I Am Titanium (Pax Black Book 1) (16 page)

Aimed toward Scarlett.

And jumped.

—no no no no No!—

Akllana’chikni’pai felt Scarlett retreat into her own mind and watched the girl trap herself in a small, featureless
pacha
of her own. A swirling black mass of smoke surrounded the girl, twisting and turning, and in the midst of it Scarlett stood, her mouth stretched absurdly wide as though she were witnessing the horrors of the school again and again. The black smoke seemed to bind her, holding her to face the horrors, no matter how violently the girl struggled.

Akllana’chikni’pai took control of the girl’s body just in time to see the boy jumping toward her, flying through the air with his arms outstretched to grasp her neck. From his face, it was clear he intended to harm her. Instinctively, she drew her swords and used them to knock the boy aside with the flats of her blades, flinging him away.

Before she could react further, black clouds of smoke rose up around her—the same smoke Scarlett had been trailing—swirling in an unnatural, mesh-like pattern, sealing her away from the world in a kind of blind shield. Negative energy swirled in the clouds, giving them form and strength.

Another cage,
Akllana’chikni’pai thought. She used her sword blades to cut through the energy, moving through one of her oldest
kata
, an elementary dance that was meant to bring the student awareness to threats from all sides. The smoke dissipated in a sudden puff of cool, moist wind, foul with the scents of smoke and machinery but welcome nevertheless because it indicated her freedom once again.

She raised her chin to the sky and soaked in the power of the sun with her blades extended and her arms outstretched for a moment. For an instant, there was only the light of the sun.

She opened her eyes.

She floated hundreds of feet above the square buildings, the grinding engines of human filth far below her. Her shadow fell across one of the buildings, a hovering shadow among gray billows rising below her. Human machines swarmed the air around her, roaring with threat. One of them approached perilously close, tilting its whirling blades at her, and she used a sword to superheat a wave of air and push it away. The streets were a kicked anthill of activity; a thousand worker ants rushed toward her with shrieks and warning lights, as though she were an invading mammal come to feast on their young.

Directly below her lay ruin.

The building underneath her had been blasted almost entirely out of the ground. Jagged brick walls fell in on themselves, black with soot. Smoke rose from small fires buried deep within the collapsed inner walls of the hive. The last traces of the children’s dissipating spirits howled from their shattered nests of burning paper, blood, and floor tile.

They would not rest easily, but Akllana’chikni’pai was of no mind to quiet them. She had not meant to destroy the school, but she would not let the tentacles take her. No matter what.

“Scarlett!”

The boy stood on the roof of a nearby building, whose broken windows looked like dozens of mouths filled with broken teeth
.
His dull clothing smoldered and streamed black smoke. It was falling off him, leaving behind the silvery sheen of his astral flesh. His eyes glowed blue, and his face reflected the red sparks and black streaks rising off his clothing. The sun sparkled off his tousled silver hair.

He will not accept the truth of what I have done,
Lana thought.
Nor the necessity.
“I have restrained Scarlett,” she said. “She is no longer a threat.”

“Lana?” Pax sounded shocked. “Is that you?”

That childish name. She would have to speak to him of it later. “Yes.” A jet of water streamed below her. The yellow-and-black caparisoned insects were trying to hit her with it. She looked down at her body and realized she was once more blazing with heat and light.

In a few moments, they would be using other, possibly more harmful projectiles to try to knock her out of the sky; never considering the damage a thrown weapon must do upon its return to the ground. “We must leave, child. Before the humans below us do themselves further damage.”

The boy turned his head toward his shoulder, trying to conceal tears. No doubt he wept for what he thought were the sins of the girl.

Akllana’chikni’pai floated toward the boy, using the clean energy of the sun. The last tendrils of smoke fell from her. She returned her blades to the small corners of her soul, where they would burn quietly, the flames of righteous anger tempered by wisdom and peace. She stepped gently onto the boy’s rooftop and wrapped her arms around him. She felt the flesh she was wrapped in responding to his, even in his moments of grief.

Interesting.

This building burned from a dozen small fires lit within its walls. She was burning, too. The heat of her was melting the ground beneath them and threatening to spread the flames farther. She could not stay and do more damage. She regretted the casualties she had already caused. There was no need to cause more.

But to go where?

The boy still wept into his shoulder, as though ashamed she should see him cry. The men of Earth had not changed so much over the centuries. His arms hung limp and unresisting in her embrace. His fingers were as motionless as the dead. Burning patches of ash fell from his clothing.

