I Am Titanium (Pax Black Book 1) (18 page)

Terkun’shuks’pai called the creature toward the island shore. And as it traveled toward him, his creation continued to feed, still driven by a relentless hunger. Interestingly, it seemed to have formed a special liking for the abundant, aggressive lionfish, an invasive species native to an ocean halfway across the planet, released into the open waters by humans dissatisfied with these less-than-desirable pets.

Several thin, neon-streaked gobies darted around a particularly shadowed area on one of the bronze plates, under a twisted curl that had been planted with a coral colony that looked like a bulging orange ball covered with small, mounded orifices. A lionfish, nearly two feet long, swam back and forth in front of it, edging closer, and then darted forward, trying to suck one of the gobies into its mouth.

As it darted forward, thin, featherlike branches crept from cracks in the coral, surrounding the lionfish. As it ate the goby, the lionfish was surrounded by a thin net.

It saw the trap. It shook its spines like battle spears and charged.

Wherever its spines touched, the feathers wilted and broke off, wrapping around whatever they touched. They clung to the fish’s poisonous spines. In seconds, the fish was entangled in feathers, barely able to swim.

Another, larger tentacle slid along the underside of the lionfish and jerked, slicing the fish’s belly open. The thinner branches filtered the blood and flesh from the water. More feathers grew around the fish, pressing against it until it was completely covered, floating a few inches away from the coral colony.

After a few moments, the feathers withdrew. A few bones started to drift away, bumping in the current and scattering over the ocean floor, and were captured by tentacles and added to the coral.

His creature could have survived on the same microscopic creatures the coral did. On its original planet, it had done so. But after the species had faced its invaders, the creatures had learned to be much more aggressive, to attack anything that attacked it. By weaving the spirits of Earthly species into the creature, he had reinforced its aggressive nature: the lionfish were not merely food for the flesh, as it were, but food for the spirit. Any species that showed it no aggression it ignored or used symbiotically. Aggressive species that attacked it or its allies had that aggression returned a hundred-fold.

It would work perfectly against the tentacles.

The lionfish had fed his creation enough that it grew until its central mass was as large as one of the brightly painted human fishing boats that burned along the opposite shore. Soon the creature would crave additional prey. Considering the alterations his progenitor had made to the human spirit, the two species should react like a carefully calculated chemical combustion, setting the planet—the solar system—on fire. The invaders would conquer nothing but scorched earth, as the saying went.

And if Pax did as Terkun’shuks’pai planned, the invaders’ tentacles would have much, much bigger problems to worry about.

Terkun’shuks’pai stood at the edge of the island, the waves brushing across his feet, and stretched out his arms.
Come to me, my child.
The long curls of white rolling toward the beach turned into mushroom-like swells, and water jumped among the roots of a shocked clump of palm trees.

Chapter 12

D
r. Villers didn’t return. Julie ate her tray of pulped-up pulled-pork sandwich, bland potato salad, cherry tomatoes, coffee, and soggy white cake and even had time to wobble to the bathroom and back before the agents arrived.

The two women in business suits were a study in contrasts. The first was a thirtyish black woman with chemically straightened hair, wearing a brown satin shirt under her tan jacket.
Sharp.
Sharp, quick footsteps on light heels. Sharp, almost artificially straight nose, the sharp, bony, protruding knuckles of someone with oncoming osteoarthritis. She pulled the smaller of the two chairs to the end of the bed, opened her briefcase, and took out a manila folder, thicker than the one Dr. Villers had thrown away. She wore diamond studs and a tennis bracelet. She moved quickly, spoke in a tone not meant to be overheard, and looked around the room with darting eyes, as if checking for spies.

The second woman put Julie’s hackles up. Even before the woman entered the room, the echo of her cow-like stomping announced her. She had big, outthrust tits and looked about sixty with her enormous forehead and gray, thinning hair that stuck out in spikes along the sides of her head. Whenever Julie was looking at her, the woman was giving a big, Texas-style smile. She had a man’s too-firm handshake and clunky black plastic necklace and earrings.

“Mrs. Black.” The woman’s voice was reminiscent of a cheerleader after fifty years of cigarettes. “A pleasure to meet you!”

Julie gritted her teeth and let go of the woman’s swollen, cool fingers—water retention and poor circulation. “Charmed.”

The woman swung the bigger of the two chairs around and sat in it backward, facing the bed with her brick-red pant legs spread like a man’s. “Dr. Villers said you’d be willing to speak with us this evening in regard to your son, Pax. Unusual name, Pax. Where’d it come from?”

“It’s Latin for
peace
,” Julie said.

“Huh,” the woman said. “I’m Vanna-Rae Grace, and this is my secretary, Martha Jance.”

Ms. Jance, who’d taken the smaller chair, flicked her eyes upward and nodded. She closed the briefcase, snapped the latches shut, and put it on the floor. The manila folder was closed on her lap.

