Airith- the Kentilan War Page 20
This brought a growl from Rapha. “Like horseshit he did. That dude never did anything for anyone unless he got money, fame or sex out of it. You sure?”
“Quite certain. He is gone from this place. As are the armies. A solider from the back lines told me as he and hundreds of his comrades fled the battlefield wounded.”
Airith’s stomach dropped into her feet. “We need to get back on track and headed to the Glitch”. The Glitch. Where they would inevitably find the Creator and try to active the power core as he asked.
*
Rapha was at the controls of the Penelope, Airith riding next to him in the co-pilot’s seat. Though she wasn’t driving, but instead explaining.
“Has the Creator ever told you about the Glitch?” she asked, surprised.
“Of course, why wouldn’t he?” he responded.
She glared at him. “I should have known he would have told someone who he’d—”
Before she could complete the sentence, Rapha had slammed on the breaks and brought the waver down hard in the sand. He threw his door open, jumped out, and punched the hood of the vehicle.
Airith jumped to her feet as well, shocked at his behavior. “What gives?” she shouted. “¿Qué estas loco?! Stop fucking with the waver!”
Rapha threw his hands up in the air, furious. “Someone who he’d what? What is it with you? Why are you always doing that? What’s your damage? Why are you pretending that night didn’t happen, pretending that it didn’t matter! What’s with the attitude, Airith? Why do you hide from me? Because Mother rejected me, while you’re her perfect assassin? What am I to you, just a nobody? Just a reject? At least I show my feelings! Shit, you showed yours that night we met. The night you were supposed to kill me. Mother might not have wanted me, but at least I know who I am! If you keep hiding yourself away, you’re going to end up alone and nowhere—just like she planned for you! That’s why she created you, right? To be an assassin by day and one of her son’s possessions by night!”
“What?” Airith gasped and shaking her head in confusion. She was completely thrown off by this outburst.
“You’re still her slave, don’t you see?” he asked quietly. “You won’t let yourself be happy, and as long as you’re doing that, you’re still enslaved to her.”
Airith stared at him for a moment, grabbed the hilt of her sword then activated it. She paused, then held the tip up to the scar on her cheek—the scar that Mother marked her with the night she came back from failing to kill Rapha. It was a mark to serve two purposes; for all to see she was the assassin for Mother and to remind her whose slave she was.
And every time she looked in the mirror, it reminded her that she belonged to someone else.
Now she slid the tip of her sword into the spot right below it and, with three sharp strokes, created a second open diamond shape. This was to symbolize the connection of two slaves. It was to show how her, and Rapha were now slaves to each other.
“A slave to Mother no more,” she hissed. “Now I’m a slave to you. Are you happy? Is that what you wanted?”
She rushed toward him without waiting for an answer and crushed her lips to his.
The moment they touched; she felt the change happen. Something was rushing through her blood… and then over her skin, under her hair, through her eyes…
When her eyes flew open, she saw that the same thing was happening to Rapha. He had a green glow over his skin, and it was… moving. Looking closer, she saw that it was a series of numbers, letters, and symbols, all rolling over and through his skin as if he was suddenly made of code. As she watched, the code from his skin rolled through the air and hit her own code—which was pink, she realized. Bright, neon pink, with something like yellow or gold threaded into it. The moment the green hit it, there was an explosion, and they both flew backward into the sand.
*
Miles away, inside the Glitch’s mainframe, the Creator’s consciousness woke. He’d felt it. The thing he’d been waiting for, for so long.
“Ah, my fateful day has begun,” he thought within the brain of the Glitch. “My two binary stars have finally fused.”
Just then, the power cores of the Glitch fired; it was being powder by the connection newly created by Airith and Rapha. The tower came alive with lights so bright the beam shot into space thousands of miles above Indio.
*
Back in the waver, Rapha was fighting the controls of the ship. No matter what he did, though, he couldn’t get it to respond to him.
“She’s all shot to shit and not cooperating?” he shouted. “This thing is programmed to respond to me!”
“You are not the one in control any longer,” Phara replied calmly. “He is controlling it now.”
“He?” Rapha shouted. Then he paused as he felt the signature, he knew all too well.
“The Creator,” Airith answered. “I guess we’ve woken his consciousness with whatever just happened back there, and he wants to speak with us. Finally, some good news.”
