In the place of Will is a shimmer, a faint mirage of the man who was once there. Then that goes too. “By the Fox,” The needles have me stuck to the seat, have the skin around the puncture holes shriveled like sun-dried janjan fruit. Phyrxian needs to drink to get through the Fade. He needs my blood. Now Will is gone, disappeared, and I can not do a thing stuck in the seat, feeding Phyrxian’s appetite. We go deeper and deeper into the gray wave.
“I am, I am...” Crick’s voice is faint. He sounds like he is about to fall into the dream world, the slightest jolt likely to push him over.
“Crick!” I try to wake him. His head does not move from between his knees. “Wake up! Do not slip like Will.”
He moves a trembling arm, his hand limp on the wrist, but then drops it to his side. His voice peters out, until there is only Phyrxian’s steady hum. My arms are already numb, the ache back in my shoulders. I need to go to Crick, but I can not remove the needles myself. Not without a big, big mess. I almost killed myself the last time, when I escaped.
There are over a dozen straps on the chair. Pacheco used every one. In doing that, my body did not pump blood like always. My legs were always tingly. To make me more comfortable, I found I could keep energy in my feet. It was this I released the day yama man go to his room and drink pyronic. It was this release, after months of waiting, that made the battery the scholar put in me go boom, too. The needles completely exploded, with my arms. My body was still strong enough that it could heal, but I became so weak. I almost fainted in the corridor to the Oisin. I would rather not have to go through that again. Even though I am stronger than old Amara, it would take many moons to get the power for that big a boom. If Crick could just wake up and help me out of the machine, then I would be fine. But it looks like he is the one who needs help, much more so than I.
Will was helping Crick past the holes and into the ship. He helped me push up the door on Narcissus. He was strong. How did he let himself get swallowed up by the gray wave like that? When Da’s brother was very young, something took him too, and they found him drowned in the sea days later. Great Mum said it was dark magic then. Is that what took Will? The scholar said there was dark magic that brought you whatever you desired. Who else knew dark magic and would want the ship? But why did he take Will, and not me? Something does not seem right.
Phyrxian bounces, as if it has hit something. Snap awake, silly girl, and look at the screen. The gray wave is being split by black lightning. That only appears when there is something, a world we might be entering. We must be coming out of the Fade. The lights dim as Phyrxian is knocked about. The frame of the ship creaks and moans. With Pacheco at the controls, coming out of the Fade would be smooth. He had spent so much of his life traversing the gray wave that landing Phyrxian was instinctive, as natural as blinking his one eye. He could smoothly land the ship on any world. I did not think this through. How am I to land Phyrxian?
Lightning cracks across the screen, and the ship flips ninety degrees. I scream, there is so much pressure on my arms from the needles. I can not breathe. Crick slides from the wall to the middle of the floor. There is a roar from the depths of the ship. Something has torn loose. The piping all around us clatters, and the lights on the columns blink furious and fast.
“Gods,” I can feel the needles pulling harder from my veins, Phyrxian needing more blood to get through the Fade’s outer edge. “By the Fox, Crick, please wake up! Please!” Small patches of green appear on the screen. They look like the suns Old Cappy paints, with beams spreading from their centers. Spreading and growing, swallowing the Fade. Phyrxian bounces uncontrollably. I think I am numb to the pain, but one hard jostle sends waves of nausea through my body. Vomit spews in a steaming pile on my lap.
“Emergency landing initiated,” Phyrxian’s voice is calm. Black shapes like the ship’s tentacles hit the screen as we fully come out of the Fade. The greenery is everywhere now. Phyrxian is going so fast into it, what we are crashing through doing little to slow us.
“Trees...” I can see the boughs now, taking turns cracking into the screen. We are crashing into a forest. Phyrxian’s pipes let out a high pitched scream. The ship seems ready to tear apart. Bright sunlight spills through the leaves as we rush through them, lessening as we fall further into the forest. The trees clear suddenly, and we are floating through empty space. Ahead of us looms the biggest tree I have ever seen, and we are headed right for it. So this is how I will go, the needles in my arms, I barely have time to think. Phyrxian hits the tree at such speed that I propel through the air, the needles ripping from my arms. I meet the wall, and blackness blooms.
