Intrepid (28 page)

Liam
 

‘On Collective Energy’ —
The Manifesto

The lack of self-awareness in Movers and Splicers is sacred. Some may say, why not just tell them of their Multiversal duty and help them adjust their course?
 

That would be like counting water drops in the ocean, for the tides of destiny tug us beyond such humble attempts. Not every universe can be saved, no matter how much we wish it so.
 

Instead, we must respect that the Splicers can activate change and that the Movers rely on their Collective Energy to push new universes into existence. We must accept that the events that follow are the ones that are meant to happen.
 

Oh, the great power of the Movers. Do not feel sorry for them since they can neither decide nor travel—Splice nor Explore—for to do so would be to misinterpret the power of the mass.
 

Always remember that it is Collective Energy that holds the most power.
 

They are the waves in comparison to the ripple.
 

—S-1, V-1.
   

Chapter Thirty-Four

The treadmill thrummed under my feet and sweat beaded the cracks of my skin. The machine wouldn’t let me run fast enough to burn off all the heat coursing through me. I kept seeing the floating otter-shark with its slackened jaw and dark lips. The yellowing teeth, sharp and deadly. Its mass eclipsing all the tiny, floating neon colors drifting around it. In steering
Geeta
out of the wreckage, I saw that the floating death scene went on for nearly a mile in circumference around us.
 

How Santiago didn’t get hit with whatever came out of Texi was beyond me. Maybe it only transferred like electricity through the water and the boat’s material stopped the current from reaching him. If that was what happened, I was glad for it. Santiago’s death would not have been forgivable.
 

I wanted to move my legs past the limits of the treadmill. I thought about Hopping to one of the nearby islands, but I knew leaving Santiago and Texi at the moment was not an option. I missed having
Geeta
to myself, and I wanted them to trade places with Nobu again. I wanted to go back to the week before everything crashed down around me. I wanted to be searching for Arti, but I knew that the red-whale was already past the Swirl by now. The window to find her was gone, and so was everything else. I wondered who’d find the journals laden with all the careful data Nobu and I had collected over the years, but I knew no one would. The information would sit here, untouched and useless, until the Multiverse collapsed in on itself.
 

I turned the treadmill off, and wiped the sweat off my forehead.
 

Ever since I grabbbed Texi in the water, I began to feel like my nerve endings no longer existed. I felt fried in every way. I was like those cartoons Nobu used to let me watch that had someone stick their finger in a light socket and come out with hair standing on end. As I ran the towel over my arms, my arm hair stood straight up from the friction, despite the sweat careening through them. I’d now spent an entire day and a half with this electricity careening through my capillaries. I didn’t know how to burn it off, and no amount of time on the treadmill could stop it.
 

“Keep your distance,” I said out loud. What a stupid plan. I shouldn’t have met her yet. I shouldn’t have been given access to her at all. Maybe none of us were able to remain objective. Maybe we’d spent too much time hoping for the best to recognize the worst when it came. The right thing to do was to fall back on failsafes before things went too far.
 

But was I being too hasty?
 

Was there something I wasn’t seeing?
 

Because all I could see was the face of a million tiny deaths. One minute, they bloomed in colors around her, and the next, they floated like dead stars in the sky.
 

I wandered up to the gardens to check on Nobu’s tomatoes. He always bet me garden maintenance duty when we’d wager things, but I knew how much he loved it up here. He was especially proud of his tomatoes year after year, but without him they looked droopy. The bulbous fruit hung heavy on the limbs, and I picked one. It was green and hard, and I thought about all the fried green tomatoes we’d eaten over the years. They were our favorite to make. I missed Nobu with a new kind of ache, and although I was home, I was homesick. He was my brother. Now I had this boy who thought he knew everything and this girl who constantly reminded me how little I actually did.
 

 
I chucked the tomato out in the ocean and didn’t bother to wait for the plunk before I picked the next one to throw. Nobu wouldn’t miss them, and tomato by precious tomato, I pitched them into the sun. But stripping the plant bare didn’t change things.
 