“You know how you asked if he ever told me what the Glitch actually is? Well, imagine a never-ending number of pieces of paper, and now think about those pieces of paper as different universes, some even alternate universes to ours. Now think about them all pressed together in an infinite stack. The Glitch can open a hole and run through that entire stack like an endless radio dial but only in the exact spot we would be in that other universe, picking each signal up as a channel. It’s how we get the Earth music and television shows beamed to us because in whatever location the Earth is sitting in its universe is where we sit in ours, it’s like a mirror in a way,” Rapha explained feeling bad for how he exploded on Airith earlier. It wasn’t a scientific explanation, but it was the one he’d been given, and it made sense to him. “It’s the Creator’s toy. He uses it to understand the other worlds.”
“Understand them?” Airith asked. “Like… connect with them?”
“Just listen to them, I think,” he continued. “I don’t think physical contact is possible. Though I don’t know that for sure,” he added thoughtfully.
Suddenly there was a jerk, and then a pop, and the world around them disappeared.
*
When Rapha’s sight came back, they were in an elevator. A white one, with strange, monotone music playing. Music that he definitely did not like. The elevator jerked to a stop and the doors opened, showing them a strange white room—with the same music playing. This room, also bland, and had no hint of color in sight. White pillows on the white couch. A white telephone on the white desk. A blank painting framed in white.
The carpet, the walls, everything bright headache white. And that horrible music.
Rapha took one step out of the elevator, and then another, leaving the girls to follow him. Suddenly there was movement on the desk, and he noticed a box there. A box that seemed to be printing some sort of message. He walked up to it and yanked the paper up toward his face.
“Please make yourself comfortable,” he read, shocked. “Athena from accounting will be with you shortly.” He dropped the paper and whirled around to look at Airith. “Who the fuck is Athena?”
“Sounds like a cheap stripper,” she replied, her eyes still on the room around them.
Her eyes jerked toward his when the robot came over the intercom.
“Coffee break has commenced,” the genderless voice said. “The Creator can see you now.”
A bright purple door on the other side of the room began to glow. Just then the key around Airith’s neck started to glow a bright neon purple as well. They both started to pulse at the same time in a Morse code like manner.
A moment later, a bright, shining person stepped through the door, covered in some sort of reflective purple material. The person had a helmet over their head, and some sort of propulsion machine strapped to their back.
“What the…” Rapha whispered.
“Hello, my binary stars,” the person—now identifiable as a man—said, lifting a fuzzy television like hel
met off his head.
Now they could see that his hair was slicked back nicely. He was young, Rapha thought, though it was hard to tell through the many-colored sunglasses he was wearing.
Still, he recognized the voice.
“Creator,” he said quietly.
The Creator nodded. “We felt your connection and are most excited about this new phase in our work,” he said. He turned. “Airith, put these on.” Pulling the glasses from his face, he handed them to her.
Airith stared at him while nervously reaching out to grab the glasses and then slowly slipped them on.
What she saw shocked her. She could see lines of living code extending from her outward—and connecting to Phara and Rapha. And the Creator. She could see the same lines running between the others, and when she looked down, she could see that the lines that ran between her and Rapha were pulsing more brightly than anyone else’s, bright bullets of green and pink running along the lines at intervals.
“Yes, you’ve noticed the Skyfire,” the Creator said, feeling where her eyes were dwelling. “You see, you didn’t need Mox’s code at all. True, his code will increase the Skyfire tech. But your organic connection has rewired your codebase and made Mox’s code unnecessary. You are now feeding off each other. You have combined and become a battery. If you are together you will have all the power you need to charge Skyfire. But like any reactor, if you get too hot, you’ll explode and kill everything on Indio. Which would be… upsetting.”
She heard the twist in his voice on the last word and narrowed her eyes. He might be telling them something, but it definitely wasn’t the whole truth. It was just the truth as he wanted them to believe it. And how did he know about the code written by Mox?
“Ask the glasses to search for Mother for you,” the Creator commanded.
“What?” Airith gasped.
“Tell them to search for Mother’s code,” he repeated.
Confused, she wrinkled her brow and thought the command to the glasses. To her surprise, her vision spiraled back down to the planet, running rapidly across the sand and into the Indigo Tower. There she saw Mother, reams and reams of code running from what was left of her body out toward her many children.
And in that moment, she knew.
“Oh my God,” she gasped. She looked up at the Creator, and then at Rapha and Phara. “He code can be transferred. If we pass her code to a clone of her, we can kill the clone and be down with her connection. We can fix everything.”
