I Am Titanium (Pax Black Book 1) (20 page)

“I am
joking
. What we have here is even stranger than aliens. We have engineers.”

The front doors opened in front of them. A skinny, retirement-age, black security guard peered out at them from inside, unnecessarily holding open the inner door. “Y’all come in now, I got you all set up. Been waiting for you. Bobby run the purse all the way acrost the building for you.”

The wheelchair bumped over the doorways and purred over the thick, new-smelling plastic floor mat. The lobby passed by in a flash of brick-colored paint and agency symbols. They stopped at a receptionist’s counter, where the guard handed Julie her purse and a clipboard.

“Sign here, please.”

She unzipped her purse and looked through it. Her phone was gone, and her planner.

“My planner,” she said. “I’m missing my planner.”

“It kept beeping when I tried to run it through,” the guard said. “I’ll return it to you when I’m finished examining it. I figured you all wouldn’t want to wait on it, though.”

“Fine.” Julie scribbled her name near a place marked
X
and shoved the clipboard toward the guard.

He took it, and handed her a white badge marked with a red
V
and a numerical code. “You stay with your escort now, hear?”

“Even in the bathroom?”

“Even there, yes,” he said. “Ms. Jance’ll give you the rest of your briefing when you get inside.” He clipped the badge to Julie’s shirt and waved them through a pair of tall white gates that looked like they belonged at an airport.

Ms. Jance parked the wheelchair at the gate. The guard jogged around through the other gate and grabbed a wheelchair from the other side of the tall desk.

“Let me help you—” Ms. Jance said.

“I can do it.” Julie waved off the woman’s arm, kicked up the pedals, bent over, put her shoes on, hooked her purse over her arm, hobbled through the gate, and sat in the other wheelchair patiently. It never paid to argue with bureaucracy.

Ms. Jance took a cellphone, an iPad, a handgun, and a tube of lipstick out of her purse, laying them on the faux-marble counter.

“You want a receipt for those?” He winked at her.

“As well as Dr. Black’s items, if you please.”

“Of course. I’ll have someone bring them right up.”

“Thank you.”

Ms. Jance passed through the gate and took the back of Julie’s wheelchair, steering her toward a double bank of elevators, nice public ones with faux-marble tile along the bottom half of the walls and clean, new carpeting inside. Ms. Jance turned the wheelchair to face the doors and pressed the button for the third floor. The elevator glided smoothly upward.

Ms. Jance smoothed the sleeves of her jacket, tugged on her cuffs just a little too conspicuously. Like a magician hiding something. “What do you know about the astral plane, Dr. Black?”

Of all the things to ask.
She rolled her eyes. “I know that Pax has been whipping up the scientific community with astral bullshit since he was ten.”

“Ah,” Ms. Jance said.

“What does that mean?”

“You’ll see.”

Terkun’shuks’pai, holding the form of a large, gray-winged gull, caught a thermal and floated high over the next island. This one was larger, not something to be consumed in one swallow—at least, not yet.

Under him, thickly forested volcanic peaks rose off a sharp, black coastline and cast their hollow shadows against the stars. Jagged waves crashed irregularly against precipitous, cavern-riddled cliffs. Low, wide houses surrounded with broad porches overlooked the water, open to the night air. Many of the inhabitants were awake, enjoying the pre-dawn freshness. Tree frogs sang and bats sliced through the shadows, hunting bugs or fruit, as the nature of their species dictated. The air was heavy with the scent of a thousand kinds of flowers. Some humans considered this a paradise because they could spend a week or two not working, not shivering in the northern winter, not having to cook their own dinners, not fixing their own drinks. It was touching, sometimes, how little it took to make them happy.

Farther along the coast, a river of light flowed down the side of a dead volcano to a protected bay. The water was a glowing maze of orange-lit docks and quays. The coastline was white sand, littered with sated pre-dawn lovers walking hand-in-hand or sleeping under palm-tree canopies. One solitary woman was jogging.

He briefly considered whether to lead his creation toward the bay or toward the cliffs and then bowed in the direction of chance.

He was not unpleased when his creation, following a trail of runoff, turned toward the more heavily populated bay.

The frigid coast stretched endlessly, a thin powder of snow over the loose rubble of the beach. Even more than the top of the mountain where her temple had been, this northern island was barren, leftover crushed rock from other, worthier projects. Thick dust streamed off the bluffs and drifted out onto the ocean. Only a few lichens grew here. Greenland, the humans called it.

Akllana’chikni’pai wondered if it was a joke.

The ice off the shore was cracked but still thick, thick enough for wolves to cross, if any were brave enough to venture this far north—although it was not a question of bravery so much as it was one of practicality. Wolves went where their prey led them.

She liked wolves. If the bees didn’t survive, wolves would make a good replacement for humanity. No cities, no cars. Their civilization would be a bloody yet practical one.

Akllana’chikni’pai landed next to the radar station, two enormous octagon plates whose range covered the Mediterranean to the Bering Strait. She had followed its signals to the isolated, rocky bluff, damping her skin so she did not reflect the signal back to its origin. She was still visible to the naked human eye as a kind of dim shimmer in the air, an absence of heat—but who would be looking for her?

