Nemesis: Box Set: Books 1 - 3 (39 page)

“Sure.”

“Sounds good. I’ll see you soon! Bye now!” The line went dead without waiting on any response from her.

Rigley sat staring at the wall for another two hours. She didn’t realize she missed her plane. Night fell before she looked away from the wall. She turned back out into the ruined city, but she didn’t see that anymore, either. All she saw was the man with his hand out, asking her not to do it. Asking her to let him live for just a little longer. That’s all he wanted. Another few minutes.

Rigley left Bolivia a week later. When she finally left, the capital was completely deserted.

T
he woods blazed
.

Morena knew what the temperature was around her, though she didn’t feel it. The men that had tried to run were all dead now, their bodies burning as the trees fell around them. Morena’s children had halted their eruptions and subsequent destruction of the planet. They snaked out now in long, strong lines, digging into the ground like roots, though looking similar to man-made pipes as they lay across the ground. They would stretch on for some time, Morena knew.

She wanted to leave, but she couldn’t yet. She had to stay here, over this hole that revealed the core deep beneath. She had looked down in it for quite sometime, remembering back to Bynimian and comparing the colors of the two cores. They were different, but she thought in time this one would move to the uniform color of Bynimian’s.

Would she and Briten walk over this spot as they had on Bynimian? Would they reminisce on the past and look forward to the future?

Not yet. Focus here, first. You must make sure there is a place for him to return to.

She would be able to move from this place soon, but she had to be sure that it wouldn’t be threatened. She saw the auras rising from the core, every color she could imagine, slowly seeping up. Her children birthing into this world. She was the only Bynimian to see something like this, since the beginning. She kept reminding herself of it, kept trying to take it in for the glory that it was instead of always trying to move onward, onward, onward.

Purples and blues and greens, all different shades of each floated up from the orange core. They would move out into this world and from there they would coalesce and life would be born. She didn’t need to follow the auras to understand where they were going, she felt them as if she floated with them.

She was waiting on another color though. One that wasn’t her children, but their protector.

Then she could move.

Morena stared into the pit beneath, waiting on some hint that it had arrived. She would be the protector until it did, and perhaps The Makers did that on purpose (
of course they did
), giving her responsibility from the very moment of birth.

She saw it though. Finally. A white cloud, unlike the auras which moved with a purpose, but this spreading more like a mindless mist.

“Thank you,” she said, not entirely sure if she was talking to the cloud or The Makers, but only knowing she was grateful that it arrived. It would spread now, out in front of the auras so that nothing would harm them.

It was time for her to move.

W
ill
and Andrew stood outside of the hotel room. The rumble had ended, thank God, but he thought that only because he was outside Grayson’s immediate vicinity. He imagined if he went back there, he would find the ground still shaking. Still, it was a small blessing to be away from it.

None of that really mattered though, not to Will, not right now. The world could rumble wherever it wanted, but Will stood in front of Rigley Plasken’s hotel room and when he entered it, his world would change yet again.

“You going to knock on it?” Andrew asked.

“I don’t want to.” It was the first time he could remember showing any of himself to those under him. His feelings didn’t matter in anything they did, and so he said nothing of them. Except for now. His feelings didn’t matter here anymore than they did before, but there was no reason to hold them in.

Andrew said nothing.

“When we go through here, we’re sacrificing ourselves,” Will whispered. He didn’t turn around to look at the man he spoke to, only stared at the dark, wooden door. “I have to go in, but you don’t…How old are you?”

“Thirty-four.”

“You can still walk away. I’ll tell them you died in the woods. I don’t know if they’ll look, but you’ll have a running chance.”

“Why are you going in there, then?”

Will was quiet for a few seconds. “I don’t think I have a choice.”

A minute passed without either speaking.

“Good luck, Will,” Andrew said.

“You too.”

He listened as the mercenary’s shoes moved down the hallway, and felt a bit of relief as they did. He didn’t know why exactly, but it was there. Will would be the only one entering this room and that was something—more than he had done the rest of the time he was down here.

He knocked on the door; when Rigley opened it, Will realized he was looking into hell. Not metaphorically speaking, but actual hell. It didn’t live below the Earth or in some place far away in space. It lived inside Rigley.

Her face was puffy and her eyes red, but that wasn’t it. Plenty of people cry.

A lake of brimstone and fire. Of eternal suffering.

