Messenger in the Mist (19 page)

Leer had been right. The havoc he created cleared a path to the machine. Star searched for him in the burning inferno raging below her but black smoke blinded her. She caught a glimpse of angry flames and thousands of black legs writhing like condemned souls in the broken sacks. She needed to get closer to yell his name, but there was no way down without injuring Windracer in the process. If she went after him, Star would put everything Leer had risked his life for in vain. He’d sealed the deal. The only task left to her was destroying the machine.

Waving smoke out of her eyes, Star spied a raised incline leading to the machine. She directed Windracer back around, out of the flames to the back of the canyon, and rode to meet her destiny. The hulk of metal rose before her, blotting out the sky until only oily black rose above her for miles.

The front was a never-ending slab of steel jutting out from the rock floor of the canyon. The machine looked like it fell on top of the earth eons ago and crushed an imprint in the sand. Although Star knew such a feat was impossible by any known means, she wouldn’t put it past these people to figure out a way to build such a thing in the sky and land it on the ground. They’d already created a machine to help a species bent on death. More importantly, she had to find the way in.

Tying Windracer to an outcropping, Star examined the greasy front. She ran the palms of her hands back and forth across the moist substance congealing at the base, but could find no cracks or doorways of any kind. A rush of anxious nervousness threatened to overwhelm her. How could she follow through if she didn’t even understand how to get in? How could she bring down such a mammoth of a beast? All at once, the task seemed daunting, and even more so because Leer had believed in her to the extent of sacrificing his own life. Now she stared blindly at her target, her voice mute and her weapons useless.

Star heard a strange, keen noise, like the call of a bird. Ten feet down the surface of the machine, the metal disappeared and a robed man came out. Distracted by the raging fire, he didn’t even notice her as he ran toward the inferno below.

She watched as the man turned away, and then approached the hole where he’d come from. It had not been there seconds before. The metal surface had disappeared to reveal a long hallway, lit by strange green glowing globes with no fire in them. Star took one look back to make sure Windracer was safe then stepped inside. The structure hummed around her, as if it was a tuning fork struck centuries ago, still resounding. She followed the chain of globes magically illuminating the path in front of her. Metal surrounded her on all sides. The walls were cool and smooth to her touch, the surface slick and polished. If she looked closely, she could see her blurred reflection in the walls.

But Star had no time for examination. She had one purpose and one purpose alone. The heart of the beast should dwell deep inside, and so she used her well developed sense of direction and followed the humming, traveling ever farther into the core. Star passed boxes of flashing lights, magical panels of jeweled buttons and tubes winding around the walls like snakes. Making sure not to touch anything, she turned corner after corner, entering room after room of oddities. She felt trapped in someone else’s strange dream.

As she journeyed through the belly of the machine, Star passed a long hallway lined with glass on all sides. She looked down to the level below. A laboratory with large translucent vials lined the walls. Elyndra, each in different stages of life, floated in the liquid substance in each tube. She could even see an embryo magnified by the thick walls of glass, the beginnings of a slender body and a slew of tangled legs. Then, a larva, small enough to hold in her hands, its skin white as ivory and delicate as silk. She gasped when she saw a giant caterpillar akin to the beasts from the forest, suspended in the gelatinous liquid, its groping mouth hanging open. Next came the lining of a cocoon, the beast inside taken out long ago. The body of an Elyndra in adult form hung from the ceiling, preserved by mist blowing through a vent in the wall. On the tables below were small dishes holding tiny white eggs the size of pearls, row upon row, glowing underneath the fluorescent globes, awaiting a new life.

Star’s stomach heaved as she realized these people grew the Elyndra, harvested them and set them free upon the world. It was a twisted, symbiotic relationship she couldn’t comprehend. All she knew was these robed men were her enemies and she had to stop them before another wave of flying beasts was unleashed to spread terror on Evenspark and Ravencliff.

