To the side of what they now called, the ‘big room,’ was a corridor leading to the ‘executive lodging.’ Once the temporary quarters of visiting managerial staff from off-world, it now housed the unwitting knights of science. Though, by their modern standards, the rooms were far from ‘executive-level;’ not much bigger then what they had aboard the ship, in fact.

  On the morning of their third day onsite, the sun crept through the horizontal slats of the circular window beside Nash’s bed, waking her before she meant to. She regretted not closing the shade the night before, but sat up anyway, bleary-eyed, and grateful for the faint aroma of coffee on the air. She shuffled out of bed and readied herself, putting on little gold earrings and mascara. When she entered the big room, the tangerine glow of morning filled the space with its light. Though the magnificent wall of glass admitted every ray, the place was colder than it looked. Nash zipped her jacket all the way up to her neck and joined Greg at a table.

  The workstations reminded her of the drafting tables, on which she’d once been made to make maps the ‘old way,’ purely for educational purposes. Like those desks of old, these too were adjoined by high, uncomfortable stools, all of which seemed to have one leg shorter than the others. Nash perched atop one of these antiquated seats and scooted it closer. Greg was polite enough not to comment on the wretched screech it made across the tile floor. Certainly, the chairs in the engineering department of whatever ‘Tech’ he’d attended were a smoother ride than these.

  He slid over the cup of coffee, made up just the way she liked. “Yesterday wasn’t what I wanted to see,” he sighed.

  “I know,” she took a cautious first sip through the rising steam. “But you still have two more, and there’s time…”

  “I was hoping the minimum amount would cut it. I know how precious the stuff is, or at least I do now…” he stared at the surface of his mug.

  “It wasn’t nothing,” she replied, recalling the previous day’s attempt. The morning before, they’d found the old PA system. After having a bit of fun hearing their own voices echo through the expanse of the pit, they sent Kory to the bottom of it with the oversized glove affixed to her right hand. On the reverberating command of ‘GO’ from the control center, she generated all the current of which she was capable, floating high above the ground. Bolts of lightning from the cloudless sky even joined her as she levitated there. And yet it wasn’t enough. She may have flickered a time or two, but otherwise remained in the present plane.

  When she descended at last, panting and covered in residual sparks, she knew as well as they did the equation required more catalyst, and that throwing extra energy at it wouldn’t solve anything. Still, they tried the first gauntlet one more time, sending Zol in her place, as it was the general consensus he was stronger. The results were the same. For all his power he didn’t break the space barrier either.

  “I guess it’s on to the second one, which isn’t much more potent than the first if I’m being honest,” Greg mused. “After that, it just gets ridiculous. Like, I’m talking blue scales up the sides of their arms… when do you think she’ll be up?”

  “I don’t know, probably not for a while,” Nash cast a sidelong glance at the hallway behind her.

  “Really? She didn’t seem all that worn out by the end of the day.”

  “I think I heard her go to bed after me…” she deflected, knowing full well she’d seen Kory out after midnight, sitting just in front of Sohrab. He had his hands on the sides of her head and was muttering something Nash couldn’t hear, though that was all she remembered. A part of her knew all along what was happening, and ignored it out of convenience, but still another part realized how beneficial it could be if that particular current were channeled into the appropriate course.

  “You know what…” Nash straightened up and tapped the surface of the table, roused from her distraction, inspired by it even. “…I’ll wake her now. Get the second device ready, for the sake of the sequence. But have the third prepared too, ‘scales’ and all. Just because there’s time doesn’t mean we should waste it.” She took her coffee and walked back across the massive space toward the bedroom hallway.

  “Aye-Aye,” Greg smiled, invigorated by the jolt of the challenge.

  #

  Later that morning as the sun rose higher, Sohrab left the building and went walking along the edge of the pit. He hated how they had to stay in an overgrown labyrinth of corridors converging on one central room. It reminded him too much of another world, another time; trapped again. “At least there were none here to poison me,” he thought to himself, as he drank from the flask he carried in between puffs on his cigarette. The air here was too warm for his usual dark coat, so the vices had nowhere to hide. But why bother with pretense in this company?

