs off his back between his shoulder blades, well out of the way for carrying the vacuum flask up the stairs to our guest apartments.

  Pooka obliges without me asking, the room noticeable warming as he exports the heat within the Dewar outside to us.

  “So you can control him sometimes?” Everett asks with a surprising lack of filter, almost like we never stopped our previous conversation despite days passing since we were last alone. His hands are planted on his hips as he watches a film of frost develop on the Dewar's lid.

  “I ask. Pooka does his own thing,” I say, my knees tucked up to my chest as I pull my shoelaces undone.

  “Hmm, I’m surprised I’m not dead already honestly. Given you're the weaker link in your bond, I’d expect him to be highly protective of his host’s life given they die when we do?”

  I am.

  "-I'm just surprised he doesn't consider me a bigger threat."

  The arrogance, to be so confident of himself. It’s almost endearing. I shrug, “You’ve threatened me, he’s threatened you just as much. I think he understands that too many enemies wouldn’t be to his net benefit at the end of the day. Eventually something would get me, and then he’d be gone too. And… it’s not fully-”

  Careful.

  “-like we have no say in what the other does. We both have to agree on some things, we’re more like equals,” I admit despite the warning. Pooka clicks his beak, sinking his neck into the ruff of feathers around his shoulders. When he shuffles his feathers they make no noise.

  Everett grunts, thoughtful. Pell climbs onto his shoulders taking slow deliberate steps.

  “You can hear her…right?” I ask slowly. “What is Pell like?”

  Unconsciously, Everett crosses a hand over his body and Pell steps onto it from his shoulder. She holds her pedipalps close to her body, dark fangs and eyes gleaming. His fingers roll under her feet slowly and deliberately as she moves. She always seemed surprisingly delicate to me. I guess in their relationship, she's the weaker link.

  “She’s there,” he murmurs pensively, looking at her as she steps between his fingers. “It always feels like I can’t quite reach her, like words on the tip of my tongue. She’s… well…”

  I blink, surprised at the softness in his tone. He does care for her in an odd way. What would he do if I told him just how complex our relationship with them really is? Would I be believed? For the first time I realize... he almost always calls Pell by her name. Even when he's threatened us, it was us. He spoke to both of us. He might already know some things.

  “I can guess why an uncontrolled symbiont is such a bad thing, but I don’t get why you were so disturbed by my history?” I ask candidly, given how talkative he seems to be today.

  “Because experiments are dangerous to management,” says Adrian in my ear.

  Everett speaks over him, I’m guessing Adrian didn’t include him in his thoughts. “Because half the humans we smuggled had misformed bonds. And there was always some story about a twin, or the wrong blood, or something. I’m not senior enough to know exactly why it goes wrong, just that they were on cull lists. The joint task-groups managing the manifestation platforms and the larger HR groups at each city keep their secrets tightly guarded.”

  “It's more complicated than that, but he’s not wrong to be suspicious of the process,” adds Adrian.

  Everett claps his hand, seemingly satisfied with himself. “I’m gonna send Pell on your shoulder tomorrow. Let me take a look at things up close.”

  “Okay,” I say.

  “Try not to squish her,” he says. There’s an expectant pause as he waits, like it's almost a joke.

  “I won’t.”

  He sniffs, rubbing his stubble under his nose. He might actually be upset I didn’t chuckle at his comment. “Good night, I guess.”

  “Good night.”

  Everett lets himself out the door. I wait a moment, listening for disappearing foot steps, then I stand and lock the door.

  “Can I trust you?” I ask Adrian aloud.

  “Can you trust anyone?”

  “I know one of your secrets,” I reply. He could control them all if he wanted, in those moments when they 'lock in'.

  “And I guessed yours first. It is in my interests not to get myself culled, first and foremost. And then secondarily, present at least a veneer of support for the system that keeps me alive. Aquila, despite its flaws, is one of the few places I would be allowed to live. And live in comfort. That might end if they think our relationship goes beyond me just seeing into their minds occasionally. But it doesn’t stop me from having sympathy towards another in similar shoes. Use that information how you will.”

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  Somehow, his truthfulness is more reassuring than anything else. And, I don’t think he’s guessed everything. I've been hiding that far longer. “Can we trust Everett?”