No.
 

There was no going back to my life with Nobu.

I didn’t know if there was any way to move forward with Texi. She contained within her Creation, but that meant there was also an equal amount of Destruction in her too.
 

And there was more.
 

I couldn’t figure out what to call it. I couldn’t figure out if I’d ever felt it before. I couldn’t even admit that something else was bubbling in my veins, bursting the capillaries that lead straight to my heart and inflaming my lungs every time I took a breath.
 

I wanted to touch her again.
 

I wanted to rip her apart with my own Energy.
 

And that made no sense to me.

I walked towards the benches where Nobu planted his flowers. “I know they don’t serve an edible purpose, but that doesn’t negate their necessity. A little bit of beauty is never worthless,” he’d said.
 
I laid down on a bench and laced my fingers behind my head for a pillow, and I counted the stars until my eyes grew as heavy as my heart. But dreams turned out to be just as disturbing. I was in the Nothing with Texi, bursting into the Multiverse into existence. Whispers grew loud, banging into our ears in the violent chaos of Creation, and I pulled her into a kiss that caused my own veins to rupture.
 

“She’s gone! Wake up!”

I heard it in my heart. She was gone. Gone. Gone.
 

“Liam! Wake up!” How Santiago sounded simultaneously panicked and calm at the same time was beyond me. It took me a moment to realize he’d woken me from the dream, and he already had his screen pulled up to hone in on Texi’s tracker when I finally opened my eyes. I sat up and didn’t have time to groan as my body adjusted. I really needed to stop sleeping in such strange places. The plush bench was not nearly as comfortable after a few hours of laying on it.
 

“Dude, did you
hear
me?”
 

I shook my head as realization finally sunk in.
 

She was gone.
 

I pulled up my screen and let Santiago enter our coordinates. “The 620s? Why would she go there?” I asked.
 

Worry fell into Santiago’s hurried movements. “Why would she Jump without us in the first place? There are too many whys to be asked here. We need to stop asking and go get her. I knew we shouldn’t have given her access to the Planck Web yet.”
 

I didn’t argue with him. There wasn’t enough time to do so, because the more seconds we spent here, the more chances she had to get in trouble on the 620s. They were a wasteland, and going anywhere in those Veins was unbearable. The only creatures that existed there were the mammoth-bears and the things mammoth-bears ate.
 

It was also a good spot to Interim Jump between Veins if you thought someone was tracking you. There was a static kind of Energy that took a while to cut through signals, and it gave you a head start.
 

That’s what worried me most. What if she was already gone? How did she know to go there first?
 

We entered into the Nothing. It flooded over us like the eye of a hurricane. We both believed we’d land within feet of her, but when we dissolved back into reality, we didn’t find Texi. We found something else entirely.
 

Chapter Thirty-Five

Wherever Texi had gone on this planet, it wasn’t in this location. The tracker’s calibration must have been off, and it plotted us amongst a bunch of nesting mammoth-bears.
 

Of course.
 

In fact, we landed right smack dab in the middle of a mammoth-bear den.
 

This adventure kept getting better and better.
 

My eyes adjusted to the darkness of the cave and I swore under my breath. Their sharp teeth were as white as the drifting snow that leaked from the cracks of the open cave, their tusks were as sharp as the ice-mountain ranges, and their ragged fur stank of damp death.
 

I slid towards Santiago, and reached out to grab his shoulder so we could Bucket Hop to the same location, but a paw swiped out. It scraped me across the chest and pushed me through the air. I lost my grip on Santiago before I entered the Nothing, and when I landed on the hard, iced ground, I felt the crack of bone and the vibrations of my own sturdy scream.
 

I propped my neck up and saw that there was nothing around me, but my arm was bent at an unnatural angle. The claw marks tore my shirt to shreds, and a cold I’d never felt before traced its fingers across each slash of skin. I knew there was a way to equalize body temperature by tuning down the sense of feeling, but I didn’t know how to do that yet. There was still so much Santiago had to show us.
 