In the darkness, an egg cracks open, slow hands breaking the shell into the goo. It is just a sound, but my mind sees it so clearly. Then I feel soft fingers on my face. It is a breeze, bringing cool, open air from beyond the cabin. I open my eyes. The entire room is bent. One of the columns has fallen over, purple water leaking from its surface. The ship is dark, quiet.
“Phyrxian...” I say, but I know that the ship is dead. Now I remember. We crashed. The impact killed the ship. The hum of the engines, Phyrxian’s heart, has hushed. Light streams in from above. The hull has been torn open, gaping up at the sky. Dust motes and pollen dance about so thick that I want to catch the light. I toss off the debris I am covered in, move over to the beams, and pull up my sleeves to let my skin drink. My hand comes back from the fabric wet and sticky, white lines like spider webs in my red palms. My shirt, my pants, are soaked. Blood. The needles were ripped from your arm, silly girl. I brush my sleeves up further, expecting terrible wounds where the needles were ripped from my skin. But, by the Fox, there is nothing but smoothness, not so much as a scrape. How could I have healed so quickly? Not even on the Coral Islands could my body treat its wounds like this.
I run my fingers over my body. No wounds on my stomach, my legs, my chest. I take my dress off so the light touches all my skin, and the feeling is the warmth and smell of spring after long winter. I feel I never knew true warmth. I smile and tear at ever having felt something so beautiful. I will never forget it, not ever. I raise my chest up, arc my arms back. Tears course down my cheeks, the thin streams warmed by the heat of the sun.
“Oh, light,” I say, “thank you for being so generous, so giving.”
“It is certainly is something. I a’int never seen anything quite so bright before in all my days.” I turn and see Crick curled up on the floor in a sunbeam of his own. His skin is nearly translucent.
“Your leg!” I say, rushing to him. It’s bent in a way it should not be, pointing up towards the sky.
“Same one that got cut by the glass. Don’t look too good,” I kneel next to him, see the bone peeking through the skin and torn cloth. “I know it’s broken. You a’int gonna break any news to me on that one. It don’t hurt none, Amara. Or, if it does, the sunshine makes it better somehow. I feel pretty good, actually.”
But he does not look very good, not at all. His eyes are puffy and purple, and the scabs on his shoulder hanging loosely from his wounds, fresh blood leaking out and slick. “You are going to be okay. Wherever we are, I will find some one to help us.” I need a knife, something sharp to cut his pants leg with. He yells, pushing my hand away. “You said it did not hurt.”
“Well, when you touch it, of course it does!” He says. He gets up on his elbows, then quickly slumps back down. “I don’t think I can walk, Amara.”
“Of course not. Your leg is broken.”
“Right.” He sighs, and it seems as if the life passes right out of him. “But I have to get out of this ship. I have to get out into the light. I can’t die here, you understand? Don’t let me die here.” I nod, squint up into the sun. Tree branches reach, thin arms and wrists grasping for the sun.
“Amara, listen to me, dammit all. I can’t die here. Get me out into the light.”
“I do not know what is out there, Crick. We could be much safer in here. I don’t even know where we are. The navigational system is down. Phyrxian is dead.”
/>
He chokes on a coughing fit, then lays back against the wall.
“The sunlight really did wonders for you, hm? You look so much... brighter than before. Not a mark on you. But all this blood...?”
I realize my nakedness, and pull my filthy shirt back on. It is cold and heavy.
“I am Ma’atha. We drink the sun, and it heals our bodies. This sunlight is especially strong. For the amount of blood, I should have some degree of bruising or scar. Look, wait here. I need to inspect the damage. Will you be alright?”
“I a’int going anywhere,” He says. I turn and go towards the other side of the cabin. The floor slopes up, then down. There’s an open door where the cabin meets the tube we took to get here. Now, there is only empty black space beyond. I yell into it, the reverberations of my voice sounding wet and watery. There’s a loud splash from deep within. But the ship itself does not answer, without even so much as a faint light in reply. The ship is certainly dead.