That’s what lay beneath the puffy flesh and blood shot eyes.

“Come in,” she said.

She didn’t bother closing the door behind him, but walked to the bed in the middle of the room. Will shut the door quietly.

“Where’s the other guy? Andrew?”

“Where do you think, Rigley?”

“He didn’t make it?”

“No. I don’t know if anyone did.”

“We did,” she said.

He walked across the room and sat down, not responding.

“He’s on his way. Marks,” she said.

“Okay. I don’t know what that really means or what we’re supposed to do.”

Rigley had been looking at her shoes but she looked up now and Will had to fight from taking a step back.
What is this? Just what in the hell could bring so much pain? Surely not her career being over? No. Nothing so superficial as that puts this kind of pain in someone’s eyes.

“Do? We’re not going to do anything, Will.”

“Then why are we here?”

“I told you. He’s going to punish us.”

Will shook his head, stood up and walked to the window, pushing open the curtain and letting sunlight stream in. “This guy isn’t the fucking boogeyman, Rigley. Why in the hell are you so scared of him?”

He turned around, leaning against the glass window. She wasn’t looking at him, but instead her eyes focused on the wall in front of her.

“Have you heard of him?” she asked.

“No.”

“You’ve been in this thing a long time and you’ve never heard his name. Isn’t that a bit weird, Will?”

“There’s a lot of names I haven’t heard. I don’t deal in politics and I don’t hang out in DC. There’s no reason to hear of him. I have a very specific skill set and it’s used for very special circumstances.” He looked at her back, refusing to believe the fear he saw welling up in her and overflowing into every word. And yet, even though his words sounded about as confident as he could expect them to, something inside him said that he didn’t want to discard Rigley. That to do so would be a grave error. People didn’t carry this kind of fear without reason.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “You can believe what you want. He’ll be here soon and you’ll see. We’ll all see.”

“Rigley, have you forgotten what just happened out there? What happened in Grayson? Isn’t that what we should be focused on?”

She laughed. “No, Will. That’s passed us. He’ll fix that as he sees fit. What matters to me is how he wants to fix us.”

R
igley’s
back straightened into such a position that Will ached just seeing it.

The knock on the door brought it on her. She had been sitting with her back against the bed’s headboard, but as soon as the noise traveled to their ears, her body seemed intent on breaking itself with rigidity.

“It’s him,” she said, not moving from the bed.

Will squinted his eyes. He knew she believed them, all the things she kept saying over and over, but he couldn’t believe fully—even with the piece of him saying he needed to. There weren’t boogeymen. There weren’t creatures that wore flesh but harbored secret power beneath that flesh. Whoever was at that door, he was a man and nothing else.

The knock came again.

“You want me to get it?”

Rigley nodded.

Will looked down at his feet for a brief second before moving across the room and to the door. He pushed back the lock on the inside and opened it, finding two people standing in front of him. He tried to assess the woman who stood behind the man, a bit shorter, with glasses and hair in a ponytail—Will wanted to assess her first because he knew who the man was. Except Will couldn’t stop his eyes from going to the man, like bugs to light.

A smile lived on the man’s face, a smile that said everything in the world was grand and nothing could ever change it.

“Will?” the man said, sticking his hand out.

Will didn’t look down at his hand, but kept his eyes up. He didn’t know exactly what Rigley felt when she saw this person, but a big, loud alarm went off inside Will. He hadn’t heard this alarm—maybe ever; it was louder and more aggressive than anything he ever experienced. Wailing noises that only he heard, but yet hadn’t even gone off back in those Grayson woods.

Why?

The man smiled like this was some kind of fraternal reunion.

Will didn’t extend his hand, but moved aside instead. “Come on in.”

“Much appreciated, good sir. Shall we, Jenna?” he said, looking back at the woman.

She didn’t respond and Marks walked in without looking anymore at either of them. As he crossed the small hallway, Will heard the happiness continue.

“Rigley! Good to see you!”

Will followed the woman in; she moved to the corner of the room, one bag in her hand and a purse over her shoulder. Will stood at the hallway’s entry. He hoped Rigley had pulled herself together before this man saw her, that she wasn’t the twisted, rigid version he saw as he went to open the door.

She stood at the side of the bed, and God bless, she didn’t look quite as bad.

Marks’ hand (or at least Will thought it was Marks, the man hadn’t given him a name) was extended again and Rigley took it.

