Nemesis: Book Four Page 5

  "What is this?" Knox said.

  Morena didn't have time to explain anything to this creature. She had no time for any of them, because there were more important things that needed to be done than sit in this vehicle and answer questions that wouldn't matter to anyone in three days time.

  "Kenneth Marks," she said, turning her head back to the window in front of the car. Morena needed to go back to her Knowledge and continue searching for the other, but she didn't want to risk this man doing something stupid, or not taking her where she wanted to go. When she came back to reality, she needed to be in front of Kenneth Marks. "Bring me to him."

  * * *

  Will was cuffed with actual metal, no zip-ties. Knox didn't know what spoke to him in the Humvee, only that it wasn't Will. He didn't know if what used Will's body was strong or smart. Knox knew virtually nothing—though most likely the creature in green that devastated Knox's first attempt at containment now possessed Will. The thing spoke the truth when it said Will isn't here, and Knox acted accordingly.

  Knox wanted to kill him, kill it, the moment it spoke, but he managed to keep from drawing his weapon. The thing turned Will's head back to the front of the car and said nothing else, not when Knox pulled the cuffs from his belt loop, not when he strapped them on either. Indeed, the entire time the thing acted as if it was in a coma, though with open eyes.

  Knox didn't try speaking to it again. He didn't want to hear anything else from its mouth—sounding like Will, but yet, speaking in the same jerky fashion with which it moved. Knox knew that Will didn’t control his own body, but whether or not he still existed at all, Knox didn't know. So he cuffed the thing, and then put zip-ties around its feet because he was all out of metal. If he could do what he wanted, Knox would have attached an anchor to the goddamn thing's foot.

  He had two of his men walk the thing to the containment area, which was basically a cage with criss-crossing bars so that the offender couldn't get anything outside besides the tip of a finger. The creature made no effort to fight, only followed in a slow, shuffling walk—the only kind that the zip-ties would allow. Knox watched it go, its head staring straight ahead, not looking to either side, down or up. As docile as a drugged up sheep, but Knox knew its capabilities. He'd seen it in action, and listened to the way it spoke inside the Humvee. It might walk like a zombie now, but that was its prerogative, and if Knox thought for a second they were safe around this thing, a lot more men would die.

  It sat in the cage as quietly as it sat on the ride back to the base, only its chest moving as it breathed.

  It's an it to you now, huh? You don't even consider it a man, nothing resembling you or anyone else in this base. Knox had to think like that, though. Considering this thing to be Will would only result in a lot of pain, a lot of death. No, Will was dead, and if he wasn't, then he had moved a long, long way from here. What Knox looked at was an it, and nothing else.

  He stood thirty feet from the cage, directly in front of the thing's eyes, though it gave no indication it knew he was there. Knox looked down to his phone and found Marks' number; he brought it to his ear while it rang.

  "Do you have him?" Marks said.

  "I have something, though it's not the person I dropped off."

  "Go on."

  Knox stared at the thing, so different from the man that showed up earlier today. That man had humor, regrets, a soul. This thing… it had none of that.

  "It's soulless," Knox said, almost thinking aloud.

  "That's not very descriptive."

  "It won't talk. It's said maybe five words the entire time. It moves when you move it, but seems to be perfectly fine just waiting. It doesn't even move its head to look at its surroundings."

  "What did it say?"

  "It said your name. It said Kenneth Marks."

  9

  Present Day

  Morena knew what was happening with her host, and for the most part, it was nothing. They placed him in a cage and Morena could do nothing but wait. She would meet Kenneth Marks; she felt certain of it, because he came to her wanting to talk. He would come again, now that he knew where she was. He would probably feel safe, and that was good. Morena wanted him to come and wanted him to feel in control. The message she needed to deliver would work best if it brought a shock to this government's system.

  She didn't know when Kenneth Marks would arrive, though—so she checked in periodically on her host. She didn't bother looking inside him to see how the actual person fared. Morena had spent her time with humans, and learned what she needed about them; she would gather nothing new from this one.

  He was different than the first two; they had been… innocent. This man wasn't. In the brief time Morena spent rifling through Will's mind, she grew acquainted with atrocities that made some of the things she might have to do look quite pleasant. This creature, if he represented any piece of humanity, was vile.

  So she didn't care what happened to him. She hadn't really cared what happened to her original hosts either, but at least there were reasons to keep them alive. The way Thera begged for her parents to live. Even the way that she attempted her revolt, she did it because of love. This man… Morena sensed no love in him, or at least not the kind Thera and Bryan possessed.

  Morena searched her Knowledge again, but as always, she grew frustrated. She would never have the ability her mother did, no matter how much she practiced. She hadn't located the other with it, though she could still feel it. Morena felt too many things pulling at her, too many needs that had to be met, and not enough time to meet them all. The other wasn't here yet. It wasn’t stopping her creation efforts or harming her young. She needed to deal with the problems immediately in front of her.

  Like this one.