The 620s were hell.
 

I know that people describe hell as flames and fire, but those people have never felt the burning heat of being frozen.
 

I tried to stand up.
 

I’d lost Santiago.
 

How could I have lost Santiago?

I thought of where I came from and forced my Energy to return there. I didn’t want to return to an angry pit of mammoth-bears, but losing Texi and Santiago within minutes of each other was simply not an option.
 

I landed at the mouth of the cave and yelled for Santiago. “Hop towards my voice,” but he didn’t appear. He must still be in there. I’d only been gone about thirty seconds, but that was enough time for someone to get killed. “Don’t do this, Santiago! We need you!” I said it more for myself than for him as I closed my eyes to Hop back into the cave.
 

I landed where I began, and saw Santiago slouched against a rocky wall with a mammoth-bear hovering over his face. Its teeth were wet and ready to close down on him, but when I appeared, the creature turned its attention to me. I needed to draw it away, because it was the only thing standing between Santiago and me. If I Hopped between them, there’d be no room and I’d only put myself within the traps of its teeth and claws. “Come on, you bastard! You hungry? Huh?” I stepped backwards until my back nestled into the cold wall. At least the other beasts wouldn’t be able to get behind me.
 

I shivered at the sight of them as they stirred from their sleep. My new entrance was a bit more clambering and attention-grabbing than our last.
 

I blinked and felt a surge of Energy. It was like I could taste everything that went into building every mammoth-bear that surrounded us. There were eight adults and two cubs, not that I could see them all to count them. I just felt it to be true and therefore knew it to be true. I closed my eyes again and felt the Energy trickle into and out of my pores. Every cell within me burst into the heat of it, and I felt it drawing from something greater than myself.
 

“No!” I yelled. “Nooooooo!”
 

But it was too late.
 

Chapter Thirty-Six

I felt the cool air of morning as we landed back on the deck. I had Santiago hoisted over my back, but he still wasn’t waking up. I stumbled over to one of the lounge chairs, laid him down, and wondered how to stop the blood from pooling out of the gashes on his forehead, neck, and torso. I clasped his wrist between my thumb and fingers to feel his still-faint pulse and put my ear close to his mouth to hear his barely steady breathing.
 

I should have known better than to make him Jump when he was this injured. Corbin should have been warning enough, but it was Jump or let Santiago freeze to death. He didn’t have time to heal back on the 620s. Neither did I! I knew I’d taken the right risk, but he should have started healing already. Something was slowing it down, and I knew it was my fault he wasn’t healing. Whatever it was I did back there was making it more difficult, but at least he was alive.
 

“You’re okay,” I whispered more for myself than for him. He had to be okay. There was no other option for him. I wouldn’t be able to forgive myself if, in trying to save him, I turned him into a delusional mess.
 

 
I tried to assess my wounds, and realized I probably shouldn’t have Jumped either. My cuts kept reopening with every move I made, and, although I knew they wanted to heal, I also knew they wouldn’t if I didn’t lay still for a bit.
 

There was another option for me too. Sometimes Jumping this injured didn’t affect the brain. Rather it altered the ability to heal. What if I wasn’t out of the woods either? What if my wounds didn’t heal, and I bled out?
 

Tatters of my torn shirt kept falling into the cuts every time I moved, and I tried to lift it over my head. The movement was too excruciating, so instead I tore at the slashes and pried the shirt apart with shaky fingers from the hand that wasn’t attached to my broken arm. The bone in my other arm was snapped in two just under my elbow when I’d landed after the mammoth-bear struck me. I looked at it and tried not to cringe at the angle it dangled in. The last thing I needed was to have it heal in that shape, and not even my screaming woke Santiago up as I adjusted it back into the place it needed to be in. I took in deep, shuddering breaths, but it didn’t ease the pain of it. I ran my fingers over my cuts. The blood kept trying to coagulate where the skin was torn, and I felt the folds attempting to reach out towards each other like tiny, stretching fingers trying to touch at the tips.