“So you two are just holed up in here, huh?” the man said, turning around so that he could address them both. “Sorry, Will. I can be so rude sometimes. Kenneth Marks. It’s a true pleasure to meet you.”

The alarms hadn’t subsided a single decibel. Will had never watched a man move like this; Will possessed excellent control over his body, not just for someone his age, but for anyone in the world. Yet this man’s control was immaculate. No wasted movements, no extraneous glances. The man moved with a precision that Will thought bordered on supernatural.

“Rigley, what are we talking about here? You were down there, right?” Marks said.

“Yes.” Anyone looking at her could tell she was a wreck, but to Will she looked almost like a different person than the one that sat on the bed a few minutes ago. She wasn’t the Rigley of old, but she wasn’t a child awaiting a monster to crawl from the closet. “We’ve…made contact.”

“That’s one way to put it,” Marks said, laughing. “Will did she tell you whatever is out there brought down a fighter jet a few hours ago?”

Will didn’t respond.

“What is it?” Marks said to Rigley.

“We don’t know.”

“Oh boy,” the man said, moving his hand through his hair. He seemed sincere, but Will understood it was all an act. That everything this man did was as precise as the way he stood. His hand's movement through his hair wasn’t any more real than someone moving on a broadway stage. “So what do you think, Rigley? What do we need to do here?”

Will looked at her, understanding that something was happening, but not what. That Marks was doing
something
with this question.

Rigley didn’t answer.

“Are we past quarantining the area?” Marks said.

Rigley didn’t answer.

“Is it time for the hammer, Rigley?”

M
ichael heard
them talking to Bryan the same way a person in a dream might hear those speaking around them. The words filtered in and out of his mind, but he didn’t focus on them. He couldn’t. There was too much happening around him, too much of the world moving for him to consider what was said to Bryan.

He looked at his friend, sitting on the grass out in the Yetzer’s lawn. His eyes were more or less blank and the scratches on his face were clean, but bright red. Michael wanted to care, truly. He wanted to go to him the same as everyone else had, but he stood back.

Because of the colors.

God, the colors.

No one else saw them. They saw Bryan and between holding him, trying to soothe him, and trying to ask him questions, they saw nothing else. Even Wren was there, with all his attention dedicated to Bryan. Julie had forgotten about Michael, had forgotten about the rest of the world, as she sat next to Bryan, a hand on his ankle, the only piece of him she could touch with the way his mother seemed to envelop him.

They were everywhere, the colors. Not just the blue from earlier, the one that had stretched out across the road as they drove around looking for Bryan. More joined it, an infinite number—colors that Michael didn’t think he had ever seen. They wrapped around everyone, but not like cocoons, nothing so inanimate. They seemed to be tasting the entire world, both the people and the very atmosphere. The colors intertwined, creating new shades, and then separating again as easily as oil and water.

No one saw them but Michael.

He didn’t even bother asking what this was, what it meant, because no answer would come. Not from himself and certainly not from those with him. There were no answers for this and as much as he wanted to be there for Bryan, he couldn’t. The rumbling beneath his feet had subsided some, now feeling like he stood on top of a dryer as opposed to the earthquake sensation of earlier. He paid it no more mind than he did the rest of the world.

He reached his hand out into the air, gently, trying to touch a wisp of orange that floated in front of his face. It moved out of the way as easily as an eel might, but didn’t run, simply didn’t let itself be touched. It turned, the entire
being
—and somehow that fit just right—focusing (
looking?
) at Michael’s hand. Different pieces of it reached out and gently caressed Michael’s skin. All of them feeling like warm sunlight as they moved across different points of his hand.

It sees me
.

It slowly stretched out further, wrapping itself around his hand like an orange glove, warming his hand but also creating a sense of lightness in it. He could still see his skin, could see through the color. None of it scared him, even the warmth that now seemed attached to his hand. He didn’t feel like this
being
wished him any harm, not an ounce.

Michael dropped his hand and the color shot outward like a flock of birds startled from a tree, different pieces flying up into the air. He watched them go, shooting through other colors already in the air, before finding one another above. Reassembling.

They all see me
, he thought,
but no one else sees them.

W
ren found
whiskey inside the Yetzer’s house.

It wasn’t what he preferred but when the chips were down, one dealt with what one had.

He filled the flask, spilling a tiny bit onto the wooden bar. Many of the bottles and glasses inside the bar lay in shattered pieces at the bottom, so Wren didn’t think it would matter too much the few drops he added to the furniture.