  She hovered above the clouds for the second time today. Her children were rising. Their exploration over, the wait for them to escape the Earth's core over. They needed to go forth and change this planet.

  It seemed never-ending, their number. She had known, intellectually, that this many moved around Grayson, had known each one that moved out of the Earth's core—and yet, seeing them now made her pause in awe.

  They came from beneath, rising from all over Grayson, floating through the clouds and turning the puffy white to a mix of ever-changing colors. The sun was falling below the horizon, the last vestige of its light illuminating the Bynums in an orange hue.

  They slowly emerged from the layers of clouds hanging over the town, one after another, breaking through the cover and reaching the darkening sky with Morena. She watched them float to about fifty feet in front of her, and then stop their movement. The first ones waited as the rest continued to rise. They moved around each other, briefly changing colors as they passed through others before resuming their original hues.

  Each one moved to the same point, directed by instinct, and forming a massive circle of twisting colors, a patchwork of shades. It resembled the ship Morena traveled here in, but an orb made of innumerable colors instead of white.

  They waited for her. None of them spoke, none of them could, but Morena didn't need words to know what they wanted. They were waiting for permission. The time had come to begin Earth's population in earnest. No more Grayson.

  "Go," she whispered. "Spread and show them where to grow."

  * * *

  The colors dispersed.

  They moved slowly, just as they had since emerging from the ground.

  They weren't the last piece of Bynimian's rebirth, but close to it. All were ready to begin; they took their time looking over the area that they were born into, but there wasn't anything left to do here. They had been waiting on one another, on their mother.

  Now the colors spread in every direction, and even in their slowness, moved faster than their white brethren below could ever hope to achieve.

  The strands would populate the Earth.

  The colors would give them direction.

  As the sun went down and stars arrived on the scene, darkness enveloped them,
hiding them from any eyes beneath.

  Some headed to the desert. Some to jungles. Some to the ocean. Some went to the cold of the arctic, and others to cities so overpopulated that people wore masks to go outside. They spread across the Earth, like the light of the sun each morning, except these colors spread everywhere at once.

  Everything worked in perfect harmony, each piece knowing its role, much like the cells of a body. These colors would give direction to the rest of the system.

  * * *

  The Bynum's aura was blue, though it possessed no body yet. It would, in time, but for now it was a beacon. To grow into a truly physical form, it would need the strands to reach it, to grow over the piece of land that the Bynum possessed.

  Its process was different than the Bynums currently growing out of the strands, just like the rest of those that floated across the nearly limitless skies. It was older than the ones now beginning to populate the ground beneath; it had lived before, on Bynimian, even before Morena's birth. It didn't remember everything, of course, not in this ephemeral state, but the strands would. The strands carried its DNA and when its blue aura reached the white, papery cords, the past would reunite with the present.

  This was all in the future, though. It would come, but only after the Bynum directed the strands.

  Currently, it hovered over a city, though it couldn't have known which one nor how big. It only sensed that there were no other Bynums near it, which was necessary. There were many colors floating across the world now, but not enough for them to congregate together, not if they wanted to spread adequately.

  The Bynum descended, the sun just beginning to peek over the horizon, casting its orange fingers across the world. The night faded and the streets beneath the Bynum filled, though they hadn't truly been empty. The aura moved through the clouds, sinking steadily down.

  It would need to wait when it reached the ground, though it didn't know for how long. It had waited a long time already, and so a little more didn't matter. It would wait; it would fulfill its role, and then it would be born again. Bynimian would be born again, and that was all that mattered.

  The Bynum floated down past skyscrapers; the aura paid them no attention. It only needed to reach Earth. From there, everything else would take care of itself.

  People may have looked out windows, seeing the oddly flat shaped color dropping from the sky at a leisurely pace. The Bynum didn’t notice. It possessed no knowledge of the world around it, having never colonized another planet. It only knew where it needed to be so that its mother could continue her creation.

  The aura reached the pavement, falling just after a yellow taxi rolled over the asphalt. The Bynum landed softly, spreading into the tiny crevices and crannies of the road, the blue hue it brought with it slightly masked by the black beneath.

  Another taxi rolled over the top of the Bynum, its driver clueless as to what was below.

  The aura had found New York City.

  10

  After the Destruction of Bynimian

  Helos only wanted to go to her daughter.

  Even in this total darkness, her fear grew from a desperate need to help her daughter. Helos didn't know what was happening, only that nothing about this was right. Bynimian was gone, a lost planet with no history of its own. Perhaps creatures from other planets had written down its history, perhaps they would remember it, but those words were written by another hand. Not by a Bynum's.

  Her daughter was alive though.

  Morena was out there in the universe; Helos had been allowed to see her for a second, and what for? Why, just before throwing her into this darkness?

  That wasn't all and Helos knew it. Something pulled on her. She could feel it, the slight drag on her (consciousness?) that said she was moving. Away from her daughter. Away from the spot in space where Bynimian once existed. She wanted her daughter but that didn't matter, because Helos wasn't in control.