Picking up her pace, Star jogged through the inner levels of the machine. Each hallway ran in a box-like shape around a centerpiece, with staircases at even intervals, taking the traveler to the next level. With each level, the turns in the hallways grew closer together, so that the new level surrounded the inner centerpiece, bringing her closer to the middle of the machine.

As the humming rose to a buzzing drawl pulsing in her inner ears, Star emerged from another long hallway into a room vast as a city square with rows and rows of tables arranged in concentric circles around a glowing sphere, which hovered above the floor, rotating like a small planet with sparks of iridescence and glimmering ribbons of light. It felt charged with energy and on the brink of instability, being contained only by some invisible force. A robed man stood in front of it, recording calculations on a raised table between him and the sphere.

Ducking underneath a table, Star watched the man for several moments. This orb must be the heart of the machine, the source of all its power. She watched as the man pressed buttons on the control panel in front of him, but could deduce no pattern to his motions or answer for how the sphere stayed in equilateral suspension.

He murmured a strange litany of numbers and names into a black grid-like film in the console. “The tenth of November, 4671 AD, at five twenty-seven.” Star thought about his words but no meaning came to mind.

After several moments of pressing seemingly random buttons, the man poured a thick liquid substance into a tube running from the console to the orb. Star wondered if the tube was the weakest spot, the one way to get past the force field surrounding the energy ball.

Star’s fingers shook and she felt as though all the nervous bubbles running through her system would explode all at once. She knew her time was running out. Leer could not keep all of the robed men away forever. She had to make her move.

She crept toward the man at the front table, sliding her dagger out of its sheath in her boot and calculating her moves. Just as the man bent to pick up a strange writing utensil from the floor, Star leaped, knocking him on the ground. Before he could react, she had her dagger glinting at his throat.

The man stared, dazed and confused before fear entered its way into his eyes, which grew wide, as if he looked on a ghost.

Star noticed the clasp on his robe, the same symbol she’d seen on the assassination letter addressed to Leer. She’d always thought the man in the insignia had slain the Elyndra, but now she knew the pewter figure engraved on the symbol reached toward the beast to honor it.

The man snatched the clasp away from her. “You’ve come to destroy us all.”

Star’s anger raged. “I’ve come to put a stop to this madness.”

“You’ve brought the madness with you.”

She was in no mood to argue as she pressed the dagger against the heated skin of his neck. “I need to know how to stop the machine. Tell me now and you will live.”

The man did not speak. Why would he give up all their answers now? She contemplated what to do with him as he looked at her in terror. If any of his friends showed up, perhaps she could use him as a hostage, even negotiate him for Leer if he had managed to survive and they captured him.

“Fine.” She brought out a rope from her pocket and tied his hands behind his back. She bound another rope tightly around his feet. Once Star secured him, she walked toward the console, looking over the alien symbols and flashing lights. She watched his face carefully as her hand passed over certain controls. But he did not move. His fear vanished as he smiled in bliss.

“There is no way, with your primitive intelligence, to figure it out.”

Star felt the stab but did not let it show on her features. She knew she was in over her head, and more brown-robed help would be coming soon.

So she pushed buttons, all the buttons. There were some flashes, a few beeps and then nothing. To her chagrin, the man tied on the floor sat back with relief.

Then her fingers brushed the tube. Attached to the console by a clamp, it shot out into the glowing globe like an umbilical cord. Star wondered if she had anything small enough to put in it and sharp enough to cause a tear or an obstruction. She thought about coins, and rummaged through her pockets, but as ever, she was penniless. She thought about matches, and set one aflame, but the fire sizzled out in the gel-like liquid on the way down. In the background, the robed man laughed, enjoying some secret joke.

Star remembered the necklace Valen had given her as a present for saving Bellanina’s bunnyfly. She’d worn it every day since, the chain clasped around her neck and the ruby heart hidden beneath the folds of her traveling tunic. It was the perfect size to clog the tube. Unclasping the necklace from around her neck, she pulled it out from underneath her layers of clothing and held it above the tube in a moment of indecision. It glowed faintly red throughout the chamber.