I pace back across the slanted ground, metal bits crunching under my shoes. I have no idea where we’ve crashed. Yet, there are trees beyond Phyrxian’s serrated fissure, and the air tastes of sweet earth. It seems a much more hospitable place than the wasteland we just escaped from. Crick is right: he will not die aboard this dead ship. I will not allow it. We must escape this carcass, and make our way for the sun.
“Come on,” I say, reaching down and under his shoulder blades. He groans when I lift.
“Are we... are we leaving?” He says.
“Yes.” But I do not know how.
“Why not the same way we came in? Through the tubes?”
“There aren’t any tubes left. They broke when we crashed.”
“How about through that big hole in the ship up there?”
“Not that I know of. Unless... wait,” One of the needles lies in a twisted heap at my feet, the tip of which is bent in several places. Strips of brown flesh are stuck to it: barkskin on a skewer. Skin that had once been a part of me, now replaced by a virgin layer, perfectly smooth. While my torn body bled out in Phyrxian’s crushed hull, it nevertheless drank deeply of the sun’s strong rays. It healed itself while I dreamed forgotten dreams. But, the needle: attached to it is a long tube, that has been severed from the machinery it used to feed. I prop Crick up against the console and pick it up. I pull it between my arms, testing its strength.
“This will do.” I lift the needle up, heavy enough that there’s a degree of strain in my voice, and toss it up and over the crack in the hull. It catches in the narrow cut. “Hold on to me.”
“Alright,” He wraps his arms around my neck. Gods, he’s a big man. His beard is sandpaper on my breasts, his arms thick ropes around my neck. Deep breath in, and I reach up and take hold of the tube. The sun envelops my hand, ushering me up. Hand over hand, into the sunbeams. My back starts to quake. We’re barely off the ground, and my muscles are already trembling from disuse. My hands make a desperate grasp for higher up on the cord; the sun delicately finds its way down my straining forearms. A renewed strength, like electricity, runs through me.
“You can do it.” Crick whispers.
I reach above my head again and again, each new length of the cord gained giving the sun greater access to my body. The shaking of my muscles subsides into a humming, like a turbine, a purring machine. Brilliant white beams rise up above the cracked hull, sunbeam roots. Another handhold, another hoist up the cord, and I can’t help but close my eyes, it’s so bright. I reach up, and wrap my fingers around the serrated fissure in Phyrxian’s skin. I tell Crick to hold himself as much as he can so that I can crawl up and out, and then pull him to safety.
He lies on his back, his forearm over his eyes, breathing harder than I am. The tops of great trees surround us, the ground hidden by green shadows and the hugeness of the trunks. We’re caught in the web criss cross of several boughs, each as wide as a street. “The sun,” he says, in between breaths. “It’s so... beautiful.”
It’s like a white hot torch burning a hole in the sky. “Yes, it is. If it were not for how strong it is here, I would not have been able to pull you out.”
“I think you could have, even if we were back in that basement again. You don’t strike me as a lady who gives up once she sets out to do something.”
“And what would that something be? Saving your life?” He moves his arm away, and looks at me with a blank expression.
“Thank you.” He says. I get up off my knees, and pace around the curved metal shell of the ship. The black skin is gone.
“Don’t mention it.”
“What happened to the ship?”
“We crashed. And when we did, Phyrxian died. Do you remember me telling you that the ship was alive? Well, the cyanophythic skin, the black ink on the outside, died too. Phyrxian was the only thing keeping it all together. Once its sentience passed, the cyanophythic skin fell away. It’s nothing more than a skeleton.”
“I guess I should be thankful for being alive, then. But still, I’m a breath away from kissing Death full on the lips. How do you do it?”
“Heal? We Ma’atha are a feat of ancient engineering. To harness the power of Helios and Hyperion, to get to the center of existence, the yamas people needed a near infinite source of energy. They were able to bioengineer the bodies of my people into photosynthetic machines, a closed cycle of perpetual energy. We drink up the sun with our skin, they draw the energy out, infinitely, for as long as our bodies hold up.”