“We must go,” she said.

But the boy did not respond.

Akllana’chikni’pai lifted the boy in her arms. He weighed little enough. She carried him like a child. He sobbed into her fiery skin, all pride gone.

They flew north to the polar ice, to a place where humans had not settled or destroyed yet. And there, because she was still burning with heat and because the body she was in longed for him and because she needed him to set aside his grief and sleep, she laid him down and stripped the rest of his clothes. She guided his hardness into Scarlett’s body and rode Pax until his pain and grief faded and he slipped out of consciousness.

Three hours later, Akllana’chikni’pai stood inside the new
pacha
Terkun’shuks’pai had built where the astral plane touched Earth. The small, windowless room was a pale reflection of his
pacha
on the astral plane. No windows faced Terkun’shuks’pai’s precious mountains. No breeze carried the soft scent of pine sap or the sound of flowing water. No elegant robe wrapped Terkun’shuks’pai’s astral form.

He served her tepid tea she had touched to her lips but not drunk. It smelled of nothing in particular and no doubt tasted of less.

“You cannot fight the darkness in the girl’s soul directly,” Terkun’shuks’pai said. “It is too intricately interwoven with the energies that keep her human.”

“I will fight the darkness however I choose.”

“You nearly destroyed an entire city. Was that your intention?”

She put the tea down in front of her. The tea slopped over the side and vanished. Another flaw. “No. My intention was to escape the negative energy creature that lives in symbiosis with the humans. How long have you known about it?”

“That it was here?” Terkun’shuks’pai shrugged. “A hundred years or so.”

“And you did not tell the council this, why?”

“Because I needed you to see it for yourself.”

“And you still think the humans should not be isolated?”

“I think,” said Terkun’shuks’pai, “that you and I needed to be on this planet, at this time.”

Akllana’chikni’pai waited for more, but none came. “I will be filing my report today,” she said. “In the short time I have been here, I have seen enough.”

“Perhaps you should wait a little longer,” said Terkun’shuks’pai. “There is much more to see.”

“Now that concerns me.”

Terkun’shuks’pai lowered his head. No light reflected from his bald head, as it once would have. There were no wrinkles. When he looked up, he was smiling. A subtle smile. “Very well,” he said. “Please continue with your mission, Akllana’chikni’pai.”

“I do not need your permission, Terkun’shuks’pai,” she said coldly and took herself out of his
pacha,
out of his world, and back to the cold arctic ice where Pax was sleeping.

Chapter 11

P
ax opened his eyes to the world’s biggest igloo: he was inside some kind of snow cavern of smooth, melted ice, as if Lana had melted the cave out of a mid-sized iceberg. The otherwise bluish ice was hazed with orange and red in places from some kind of algal bloom, and a soot-colored crack ran almost directly overhead, like a meridian. A faint, constant moan of wind echoed around the dome, interspersed by distant cracks and creaks. The ice even seemed to vibrate a little. The air tasted faintly of salt.

He’d lost his shit for a while. He remembered seeing the sunset over the ocean, orange and gold painting the cold, white icebergs as they flew. He remembered the smoking brick shell that was Scarlett’s school. But that was about it.

Either it wasn’t very cold under the dome or he wasn’t at his normal body temperature because when he bothered to breathe, his breath didn’t steam in front of his face. A small ball of fire burned next to him, melting a shallow pit in the floor, and throwing up a thin line of wavering heat. Several fireballs had been tossed around the floor. They threw dancing reflections across the dome as they melted down into the ice.

In the center of the dome, Lana stood at a waist-high, flat table of white ice. He was certain it was she. Not just from the way her skin burned with a clean yellow fire, but from the straightforward way she stood. She didn’t lean on one hip, or flip her hair over her shoulder, or tilt her head to the side. Her hands moved with confidence and purpose instead of fluttering in the air or hanging at her sides. She didn’t chew her hair. Scarlett always managed to look like she was about two seconds from falling apart. Lana stood as if the earth itself was a part of her.

“Where are we?” he said.

Her hands paused. Then they started moving again. She seemed to be making something, sculpting it with her hands without actually touching it.

“We are in a cave on the ice cap near the North Pole. Before you ask, I am unsure of the current political designation. It’s deserted for several hundred miles in all directions and is as isolated as I could manage on short notice.”

“Why?”

She raised one hand.
Silence.
“The ice has melted to appalling levels. Worse than I could have expected. If I had any thought of mercy for your species, the evidence here is the last argument against it.”

“That’s not my fault.”