“Wait!” The man’s expression turned into fear. “Don’t drop that in! You’ll ruin everything!”

Star whirled around, her trance with the necklace broken. Somehow she’d struck the right chord.

“If you drop the jewel in, we will all suffer. The planet will die.”

The pendant hung above the rim, swinging back and forth like a pendulum. Star shot a glance back at him. “What do you mean?”

“This machine controls the equilibrium of life on this world. Without it, chaos will reign unchallenged.”

“It seems to me all the machine controls is that awful mist.”

“Which is the life force of all the Elyndra.”

“Then they should all die.” The pendant dropped a bit farther.

“No,” the man pleaded, his voice hoarse. “You don’t understand.”

“You’ve got one minute to explain.”

The man sighed like she’d asked an impossible task. He shifted on the floor and straightened his back, as if to gain force with his voice and collect his thoughts. “Ages ago, our ancestors were forced to leave their home world. There was no balance, no one to oversee the population, and the world grew full with people and nothing else. All other species became extinct. Resources dwindled. They sent out ships to colonize other worlds, but the pattern kept repeating on and on again.

“Our ancestors, The Forgotten Ones, were like a virus, spreading death on each consecutive planet they reached. It took generations upon generations, but the end was always the same, until our ancestors devised a solution. They chose this planet with a purpose, to coexist. Don’t you see? The Elyndra are the check in the system, the solution to the problem. If we kill them, then we kill this world.”

Star’s eyes flared as if she talked to a child who didn’t want to listen. “The mist has taken over. It’s invaded our territories. The Elyndra will kill us all.”

The man shook his head, bitterness simmering in his eyes. “It is you that have taken over, your cities sprawling out onto preserved land. Without the mist, what is there to stop you from taking over the entire planet?”

The sheer thought of other worlds bent Star’s mind, never mind the concept of lands full of people and nothing else. Between Ravencliff and Evenspark alone, there was enough room for hundreds of new towns and thousands more people. “The Elyndra are attacking my friends. If I don’t stop them, the people, my family, will die.”

The man’s shoulders drooped. “Then you doom us all.”

Star hovered on the brink of a great and everlasting decision. She knew that what he spoke was beyond her comprehension and she was not a god with license to choose the fate of an entire world. But then she thought of Leer, how he’d been so eager to fight for her cause, of her parents in their wispy home on the outskirts and of Valen watching the walls of Ravencliff each day. She could not let them down.

She was not the one to make such a monumental decision about life and fate, but neither was this cold-hearted, monster-breeding scientist boasting all the knowledge in the universe but knowing nothing of family, of love.

Star dropped the necklace and it fell into the depths of the tube. She watched in silent horror and awe as it traveled up to the orb, pulsing red in the glowing light. The robed man shouted and sobbed behind her, praying, but the necklace moved steadfastly, right to the sphere’s inner core.

King

“They’ve breached the walls, Your Highness. We must fall back!”

Valen slashed through the air, his sword finding another flying target. Although they’d achieved a lull in the fighting, the numbers of Elyndra rose again in the last few hours, dozens of them flinging themselves at Ravencliff’s walls. He feared some had even managed to get through their barricade and now wreaked havoc on the streets below. He hoped soldiers and pedestrians alike had heeded his bugle call and were fortified inside their homes.

“If we retreat now, there is no turning back!” Valen gritted his teeth. Sweat and blood wet his tunic, and his arms and legs hurt like he’d been torn apart by racing stallions. But he was not yet ready to give up.

“Your Highness,” the man said, bowing in all humbleness, “the troops are dying. If we don’t fall back now, no one will be left.”

Valen stared the man down, his face inches away. “Do you want to live in a hole in the ground for the rest of your life? To never see the light of day?”

The man nodded. “I want to live.”

Just then, an Elyndra crashed into what was left of the sand bags stacked on the barricade. Grit spewed around them, raining on their heads. Then the wall of mist poured in.