He crumbles apart into a fit of coughing, his eyes wide. “I just realized... William! What happened to him?” He props himself up, and looks back to the hole in Phyrxian’s skull. “Oh no, don’t tell me...”
“No, Crick. He disappeared before we came out into this world, wherever we are.”
“He what? What do you mean, he disappeared?”
“I don’t know. The spatial fabric is thin in the Fade. It is not a world like you and I know. It’s nothing, and it is very easy to slip. But the way he went, it’s as if someone was pulling him away.”
“Someone pulled him away? What does that mean? How could someone just grab someone away like that?”
“Ancient science. Pacheco...”
“Pacheco? That man with the cape? Who we stole the ship from?”
“Yes, but also the kidnapper, the maniac whose people call him “the good doctor” on account of his barbarism and, and... brutality. That man has access to a wealth of knowledge not of this world, Crick. He has travelled to worlds long thought lost, rediscovered knowledge that allows him to manipulate time, space and everything in between.”
I think of the good doctor pacing around the deck of the ship, his thin neck barely peeking above his heavy scarf, his wasted body enclosed in heavy armor. Sometimes he would sit in his chair, finger and thumb angling his face, eyeing me silently. The needles so deep in my arms, viscous spit around my lips: I learned how to shut the pain off, and watch him with rapt attention. Because even the good doctor was capable of making a mistake. By failing to regularly monitor the ship’s main potentiometer, by being ignorant of the fact that Phyrxian’s source of energy, my body, was changing, actually expanding, he set in motion his own downfall. Because he failed to recalibrate it, I was able to keep that small well of energy a secret, and slowly keep building upon it.
The good doctor went about the ship with a machine-like regularity, but aloof, as if his mind was always wrapped around a problem in a dozen different ways. When Phyrxian was just cruising through the Fade, Pacheco would hunch over the pages of some ancient looking book, it’s yellowed cover delicately balanced between his hands. He mouthed silent mildewy words to himself, until something like a newly lit torch would gleam in his eyes. His fingers would then alight over the controls before he’d retreat deep into the ship somewhere, emerging hours later, his shoulders heaving with his breath, his eyes sunken deeper in his face. He’d hold himself up with a hand to the wall, until he made it to his captain’s chair. Crumbling into his seat, he’d look at
me without a word, his eyes like that of a man who had seen too much.
He spoke to me, once, after having just returned from deep within the ship.
“I know you’re in great pain, barkskin. But think of the future. Your people. They’ll know a tomorrow. They’ll know a life without want, a life where anything is possible.”
“They already do. We are not like you. We are not afraid of dying.”
“Oh? Well. You should be.” And when he closed his eyes, the lids crinkling tightly, all the wrinkles on his face became like clay, so unnatural that there appeared to be a youthful visage underneath, one on the verge of tears.
“Amara?”
He only ever called me barkskin.
“Amara?” Crick coughs. “We have to find William.”
“I know. But I do not know where he could be.” I say.
The leaves begin to chatter together. Their shaking increases, grows louder; yet, there is no wind. “What’s going...” Crick can not finish. His breath slips out of him like air from a punctured balloon. The ship shakes in the branches, falls deeper into the trees. Phyrxian re-angles herself, the flat roof deck we are standing upon suddenly sloping downwards. Crick’s body slides towards the edge, his hands scrambling at Phyrxian’s surface for a handhold, anything that will stop him from vaulting over, but almost everything is just smooth bone. He makes one more pained yelp before completely going over. I rush to the edge as quickly as I can, and without so much as a glance, launch myself after him. I am just in time to grab Crick’s wrist, before losing him completely to the veil of foliage beneath us. I manage to grab on to a thin enough tree limb, and almost pull my arm out of my socket by stopping our fall.
“Gods! Grab on to a branch! We have to climb down.” There is an avalanche from above our head. I do not need to look above to know what is crashing down towards us. “The ship, it is falling!”
He tries to grab a branch, but cries out when he extends his arm. “Goddammit, my leg!” How are we going to get him down when his leg is completely shattered? I think to myself.