  Something else was.

  Something that had shown Morena's distant light.

  Didn't you know something would happen? Didn't you know, but let it be?

  Of course she knew, but what could she do? Helos knew she would pass from Bynimian before whatever she felt came to be. She didn't have the right to prepare Morena either. Morena's gifts were her own, granted from The Makers, to be utilized at a time that they were needed. Helos wasn't to break that bond, the one between a Var and The Makers, regardless of what her own Knowledge revealed.

  And it had revealed nothing.

  Only a sense that doom might come during her daughter's reign. A sense, nothing more. Morena was tasked with navigating that, just as Helos had to deal with any problems during her reign. The Makers allowed life and they allowed death, and when one's time in this place ended, others must carry on, must work out solutions to the problems they faced. Helos had known a little, but not enough to stop whatever happened.

  Now her daughter was far away from her birthplace, completely alone if the single dot of light told Helos anything. So why was she allowed to see, if only to be pulled away, to be torn from helping her daughter? But there could be only one answer to such a question and Helos knew it. Perhaps she knew it the moment her eyes opened in deep space. She couldn't tell why Bynimian ended, but she knew it wasn't recent. She saw how far away Morena's light was, how far her daughter had traveled. That took time, lots of it. Something had brought Helos back from the dead.

  Only The Makers possessed such power.

  So was she traveling to them? To the creators of all that ever existed? The pull was extremely slow, no haste or urgency in it at all. Indeed, if Helos thought too intensely she could completely forget the movement.

  It existed, though, underneath the surface of her thought, of her existence, dragging her to some inescapable… end? Helos didn't know, but she doubted that was the right word. One doesn't waken from death only to find it again by those who woke her.

  She wanted to find her daughter, but no longer had any choice in the matter.

  11

  Present Day

  Michael stood before the creature. He was hesitant to call the creature a man—though there were similarities—the differences were too stark, and not just the wind like color floating around him. Michael had come to accept his own differences, though he didn't understand them. Something had changed, was still changing. Hell, the fact that he walked around in a gray world, himself the only color besides this creature in front of him, said a great deal about how much he had changed. He didn't know if it was a cellular thing, if his actual body was mutating, or if only the chemicals in his brain were changing—he only knew that the person he had been that night in the field wasn't the one now standing next to the grays.

  Yet the thing hanging on an invisible cross in front of him was neither the person Michael had once been, nor the person he was now, nor anyone Michael had ever met. This thing was separate, a creature not from Earth nor from wherever the colors Michael saw on the other side came from. It had once been powerful, Michael thought. He was once powerful. Maybe the color whipping around him created that sense, or maybe the set of his body—completely immobilized but holding a stature that demanded others lower their eyes. Even now, the creature unconscious, Michael felt a pull to look away, that to look at the creature for too long might be disrespectful.

  Still, he didn't avert his eyes.

  He walked across a land that no human should see for this creature, for this magnificent, yet frozen being.

  Why, though?

  Why was Michael drawn to it? Why had Michael known that somewhere in this gray world the creature waited? And was it waiting? Is that why it hung here in the air, none of the grays dare touching it? Because it knew he would come?

  Michael finally looked away, back to the circle of grays surrounding him, their translucent bodies revealing an infinite number of the same behind them. He turned around and looked back at where he came from. No path marked his passage, for he had simply moved through everything in his way. Mi
les and miles to this place, without a map. And what did he do now that he found what he came here for? Turn around and head back to Bryan's house, where he would somehow make his way back to reality?

  He had known to follow this thing, to follow its pull, but nothing else. He stood here, in front of it, without a clue as to what to do.

  And the time was coming, the time for him to choose whether he left this world. Whatever opening allowed him to come here was now closing. It had allowed him to find his way to this place, and now it would force him to make a decision. There wouldn't be time to walk back to Bryan's house. He would decide now, here, whether he stayed or left.

  And that wasn't a choice, because no one stayed here, not unless you wanted to look like the creatures surrounding him.

  Michael turned back to the floating being.

  He took another step closer, so that he stood barely a foot away, looking up at the creature's closed eyes. Michael had watched someone else do something similar. He had watched Bryan walk almost blind to that orb in the middle of the woods. Bryan wanted to touch it, desperately. Michael didn't feel the same about this creature, he felt to touch it would somehow sully it, that things this great aren't meant to be felt by lesser beings. Bryan had touched the orb, eventually—which set all of this in motion. Michael stood here now, the world on the other side being wrecked, all of it because Bryan decided to touch something he shouldn't.

  And maybe that meant Michael was supposed to touch this thing. Maybe that's why he came. First Bryan, now him, and hopefully the result would be different this time. Either way, whether he ended up like Bryan or not, time was up—he needed to choose.

  He reached up, his hand moving slowly, like it knew it shouldn’t touch this thing, but Michael’s brain overruled its inclinations. His hand moved through the red color, immersing itself.