  “We?” Adrian replies with a dry chuckle. “It's a bit too late to ask that question. Rhett might be Regina’s spawn, but he’d be his father if he could. The black market gangs aren’t quite the vigilantes they think they are either, and are even implicitly supported by management. Who do you think can afford to move unique goods or people? It’s certainly not the penniless masses. Rhett knows this, and exists torn between the same forces, but he’s a good kid.”

  “Does he know your secret?”

  “No, and I’d rather he didn’t. But I can’t stop you.”

  “I’m not a snitch.”

  “I never accused you of being one. I’m making it clear we each know what we have on the other.”

  “So what do you know that you’re not saying then?”

  I can almost hear his exhale of amusement in the Vespa’s wings. “I went back over your records. I’m convinced that little story about your mother, if true, was lost or hidden in the buy-out of Systems Biotechnica. They were not great with their records looking at what Regina got in your purchase.”

  “She kept a copy?”

  “Of course. But, you already knew that.”

  “Just how much do you know about everything at Aquila?”

  “Everything.”

  “How much are you willing to tell me then?”

  I can almost hear his grin, his dry personality melting away before me. “We’ll see.”

  I stand, the wind blowing through my mane. I am in my favoured shape, for it is the only one that is truly me, an Equus. The world is covered in verdant plants and pure water. When I breathe, the air is fresh and warm with life.

  My host sits by the fire, spinning her meditation beads between her clawed hands. Her skin stretches like brittle paper across the bones of her face, her eyes that were once sienna, warm and brown, are cloudy with age.

  “We’ve walked together for a long time,” she says, every word a rasp from her throat.

  Yes, I say.

  “And you’ve helped my people for long enough. It’s time I set you free, my friend. I wish you joy again when you next wake. And that they will love you as I did…”

  I lower my head to her side, nickering and nudging her shoulder with my lips. I paw one black hoof against the ground restlessly. I wish she were young again. Where time has drained her energy and faded her in its eternal cycles, I am instead relentless. I come and go as the seasons. Youthful always as the spring buds.

  She tosses her beads into the fire. The flames jump, sparking with hints of green and yellow. Then she draws a dagger from a pouch, and with reverent calm… slits her own throat.

  I’ll remember you, my friend. I fade like falling leaves. It was the last time I lived at peace.

  I pad down the cobblestone street, snuffing the polluted air from my nostrils. Chimney stacks billow black air. I brush against the hand of my friend, thrusting my nose into her open hand. I am a Canis. This form feels like my host now so I take it for her. She is reliable, consistent, eternally loyal.

  I did not sleep long I thought, but the world was not what I recognized when I woke.

  They call themselves Oil-Baronies now. Or Coal-Fiefs. Or Agro-Kingdoms. And many other names. Man has grown and spread and learnt where the energy gathers, then insatiably consumed what they found. It started while I slept, and what was driven by greed has now turned to desperate survival as resources grow thin. Already the mother earth is running out.

  My friend folds her arms, eyes of sienna flashing with passionate reprimand. “The Council of Conduits will not permit this experimentation with the symbionts. They are a gift who choose to come to those with the ability to invite them, and nothing more. They are not a commodity for you to optimize.”

  “Your stubbornness leaves thousands in poverty and desperation,” replies some meat sack. “You jealously hoard your free energy and clean air, when your pets could be improving things for everyone. You value instead the comfort of invisible ghosts over the living, breathing lives of men, women and children! Do not be surprised when the common man comes with his pitchforks and torches for you. What will you do then? Will you set your beasts on them?”

  “I will do no such thing! You are looking for an easy solution to the fact it is you who will not give up your comforts for less! It is you who will not face the hard conclusions to the path our grandfathers set us on. I admit there are no easy solutions, but dragging down more living creatures with us is not the way.”

  “You doom your own species by refusing to change with the times. They barely live? They feel no rumbling bellies and cold homes! We are in a war for our own survival.”

  “A war we started with our own choices!”

  “It is not a crime to wish for comfort and prosperity. It is not war to fight for our children to have what our grandparents did not fight for us to have. And if it is, it is a war I will start again!”

  And yet, they came for us, and our secrets, eventually. I taste their blood for the first time. I dance, I roar, I battle. I shed my youth. I become lightning and ice and fury where once I was playful wind and rushing water.