Wren put the bottle down but didn’t replace the cap.

Everyone slept except for him. Like any alcoholic worth his salt, he waited until no one was around—until no one could catch him—before finding his loot. He imagined everyone was sleeping like the dead now, waiting for Christ to return before they woke, so he wasn’t too worried about anyone catching him.

He was tired too.

Awfully so.

Yet he couldn’t go to sleep without knowing where the next fix would come from. Even now, sober, his mind didn’t release that
need
. Michael was back, Bryan was back, and while the immediate danger perhaps hadn’t passed, it had changed. Wren left his house looking for his son, and now that Michael was found, his mind wanted to go back to what it did best. Find its fix.

The liquor bottle was a nice one, much better than what Wren served himself back at his own castle. The bottles there weren’t made of glass, but plastic, and the tops were always twist-off.

Have a sip, then. Taste something just a bit different from what you're normally forced to deal with
.

The voice was his own, making more sense than anything else Wren had ever heard in his life.

They’re sleeping anyway. You can go ahead and have a few shots, then get some shuteye yourself. No one is going to know. You think the Yetzers are going to come check their bottles right now? Not a chance.

Goddamnit. It had left him for a while. He had been busy, focused, and now with silence wrapped around him and nothing to do but sleep, the beast rose.

It’s okay. You’ll be sober by the time everyone wakes up.

Maybe he would be. Maybe he wouldn’t though. Maybe he would keep pounding away at that bottle until there was either nothing left of it, or nothing left of him.

It’s fogging your mind
, Linda said.

He looked at the brown bottle, but for the first time in a few minutes, didn’t see it.
Go on
, he thought.
For once, keep going, Linda.

You’re missing what’s around you because you can’t see anything but the drink in front of you. Michael’s not safe, and I don’t mean in the way that no one right now is safe. He’s different, different than when you found him, different than even this morning, but you don’t see it.

Different?

You can drink this if you want, but there’s no coming back from it if you go to it right now. Whatever bridges you have to those around you, they’re going to collapse in a heap, and you’re going to fall, except I don’t think you’ll find rock bottom. I think you’ll fall forever.

Wren brooked no argument. He thought that voice, the one sounding like his wife but was only himself, was right. Not just about the fall waiting for him, but about Michael. Wren went to him out there in the yard because something had been off, but then Wren forgot about it all.

Put the caps on both of these things and go see him now. Go see what’s happening with him.

Wren’s hand shook as he reached for the liquor bottle, shook in spite of him having continued his nips from the flask throughout the past two days. He capped both and then dropped the flask into his back pocket. He closed his eyes, placing his hands on the edge of the bar, but careful not to venture to where he had spilled the whiskey. Touching it would be too much.

Okay,
he thought.

He went to the back of the house, his hands still shaking, but thinking about his boy instead of the bottle.

Wren opened the bedroom door that Michael had gone to. He stopped as it opened though, not venturing inside. Michael wasn’t in bed. He stood at the window, the curtains pulled back, and staring outside. He didn’t even turn around at the sound of the door.

“Michael?” Wren said.

Michael didn’t move.

“Why aren’t you sleeping?” Wren said.

“You can’t see them, can you?” Michael asked, his voice low, soft.

“See what?” Wren’s hands no longer shook and a deep cold spread from his chest through his limbs.

“I don’t know what it means. I don’t know what any of it means,” Michael said.

Wren went across the room, fast now, not liking anything he heard in his son’s voice. Not liking anything he saw in this room.

“What are you talking about, Michael? What is it?”

Wren touched his boy’s shoulder, and kept asking questions, but Michael said nothing else. Not another word.

M
orena had missed being
able to move so fast, though she hadn’t realized it. Of course, the ship she used to arrive—unexpectedly—on this planet moved her at speeds greater than this, but she hadn’t been exactly awake for that trip. Now though, she moved through the air at a rate no human vehicle could attain. The world passed around her as smears of objects and shapes, houses trees, even humans—all of them little more than swathes of color.

Morena didn’t need to see them to know that they were there, however. She didn’t need to see anything in this town anymore, because she felt every piece of it just as if it were her own appendage. The white fog seeping out across the grounds connected her in a way that let nothing escape her purview. She moved across the land on the ship’s remains that brought her here, and anyone who viewed her flying through the air wouldn’t have known—she flew like some kind of superhero, instead of riding on something invisible to the human eye.