The wind hissed across the landscape, ripping at a tin sign that was already losing its color from the burnishing dust.

She entered through a door in the base, short-circuiting the lock and alarm and letting it bang open in the wind. She slipped inside the second door a few feet away in the dust-clogged entry corridor. A lone human with jaggedly cut white hair pulled on a blue jacket, cursing to herself. Akllana’chikni’pai walked toward her with a warrior’s balanced gait, her feet making little sound on the dusty, rubber-backed rug.

The woman stopped within arm’s reach of Akllana’chikni’pai, sniffed, and looked up, pinching her nose with her thumb and forefinger. Akllana’chikni’pai stilled herself, chilling the air slightly. The woman sniffed again, pulled a large red cloth out of her pants pocket, and blew her nose into it.

She scrubbed the cloth over her nose, which was rapidly becoming redder.

“Smoke,” she said. “I smell smoke.” She tucked the cloth into a pocket in the jacket and walked back to the desk, behind which was a small monitor screen, a computer, and a telephone.

The woman, her coat distending her overlarge belly, edged past her chair, her back scraping a calendar decorated with a tropical island off the wall and onto the floor. Straining to reach over some computer equipment, she grasped for a red alarm handle on the wall.

Akllana’chikni’pai drew the swords from her thighs, leapt on top of the counter, and swung twice. The woman fell, hitting her head against the desk and crumpling underneath it. The chair rolled across the tile floor and stopped with a jerk when it hit the line of rugs.

Akllana’chikni’pai stepped down onto the desk and onto the floor next to the woman, returning the swords to her thighs and lifting the woman upright by the lapels of her jacket. A few moments later, the woman was sleeping soundly at the chair, slumped over some papers on the desk. She would wake normally, remembering nothing, with a few insignificant bruises.

Akllana’chikni’pai found a button under the top of the desk that unlocked the glass door leading farther into the building, braced the woman’s knee against it, pulled open the door, and walked through.

Scarlett sat weightlessly on a little shelf of drifted snow with her knees up against her chin and her arms wrapped around her legs. Though they weren’t really her legs. She was just an apparition now, not solid at all. Half the time she could see through her knees.

Below her, energy swirled with what almost looked like messages to her in glowing green and gold and purple. It felt as if she were being read: the story of her life, her emotions, dreams, everything. Whatever was reading her wasn’t judgy, either. Outraged at all the right parts. Curious. Friendly. It was trying to make her feel good about herself. After she’d killed
her entire school
.

In her mind came the image of the school, burning around her. With it came a wave of sympathy, emanating out of the black lake.

She snapped out of the dreamy haze with a little jump that put a tiny ripple over the top of the lake. The ripple faded quickly, as if it were passing through heavy sewer sludge.

The northern lights had faded and the sun had risen, throwing cold sparkles over the icebergs surrounding the lake. The lake itself hadn’t changed—it still reflected slowly shimmering northern lights, like some kind of screen saver.

This was the same negative energy that had helped her destroy her school.

I’d have to be fucking stupid to trust it.

Scarlett stood. Somewhere back along the ice, Pax and Lana were probably done fucking. They’d probably discovered Scarlett’s captured “spirit” was nothing but a mass of tangled negative energy. Which meant they’d probably be coming for her soon, if they weren’t already. She had to get out of here.

She shoved her fingers into a long, thin crack in the ice and scrabbled around until she found a toehold, pushed herself upward, and felt around for someplace else to put her hands.

Wait.

She hung on the side of iceberg in the middle of the freaking Arctic and waited while the lake full of all the worst humanity had to offer came up with some dumbass way to get her to do what it wanted.

Need help.

Sure, it needed help.
Spreading its shittiness throughout the galaxy all the way up to the astral plane probably.

Need help fighting enemy.

“Do you?” she said sarcastically. “Well, I’m not looking for more work at the moment, thanks. I’ve screwed enough things up already.” She ran her hands across the ice, found a splinter that fit nicely into her hand, and gave it a yank.

Instead of holding her up, it ripped off.
Fuck.
She swung backward, willing her fingers on her other hand to stay jammed in their crack and her toes on their little outcropping. Good thing she wasn’t freezing while she was doing this.

The shard of ice bounced off the snow shelf and landed in the lake with a
glup
. After a few seconds it bobbed to the surface.

Scarlett. Enemy coming. Need you.

“Whatever,” she said.

Come inside me. Show you.

“No. Fucking. Way. Ever.” No
way
was she going to dive into that pool of negative energy. No
way
was she going to turn her back on the last part of anything good inside her.

Another image slipped into her mind, this one far clearer than the last.

Lana was standing in a chamber full of tentacles. As Scarlett watched, Lana began to burn, brighter and brighter until the tentacles burned away from her body. The flames spread wider, farther, spreading beyond the chamber, disintegrating everything in their path. Scarlett watched herself standing on the desk, staring in fear at the mass of tentacles that surrounded her. Then flames burst from her body, exploding in all directions and engulfing the school in a huge conflagration that turned the tentacles into dust even as it ripped holes in the walls and blew students and teachers into bloody, burnt pieces.