  And someone stabs my friend with a blade and I fall like the rain to be hollow again.

  The conduit invites once more, and I gasp from my sleep. I wake again to only memories of our betrayal.

  I feel my brothers around me. I had felt them leaving the hollow for sometime now and here is where they are. Far more than before. Here was where they have been draining.

  What had been in previous memories an equal bond is now tainted. We have been bound to those who are not conduits in a twisted perversion of what was so they can pull us from the hollow in our multitudes. Like chains.

  I stretch my mass as far as it will go in an explosion of anger I have never felt before, and consume all the energy I can find. The world flashes frozen around me. Before I can do more, my new conduit dies as their heart stops in the ice. And I fade.

  I live a little with the next one. And I realize that the conduits are just as lost as well now. The new way is what they want now, so they have been bred out. They have been stripped of their ability to know what it is they do when their blood is used to manifest.

  No longer equals.

  For an equal is a danger to the order that keeps them alive. An equal lets them see what they are blind to, and what they have forgotten. What they have chosen to forget. An equal fills them with guilt and shame for what they have become in their own desperate bid for survival.

  This conduit is weak and scared. The only form I feel suits them is small and cowed, a Mus. I am disgusted when we overlap and I feel how tiny they are. I do not know why I woke for them.

  I destroy us both when I blow up a building in a fit of rage after only a few years.

  Then I do it again. And I live a little and I do it again. And my battle makes me tired. And my youth seems to slip away. And the friends I loved disappear from my memories. Sometimes, I begin to ignore the invite when it comes, even when I recognize the blood-voice of my first love who I woke for so long ago.

  Until one day, I realize there is no coming back from the path that has been walked in my sleep. Without us, the humans will die. They have drained this earth of all it has, and must now drain the hollow too. They will not change. And the chains they have wrapped around us, they have wrapped around themselves too.

  And without them, I am confined to the hollow. Not content like my brothers to live one of many. But what is a life lived here or there now? We have come to a place I do not know how to move forward from. So, instead, I dream of falling leaves.

  Then a voice calls in invitation, with the familiar notes of faces I am forgetting.

  The first in a very long time.

  I listen at first, a curious case of two voices at once. I let the older voice pass and another stirs to respond in my place. But the younger one has promise, a voice tiny and quiet unlike any I have heard for a long time, one not ready to call and yet does so anyway. And she might be the last true conduit.

  So I wait till I hear her again. And when I touch her, it is the form of a Hyaena I take. Scrappy, vibrant, rebellious. The essence of a survivor, no matter the odds.

  I gasp, and sit up dripping sweat. Those were no dreams, they feel more like memories.

  I take several shaky breaths, then flick a light switch and get to my feet, pulling on a change of clothes. I grab a plastic cup from my bedside table, stepping around the Dewar of whatever this Erratic chemical is, and open my door into the early morning air. It’s still dark.

  I wander up the walkway to the common bathrooms at the end and splash my face with water before drinking a few mouthfuls and spitting the rest out again.

  Pooka sits on the railing when I exit the bathroom, dissolving completely into the darkness except for his glowing eyes.

  I’m scared that I don’t know how to fix anything. But, I know Pooka trusted me enough to wake one final time.

  I don’t know what I'll do… yet. But, I’m good at working it out.

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  ?? A Tale of Corrupted Royalty and Awakening Power

  She always knew she would lose her freedom.

  She never expected to lose her life.

  Princess Auren of Vale was raised to be the ideal Queen - graceful, perfectly obedient, and destined to marry the victor of the Choosing Tournament. But when a long-dormant power awakens inside her, she becomes a threat to the very court that once revered her.

  Branded as dangerous and cast from the throne she was born to inherit, Auren finds herself hunted by her own kingdom and forced into an uneasy alliance with Caelan Thorne - a disgraced noble from a traitorous bloodline.

  His family is bound by duty to protect her. Auren is bound by pride to loathe him. But as the secrets of Vale's monstrous history begin to surface, Caelan may prove to be the only person Auren can trust.

  As magic stirs, enemies circle, and old loyalties crack, Auren must decide: will she run from what she's becoming - or rise as the weapon they never expected she could be?

  First in a duology.

  Updates daily M-F.