“So, your son! We’ve talked to the girl’s folks, nice people, and have found out some
very
interesting things.”

Like
hell
the girl’s family were “nice people.” Julie kept her face passive. “Like what?”

“Like your son should be dead.” Ms. Grace leaned back, hanging onto the back of the chair with her pasty white hands and laughing uproariously. “He had some kind of fatal disease, didn’t he?”

She snapped her fingers at Ms. Jance, who, without opening the folder, said, “Acute diffuse scleroderma.”

“That’s right. Scleroderma. Incurable autoimmune disease. And because you’re a fairly brilliant doctor by all reports and because Mamma’s always got to be an expert, you started researching it, didn’t you? Now, you’ve made some progress, but not enough to cure your son. Am I right? So why don’t you tell me what all happened to your boy, that he was able to get up and walk out of a hospital the same day he had a heart attack. I don’t know about you, Doc, but I ain’t never heard of a hospital releasing someone without hanging onto them an extra day for observation.”

“We can’t keep people who are well and insist upon leaving, Ms. Grace.”

“I see, I see.” Ms. Grace leaned forward again, her tits crushing up against the mesh of the chair back, nearly shoving themselves over her black camisole. Neither one of them had shown her identification. But to question their bona fides was to raise their suspicions even further. “Actually, I don’t see. You’re his mamma. He’s a minor. How the hell did he get out of here if you didn’t want to let him go?”

“I was having a heart attack at the time,” Julie said. “Believe me, I wasn’t happy about it when I found out. But what can you do? I tried to convince him to come in for tests. He didn’t. He hasn’t even called me.”

“Now,
that’s
no surprise,” Ms. Grace said. “Considering what he was up to today.”

She snapped her fingers again. This time Ms. Jance opened the folder and slid out a photograph. Light danced over the surface as Ms. Jance passed it over to her colleague.

Ms. Grace balanced her flabby forearms on the edge of the chair and held the picture by the edges. It was the size of a normal sheet of printer paper. “Hmm,” she said. “Have you ever seen anything like this before, Mrs. Black?”

“I haven’t seen it at all,” Julie said.

“Fair point, fair point.” Ms. Grace turned the photograph around.

Pax had been caught in midair from above, and close, as if from the cabin of a helicopter. He was dressed in a hoodie and blue jeans. She couldn’t see his face. His hands glinted like metal, and they were twisted into claws. On the lower corner of the picture, a knot of smoke surrounded the burning flame of a foot.

“No,” Julie said honestly. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”

“Whatcha think about it?”

“Some Internet prank? Someone trolling my son.”

“This ain’t an Internet prank,” Ms. Grace said. “It was taken by one of the folks in the air at the time that your son’s friend’s school exploded. And this was after someone greatly resembling your son had visited a wedding earlier and caused a bit of a ruckus.”

“I’m sorry?”

“You know how there’s some folks as will protest anything having to do with the gays?”

The gays?
Julie blinked slowly to cover an involuntary roll of the eyes. “Yes.”

“Well, some gays over by your apartment building were having a wedding in the park, and a church that hates that kind of thing was having a protest on the sidewalk next to them. Your son apparently walked right into the middle, picked up one of the protestors, and chucked him across the street into a construction area. I guess the feller was carrying so many protest signs that he kind of flew like a paper airplane. Feller’s dead, by the way. Cracked his skull and all the protest ran right out of him.”

“That’s impossible.”

“You bet,” Ms. Grace said. “Which is why it’s us who’s here talking to you.” She smiled at Julie, showing teeth. “NYPD is the wrong kind of nosy for this situation, you ask me.”

Julie handed the picture back. “I just can’t believe it. It’s not possible.”

Ms. Grace tossed it to Ms. Jance, who slid it back into the folder. “Could be a miracle.”

“Not with over a thousand people dead at that girl’s school. I watched the news during supper.”

“You a Christian, ma’am?”

“In a vague kind of way.”

“Christmas and Easter Christian. I get you. Well, you know what they say, ‘God works in mysterious ways.’ What if one of them kids was about to grow up to be Hitler?”

“I think one of them did,” Julie said. “That
girl.
”

“That friend of your son’s.” Ms. Grace put an elbow up on the back of the chair and tucked her fist under her chin. She would have been beautiful when she was eighteen. She had that round, apple-cheeked kind of face. And what was left of her original hair color looked pale blond. A blond Texas girl with a wide smile and big tits, who had worked her way up through DARPA. “Girlfriend, maybe?”

Julie sighed through her teeth. “Ms. Grace, I don’t understand what you’re looking for. Whatever you want with her, I doubt I can help you.”

“Just making conversation,” Ms. Grace said. “What we actually want you for, Mrs. Black, is to come help us study how those kids got that way.”