“Humanity.” She sneered, still not turning around. A puddle of water was gathering around her feet; she was melting footprints into the ice. She went back to gesturing. “The tragedy of your species is your illusion that you’re somehow
independent
of each other.”

“Sorry,” he said. And he was. What he’d said sounded like a comment from one of those anti-science trolls that frequented his forums just to stir things up. Fuck.
It’s not my fault. But now that you brought it up… I’m going to make it worse just to spite you.

Pax might not be as bad as those troglodytes… but he still knew better.

Pax stood up, glad his naked skin didn’t stick to the ice.

Naked. Again.
He looked down. His body was titanium once more. He looked over at Lana’s own naked, fiery flesh. He thought briefly about covering up but said
fuck it
. He was pretty sure Lana would sneer at his embarrassment if he did and wouldn’t notice if he didn’t.

“What happened?” he said. “All that I know is that Scarlett… blew up her school. Killed a bunch of people.”

Lana continued to work on whatever was in front of her. Little flashes of light spurted out of her fingers. He walked closer.

“If you know that much, you know more than I,” said Lana. “She trapped me in a mesh of negative energy earlier today; by the time I had freed myself, the building was destroyed.”

“Negative energy?” Pax frowned. “You mean the black tentacles?”

“Yes,” said Lana. “I think they have overwhelmed your friend. I am not sure she is still completely sane.”

“Where is she now?”

“Still inside here,” said Lana, tapping the flaming skin of her chest. “She is so wrapped up in the horror of what she’s seen that she cannot face reality. So I took over her body and brought it here, to keep the fires from spreading.”

Pax was relieved. Ashamed of being relieved. He forced himself not to ask when Scarlett would be let out, in case Lana picked up something from his tone of voice.

Even though Lana was obviously on fire, she didn’t feel warm. He wanted to take his hand and run it across her skin to see what temperature she actually was. He didn’t.

A Waterman-Butterfly projection of the Earth’s surface spread out on the ice table in front of her, with Australia on one wing and New Zealand on the other. The land masses were made out of white ice; the oceans, major lakes, and at least twenty major rivers were crafted out of clear.

Lana held a finger near the fractured area at the top of the map. Where the split areas met—where they would have met if the map had been folded into a globe—would be the North Pole. A spark leaped from her burning fingertip and landed on an undifferentiated mass of polar ice. “This is the dome. We are here.” The spark burrowed into the ice, raised up a miniscule bubble, and froze. “Not to scale.”

Pax grinned. The dome would have to be miles across.

“Now, be silent.” Lana pinched the top of the bubble, and a thin line of ice rose between her fingers into a spike. She bent her head. Her hair had been tied back in a braid of flame, so there was nothing to block him from seeing her grimace, as if eating something bitter.

“Greetings from Earth. This is my first report.”

“After being forced to relocate to the northern polar ice, I have set up an array of devices to collect satellite signals, using, as might be expected, methods that don’t depend on line of sight. I have hacked into the global network and searched for signs of secondary or tertiary intelligence, whether mechanical, biological, technological, spiritual, or other. The processes for establishing non-primary life forms are well established, and I have no doubts that no existent or incipient intelligences have eluded my search. No windups, Gaia-level planetary intelligences, AIs, gods, kami, or other types of secondary or tertiary intelligences have been noted as present.”

She sounded like she was reading a textbook, or giving a formal judgment at a trial. She kept staring down at the map made of ice. One hand gripped the edge of the table, melting fingerprints into the ice. The other spread out, hovering over the surface.

He reached across and grabbed her wrist. “What are you doing, Lana?”

To his surprise, she didn’t pull away, although he could see her nostrils flare and her jaw clench. “The question of whether to isolate the Earth—and therefore cut off humanity from the astral plane—does not solely rest on the shoulders of humanity. If there are other life forms here that may evolve to one day join us on the astral plane, we must take that into account, too. Fortunately, the Earth already sustains a wide variety of good replacement-candidate species, from insects to primates and several types of sea mammals. Personally, I am partial to honeybees.”

He tugged on her wrist, and she finally pulled it away from him. He grabbed it again. “Replacement species? So you don’t just want to cut humanity off, you want to make us all disappear?”

She shook her head and turned back to the map. When she spoke again, it was not to him.
“Humanity has been observed to be destroying its own habitat as well as those of other species, even when humanity is not competing for the resources of that habitat. It is projected that Earth will be unsuitable for all other species eligible for replacement in less than two thousand of its solar cycles; a major ecological collapse is projected in less than five hundred. The binary competitive-collective nature of the human species is so excessively weighted toward competitiveness and so-called individualism that it will be impossible for them to be able to sustain their current existence as a species or prevent themselves from collectively destroying the biosphere, as it now exists.”