  As he trod along, a rat crossed his path. Curiously, it was the only other life form he’d seen since landing. He kicked a rock at it and lost his footing in the process, scarcely avoiding the twenty-foot drop to the sharply cut ramp below. When he regained his balance, his eyes were drawn to the middle of the basin, the rat all but forgotten.

  Down at the center, some three hundred yards away, stood Kory. She was attended by Nash and Greg, who fussed over her accordingly as they affixed the second stage gauntlet to her hand. Sohrab recalled overhearing a whisper or two indicating their lack of faith in it. He believed them. From what he’d seen, number two didn’t look much more robust than number one, and he’d be lying if he didn’t admit yesterday’s results weren’t as disappointing for him as they were for Greg. But unlike the one who’d made the device and had a tangible stake in its success, Sohrab kept quiet. His motives confounded even himself sometimes. How could he expect the rest of them to understand?

  He sat down on the dusty path and kicked his legs over the edge, content to see the action from this vantage point. Yesterday he’d been inside, watching it all from behind the glass with the rest of them. It wasn’t enough. Without feeling the static in the air and hearing the steady crack of current, what could be the point? He reclined against a rock and waited some more. The resonant properties of the pit and the rising wind carried their voices all the way up to his ears. Oh, how they prattled on. Wouldn’t they just let her start already?

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  At last, Kory stood alone. Greg was some distance away by now, trudging up the side and scrambling up ladders in his ungainly way. To Sohrab’s dismay, Nash wasn’t helping the Human get out quicker, she was flying straight towards him. That nagging old marm, what did she want now? He flicked the butt of his cigarette away, but didn’t rise to meet her.

  “You won’t want to be here when it starts,” she said as she landed beside him. “Come on, I can give you a lift back.”

  “No,” he said with no inflection, as he took another sip from the flask. He cared not a lick that she grew sicker of him by the day.

  “You could get hurt,” she chided, not bothering to hide the impatience in her voice. “The voltage alone… plus, what if this one works?”

  “It won’t,” he replied, staring abjectly at the white sky above them. “You don’t believe it, and neither does he,” Sohrab nodded in the direction Greg had gone.

  “Suit yourself, get fried then,” she huffed.

  “I should be so lucky,” is what he thought, but what he said was closer to: “You know why I’m here. Don’t act brand new.” They locked eyes for a moment and shared a hostile, knowing gaze. Then she flew away. He smirked to himself, knowing Nash knew little, if anything, though she’d never say it out loud. But then he came to the sobering realization that he’d need her to water the seeds he’d planted. Couldn’t be doing everything, could he?

  When Sohrab sensed he was finally without intruders, he sat up straighter and drew one knee up under his chin, letting the other leg hang free still. At the center of the pit, Kory stood motionless, until one word from the control center speaker rattled her and her observer both. “GO.”

  She charged up and soared as easily as the day before, letting the rivers of light run over her like a flood. On the ascent, she saw him standing there in the distance, rushing to his feet, and poised defensively, but otherwise frozen in space. The cocoon of electricity was as numbing and comforting as it had ever been. It carried her higher above the ground, but it didn’t change anything. Kory resolved to try harder, straining against the upper limit of her ability. Existence flashed in and out but for an instant. There was something else, something waiting on the edge just beyond this plane, more than something, more than one, prowling, gnashing, eager to devour her and everything beyond. It wasn’t right to test them. She powered down and sank to the ground, letting the weight of the glove fall from her hand to the dust.

  Her feet touched the floor of the pit once more, discharging stray energy from herself. She felt the weight of what lay outside the veil lift off as the cold rage of the one who watched settled in. Displays of her power ignited a ravenous desire in him that bordered on hatred. She turned her head and gave him the same dirty look he’d given her when they first arrived. Then she kicked her heels together and rose over the edge towards the building in a flurry of sparks, blind to the flecked blue pebbles left behind.