“Come? I can’t come anywhere. I’m recovering from a heart attack.”

Ms. Grace nodded. “That’s true, that’s what I told my supervisor. ‘I don’t think Mrs. Black will be wanting to come all the way to Arlington. She’s got a lot on her mind, what with her son gone missing and all that important research to get caught up on and that heart attack. You want her to come in, you got to make it worth her time.’”

Julie snorted. “If you’re going to try to throw money at me, you’re wasting your time. Lives depend on me. My patients—”

“Now, we all know you aren’t in any kind of financial hardship. Naw, what I told my boss was something like, ‘How about we tell her we got the bodies of two teenage kids in Arlington, a boy and a girl, one of them with—’” she snapped her fingers. “What’s the name of that disease again?”

“Acute diffuse scleroderma,” said Ms. Jance, reaching into her folder. She pulled out a pair of pictures.

Ms. Grace took the pictures and handed them to Julie. “That’s right. In any case, our docs are about to start doing the autopsy. Think that might be worth your time?”

Akllana’chikni’pai found Terkun’shuks’pai in the late afternoon, on a small, rocky island surrounded by long, blue stretches of ocean and sounding only of the crash of waves. He had changed his black silk robes for a flowing pair of pants and a jacket, but he was still unarmed.

The sun glistened off his bald head as she landed behind him. The stiff wind caught at his clothing, rippling it like flags. He rubbed one hand over his scalp, brushing away beads of sweat.

He was watching a broad swell in the ocean. Something large glided under the waves—a shark, a large fish.

“Terkun’shuks’pai,” she said. “It is done. I have sent the report to the Council.”

He continued to watch the horizon.

A thin layer of white, crumbling powder had collected in the crannies of the rocks and broke off under her feet as she crossed toward him. She had never seen an island like this one—completely bare of vegetation or soil, almost a quarter-mile across. Unusual for life to ignore so big a foothold.

“Terkun’shuks’pai—”

She placed a hand on his shoulder. Despite the solidity of his appearance, her hand fell through: he was here only in spirit form.

Nevertheless he turned around to face her. Bowed, formally and low. The wind caught the front of his jacket, pulling it halfway off his chest before he tucked it back in place.

“Akllana’chikni’pai,” he said. “You have been a worthy opponent.”

She bowed back to him out of habit, a warrior’s bow that did not lose eye contact for a moment. “I recommended the isolation of humanity.”

“Of course,” he said courteously, straightening. Water flowed through his feet, pulling a few small stones off the island and down into the deep, green waves.

Akllana’chikni’pai squinted at him. “What do you mean, ‘Of course?’”

He grinned. For once it was not a cool smile filled with politeness, but that of a young human child, praised for its mischief.

“You knew I would make the recommendation,” she said, her eyes narrowing. “I thought you were on their side.”

“I know you did. Just as I know isolation is not all that you and the council have planned for humanity,” said Terkun’shuks’pai. “Did you tell the boy, or are you going to let him find out on his own?”

“The boy does not need to know,” Akllana’chikni’pai said, wondering when and where Terkun’shuks’pai could have found out the Council’s intentions. “Too many species on this planet could grow capable of astral existence to leave it in the hands of the humans.”

“I agree.”

“Then why are we here?” demanded Akllana’chikni’pai. “We could have just closed the Earth off and been done with it. Why did you argue at the council and insist we journey here together?”

“Humanity isn’t the greatest threat here,” said Terkun’shuks’pai.

“The tentacles.”

“Yes.”

“They aren’t sentient,” said Akllana’chikni’pai. “They’re reactive, and they may have some rudimentary intelligence, but they do not have enough to become astral.”

Terkun’shuks’pai nodded. “That is what the Council believes as well.” He smiled again. “I, also, have sent my report.”

“Recommending their destruction?”

He shook his head. “It would have been out of character. So I reluctantly agreed with you. I stressed the importance of sealing humanity away from the rest of the astral plane. Forever. There should be no contact with this world. Ever.”

“Then I ask again, why did we come here?” demanded Akllana’chikni’pai. “What could you possibly have accomplished by making that boy one of us? Or the girl, for that matter? He should have been allowed to die, and she should never have known about our existence.” Akllana’chikni’pai’s eyes narrowed. “What are your
plans
, Terkun’shuks’pai?”

His smile widened. “You have known me for eons, Akllana’chikni’pai. Have you ever known me to reveal my plans?” Akllana’chikni’pai watched the waves glimmer through his legs, his chest. The long swell of water had disappeared, sunk too low to be picked out amongst the other waves. “Now go and carry out the rest of your mission. And I look forward to seeing you explain it to the boy.”

With a slight nod, his image stilled, and the wind pulled it into long, cloudlike threads before it dissipated into thin air.

He knew all along,
Akllana’chikni’pai thought.
He knew all along, and he agreed all along. So what did he really want in coming here?