“The destructiveness of the primary intelligent species, combined with its lack of production of secondary or tertiary intelligences, clearly indicates that leaving humanity in its dominant role is a poor risk. Removing humanity, on the other hand, provides rich opportunities to observe, or foster, a new primary intelligent species with a better balance of competition-collaboration and a better chance of producing secondary or tertiary intelligences.”

Little flickers of fire curled over his hand from her wrist as he squeezed harder. He was listening to the death sentence of humanity. How could he even argue with it? None of what she was saying was
wrong
. “Lana—”

The flames stung his hand. A warning.

“In addition, I have discovered the existence of what can best be described as a symbiotic or parasitical negative energy species. This species manifests itself as black tentacles, not visible in the spectrum of human vision. It is extremely destructive and seems to feed directly on the negative energy produced by the humans. It also, it seems, encourages that negative energy to spread.”

Another species,
thought Pax.
That makes sense.

“It is my belief that this species can only exist by feeding off human energy, and it sees astral energy as a threat to itself and its host species. It has attempted to destroy me twice now and it is only due to the energy provided by Earth’s sun that I was able to force back the parasite. I believe that, once humanity has died, the species will die with it, but that if humanity gains access to the astral plane, the parasite will be able to follow and may further attack our existence.”

“Therefore, I highly recommend isolating the humans. Humanity has become self-destructive and will most likely destroy itself, as well as most terrestrial life, within the blink of a geological eye. I hope another species will be able to fill the void once humanity is gone. I feel that, while other terrestrial species are certainly competitive, they will be far more successful than humanity.”

Lana looked at him. Even though her eyes were orbs made of flame, he could read pity in the way her eyebrows pinched together, and the muscles along her clenched jaw softened. So she felt bad about recommending the destruction of humanity. Great. That was just great.

“The only ray of light in this situation is that Terkun’shuks’pai has isolated one of the few spirits to have partially overcome the cruel experiments laid upon him, the male adolescent. I have witnessed his reactions, and, while they are mixed, they are sufficiently balanced that I believe his spirit should return with us to the astral plane for consideration for citizenship. His is such an unusual case that I doubt it could ever be replicated.”

“The other adolescent, I am afraid, is completely corrupted by negative energy, and should be destroyed as soon as possible. I have personally contained her spirit. Her intelligence, while strongly skewed toward the competitive and selfish, is innate and instinctual, and I have no doubt she will effect her escape in a matter of a few planetary revolutions or less.”

“This concludes my report. Immediate response requested on my request for the destruction of the female adolescent.”

Lana waved her hand. The spike melted onto the surface of the ice like a tear for a moment. The tear slumped, and the water sank into a hole in the ice.

Julie closed the manila folder softly. It wasn’t very thick, just a collection of a dozen or so news clippings. The overhead lights cast the shadow of her head on the newsprint and across the blankets over her chest. She fumbled around the clean sheets until she found the call remote and pressed the button that lowered the head of the hospital bed with a slow, disapproving hum.
Now is not the time to relax.

Julie put her hand over her eyes, but her fingers barely seemed wide enough to block the light. Her wedding band hung loosely on her ring finger, and she idly pulled it off and slid it onto her index finger instead. It caught on the knuckle, but she pushed it past. She’d long since left the engagement ring, with its heavy stone, back in the safe in her apartment.

Dr. Villers sat beside the bed with his hands folded almost in a prayer position between his widespread knees, fingers pointed toward the floor. The muscles along the sides of his jaw seemed to throb. He’d heard her close the folder but he hadn’t looked up.

That girl.

She hadn’t been officially identified, but Julie recognized her, even though her skin seemed to be made of burning charcoal. She’d stared at the back of the girl’s head and listened often enough from the hallway to the two of them talking in Pax’s room.

The girl’s arms were spread wide in the picture. Her shoulders lifted in a question.
Who, me?
Another picture showed the figure slumping in midair, the posture of one of those teenage girls whose constant self-pity masked the damage they did to the world around them. It wasn’t rational. But she was
sure.

And the picture of Pax on top of the other roof? It took only a glance before her gut told her. Any mother would have known.

“It’s her,” Julie said.

“And Pax?”

“Yes, yes. Of course that’s Pax.”