  #

  For the ‘sake of the sequence,’ Zol was next to try out number two. They weren’t sure the result would mean anything, but it would give him something to do while Kory rested, seeing as number three was next on the docket. After a thorough inspection, the two self-elected scientists determined nothing was out of place. The glove was the same as before, with not one mark to indicate scorching or charring. Nash even counted every inlaid Vercoden gem to ensure none had fallen off.

  “This is dumb,” Zol said as Greg tightened the metallic rim of the gauntlet around his left forearm.

  Nash blurted out a hasty response, unsure what, if any, logic would satisfy him. “I mean, of course it seems repetitive, but sometimes scientific progress is –”

  “Kory said don’t do it. Said it’s bad,” He cut her off, taking a drag from the cigarette in his right hand.

  “Now why do you have to go and smoke those things?” Nash teased playfully, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear.

  He looked her dead in the eye, flicked the butt away, and said, “I do what I want.”

  “Right, well…” She turned her eyes downward, bashfully at first, but then purposefully as she spotted something she hadn’t seen before. There in the dust were little glints of blue. “Greg, look! Were those always here?”

  “Well, I’ll be…” the Earthling crouched in the dirt, collecting one of the azure spheres with a napkin he’d had in his pocket. “You know, I don’t think they were!” He rose and showed the pea-sized object to Nash.

  “We should go test this, see if it’s really…”

  “I don’t see what else it could be,” Greg wondered.

  “Is this important?” Zol grumbled, impatient with the pace of ‘scientific progress.’

  “I’ll tell you what,” she beamed up at him. “We’ll hurry this up. You go ahead and do exactly what Kory did, and we’ll see if there’s more of this stuff here after you’re done.”

  “But shouldn’t we at least wait and get a sample –” Greg started.

  “Samples, samples, there’s time for that later,” Nash grinned nervously, still aware of every single blue stone embedded in the mesh on Zol’s forearm. “Come on, I’ll give you a ride up. Let’s not waste any more time.”

  “But –”

  “Just take the one in your napkin, gosh…” she insisted, her voice fading as their glowing forms disappeared over the edge of the pit.

  Zol watched her leave, same as he always did. A small part of him wondered why someone so commanding was prone to stare at the ground in his presence, but he gave it no further mind. He scratched his bearded chin and raised his arms high, preferring to channel the sky from the jump rather than rise to it in that stupid, little unfolding-like-a-flower pose Kory favored. Never mind the confounded spin-move Mia would have tried if she were here.

  If there was one thing he couldn’t wrap his head around, besides a vast majority, it was how worldly the only other two members of his race he knew were. There was a great deal he didn’t relate to about growing up in a materialistic, cosmopolitan society, and though a few trappings of it tempted him and always would, it was hard to see the point of it all. In a way he almost sympathized with Nash and Greg, pursuing discovery for its own sake. Ever since he’d been ripped unwittingly from his tiny, isolated world, he’d gone along with everything they’d said simply for the experience of it all. Who else from his planet could say the same? Not even the one who’d charged him with this bizarre quest could lay claim to sights like the ones he’d seen. By now, Zol was sure he knew a lot more than that filthy old ‘priest.’ Whatever haunted past he’d seen in the crystals surely paled in comparison to the glittering future Zol had been given. If only he knew how wrong he was, and just what awaited him past the edges of the frame.

  In any case, there was nothing waiting for him back there; hadn’t been for a long time. Bearing it all in mind, he inhaled deeply and closed his eyes, not bothering to wait for any command from the voice box. The current started from the tips of his outstretched fingers and trailed downwards, until it engulfed him wholly. He rose just as Kory did before, testing the limits of his power, pushing the boundaries of existence, until whatever else was out there pushed back.