This was all so new to her still.

She felt like a child, like when she first began learning about her duties as Var. She kept going back to her mother, to wondering if she felt anything similar to this during her life. Morena hoped she had, hoped she felt this childlike wonder at something she encountered.

Every object inside this white haze was transmitted directly to Morena. Every movement, whether from the tiniest insect or largest human, went through her aura the same as her own thoughts. As of right now, her children were completely safe from any dangers inside this town, yet she needed to understand what waited outside of Grayson. She needed to see if the government had finally arrived, and if so, what it brought.

She had gone from the core’s opening to the outer perimeter, and now she moved around the white haze’s stretch of possession, circling the town, looking out into the surrounding world, checking to see if anything arrived. So far, there was nothing, but she needed to complete her circuit around the perimeter to be sure. The haze would eventually move further and further out, negating her need to do this, but only after it felt the push from her children, and right now they were still escaping the core’s womb.

Finally, though, she saw what she wanted.

The humans couldn’t see her because they couldn’t see anything inside the haze’s perimeter, not even the white of the haze itself. To them, the place showed exactly what they expected to see; the haze creating a picture from the culmination of their thoughts and simply replaying it back to everyone. The picture was part of its defense mechanism, because no matter where any one of these newly found people moved, they would see the group’s image of the town, and the group saw it as they had been told it would look. Smoke rising in the distance, from the felled plane, but for the most part a quiet place.

She knew some of the words to describe what lay before her. Tanks. Guns. Soldiers. All of them had no equivalent on Bynimian.

Bynimian doesn’t exist anymore. Hasn’t existed for fifty million years,
she thought.

The words hadn’t existed, then, but they did now—because Morena saw and understood what all these different things really were: weapons. The government had arrived and brought…what was it her host had said? The cavalry? Morena smiled at the thought. This was a large cavalry and she felt happy they were here. A group this large, something this powerful, would make a good example for the government, for any other humans on this planet that might want to challenge her.

Morena moved to the very edge of the haze.

The tanks stood in rows, five across and ten deep. Fifty. She didn’t know exactly what those things produced, but from her host’s memory, she saw fire, explosions. Men stood in front of the tanks, five hundred, all of them wearing dark green, and holding any number of things that Morena thought were meant to bring damage. She laughed at the thought. The whole of them was meant to bring damage.

She nodded, thirty feet above the highest tank, as she looked out on the mass sent to destroy her. “Let us start.”

Morena moved out from the haze’s guard, her platform gliding easily into the air where everyone could see her.

She watched their faces, the ones standing in front of the tanks, as their minds took in what appeared before them. Disbelief dawned first, with slack jaws and wide eyes. Morena knew what she looked like, could see herself as she imagined they saw her. A being surrounded in a whipping fury of ephemeral color, with a core that they could see, but barely grasp. Arms and legs like theirs, but eyes that shone with an even more ferocious green than the waves reaching out around her.

Fear came next. Because she wasn’t human. She wasn’t anything they had ever seen, or ever imagined seeing, and they came here to kill her? Something that shouldn’t exist?

Morena didn’t smile, because in that moment she pitied them the same as she pitied the men who tried to escape the forest. She found no pleasure in this, even if there was pleasure in her children growing. Chilras had feared
this
.

It’s too late, Morena. End them mercifully.

She raised her right hand and her aura moved as well, firing out like flames swimming into the air. She watched the men follow it up into the air, losing sight of her body briefly.

Morena opened her left hand and stole the breath from everyone looking at her aura. Their lungs collapsed as air shot out of their bodies. Men fell to their knees, gripping their throats and chests, forgetting totally about the creature they had recently been so frightened of. Deep blue veins cropped up on their necks and foreheads as their bodies struggled to find the oxygen that fueled them.

Morena held onto them even as she turned her attention to the tanks, which were now turning their attention to her as well. She felt the blasts coming a few seconds before they fired, her Knowledge kicking in.

The shots exited the cannons as huge explosions, but what should have happened in an instant, moved like thick, dripping syrup for Morena. She saw the fifty great pieces of metal as if they floated to her instead of flying at speeds nearing the sound barrier. The aura from her right hand, still high in the air, moved then, swarming out at ten times the speed of the missiles, twisting through their metal. And then they were one with her, the same as her aura.