“A clone?” Rapha asked.
They both turned at the same time to look at Phara. Mother’s most perfect creation.
Mother’s clone.
Phara returned their stares and nodded solemnly. “I am willing,” she said.
Rapha grabbed her arm—which made Airith’s stomach flip in unpleasant ways. “It will mean sacrificing your life, Phara,” he said firmly. “You’ll become what she is.”
Phara didn’t even pause. “I am aware, Rapha.”
Airith’s eyes dropped toward the floor, but her gaze was snagged by the connection between her and Rapha. Now that she looked at it more closely, she could see numbers on her chest and his. Across her breast, in bright pink, she was wearing the number 52. And on his, in fluorescent green, 143.
What did the numbers mean? And why had they appeared with the code? Did they have something to do with the Skyfire? Something to do with their new weaponization?
She shuddered at the thought.
Then she noticed the light pink cord that connected her to Mother. And another running from Rapha. They were all connected, she knew—and all exposed, because of that connection. Destroying it was the only way any of them would ever be free.
“Phara is the way,” the Creator said, interrupting her thoughts. “The only way. But you see that there is a way to defeat Mother. One that you never anticipated.”
“But how would we do it?” Airith asked on a gasp. “We’ve tried to fight her. We’ve lost. And she has new powers that we cannot defeat.”
“You must only wound her,” the Creator said quickly. “Wound her enough to imprison her, and Phara will be able to absorb her Sadness. Once it has entered Phara she can take control of Mother’s direct line to all. That will be the end. The end of the being we have called Mother.”
“And we just kill Phara like it’s no big deal? What the fuck?!” Rapha asked in anger, his voice low and more dangerous than Airith had ever heard it. She wondered, now, what it was he felt for Phara. Why he was so concerned about her.
The Creator was unapologetic for his next statement. “You must kill her so she can convert the Sadness and deploy the new codebase.”
Airith gasped. Kill Phara? She didn’t like the girl, but she didn’t think she could consider killing her.
“It is the only solution,” the Creator said.
“And I am willing,” Phara added. “My life has been so that I could protect the Life Pool. This is the only way to return it to its natural state. To rid it of the Sadness that now pollutes it. To rid the world of Mother without killing her children.”
She strolled to the window that appeared in the wall and glanced down, then gestured for Rapha and Airith to join her.
Airith walked forward, holding her breath. When she arrived at the window, she looked down to see Homecity. Mother had covered it in a protective bubble of the Sadness, blocking it off from the rest of the world.
“She is already trying to protect herself,” the Creator said. “You will have to move quickly if you’re to succeed at saving all of her children.”
Airith took a deep breath, and then looked up at Rapha. In his eyes, she saw the same awareness she’d already begun to feel.
If they wanted to defeat Mother and win their freedom, this was the only way.
She yanked the hilt of her sword and held it up in front of her. “Then I guess we’d better get going,” she said quietly.
A nod from Phara, another from Rapha, and they all turned and headed for the door, leaving the Creator chuckling behind them.
EPILOGUE
M Any miles away, in the Kentilan Tower Palace, young Grand Duke Luka Kentila was staring out the window at the black liquid shield that had come up over Homecity like a dome of darkness. He didn’t know what the darkness was, but he knew what it meant. His father had stormed out of the palace that morning, shouting that when he returned, they would celebrate a great victory.
It looked, however, as if the victory belonged to someone else.
At that moment, a hand touched his elbow. He dropped his gaze and looked back, keeping his eyes set on the floor rather than meeting the gaze of whoever had come to him.
“Sire,” a voice said. “It’s about your father…”
ILLUSTRATIONS
by Luka Dudic
RAPHA
CONCEPT ART
AIRITH
CONCEPT ART
THE CREATOR – BEFORE TRANSFERRING TO THE GLITCH
CONCEPT ART
MOTHER
CONCEPT ART
EMPEROR KENTILA
CONCEPT ART
ISABEL RAE
CONCEPT ART
ISABEL RAE’s fellas
CONCEPT ART
VALDOVAS
CONCEPT ART
MOX AND TODDBOY
CONCEPT ART
SCENES
CONCEPT ART
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Once someone called me "The cleverest writer on the Internet" and "A controlled chaotic mega brain that creates methods of madness that work freakishly well”. So, I got that going for me.
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