“We just... we have to get out of the way of the ship.” I say. We both look up, expecting Phyrxian to lurch over again, to continue its plummet through the trees, all the way to the forest floor. The branches seem to have caught it again. Its bowels shake, the leaves rustling around it. There’s a skittering noise from within the ship, like dozens of metal feet on the hull.
“What is that?” Crick asks, as I place him down onto a broad branch, a few arm spans beneath us.
“Something terrible.” There’s no time to explain. If one Phyrxian’s parasitoid creatures survived, the taste and smell of my blood, which has sustained them all this time, must be fresh in its mind. “We have to get out of here...” No sooner do I say this than a hooked talon breaks through Phyrxian’s hull, the tip pointed directly at us. Like a thread splaying, the talon comes apart, six smaller claws, peeling back, opening like a flower. The six claws open, Phyrxian’s metal body cutting easily apart like a ripe fruit.
“If the creature comes through, we are finished.”
“What is it?”
“Give me your hand,” I pull Crick up and onto my back, just as the creature from within the ship pushes its head through the hole it has torn open with its claws. It is flat like a coin, with a maw of craggy teeth, popping open with intermittent jerks, as if a hydraulic pump is priming it. Its eyes are at the far side of its head, small, oblong and black. “It smells us. Gods, hold on,” I say to Crick. I feel the bristle of his beard on my back as he nods. I jump from the flat branch we were standing on, and let myself free fall through the net of leaves, deeper into the forest. We narrowly miss an enormous tree limb as we come out of the deep leaf canopy, and into a cathedral like enclosure of mountainous tree limbs and golden sunlight.
There’s a crashing above us, wood splitting apart. I can see the beast out of the corner of my eye, its snaking lizard body tearing at the air with its sharp teeth, hungry and insane from Phyrxian’s crash. A series of vines hang in our way, and I try to grab at them, hoping they will at least slow our fall. Each only breaks off in our hands, not slowing our descent in the slightest. I can hear the beast’s teeth clacking against themselves, its spidery limbs waving through the air as it falls after us. Finding any sort of handhold now will not save us, would only serve us up to it. It is all hopeless.
The feeling of falling, of my stomach suspended up around my chest, has not left me since I jumped after Crick. And now I see that it does not come from the fall at all, but from the fatal certainty of my situation. Another canopy of leaves and branches is coming up quickly, where Crick and I will likely be broken to pieces.
There is a flash, lightning, like Crick when he lit up the space below the Digger’s hovel. We must have been smashed or consumed by the beast. Death has come, and it was quick, and without too much in the way of pain. I should be thankful for that, but instead, I can not help but wonder why I am still so aware of my body, of the forest still around me. The brightness from the flash gives way to a dull, throbbing black; it takes a moment for me to realize that what I am seeing is in my head, and the flash came from being hit. Actually, no, not hit. We were grabbed, pulled out of the air by two great arms, as firm as packed earth. I can not clearly make out up or down, until there is a firmness under me. It is then that I feel my heart pounding, the hotness of my skin. My vision comes into focus with each stabbing beat in my chest. I see that I am on another rough branch, wide and flat save for the knobby growths that my fingers squeeze like woody pustules.
“Amara?”
Gods, he sounds even worse than before, barely alive. “Yes... Crick... Are you alright? Who was that? We have to get... to safety...”
“Look, Amara. I can’t even believe it.”
There are waves crashing and tumbling around my head when I turn, following the direction of Crick’s voice. He sits propped up on his hip, his broken leg bloody and aslant underneath him. His great nose and strong brow point up and away into the empty space we just fell through, into the great cathedral space with the fairy tale dust motes sparkling in the golden glowing sunbeams.
“What is it?”
“Your guess is as good as mine.”
It’s like a green blur, hanging in the air. It moves like a microscopic fleck of dust on the back on an eyelid: slowly, subtly, without any discernible movement of the body for propulsion. I strain to bring it all into focus. When it is still for a moment or two, the green blur coalesces into a green robe, entirely covering a body of brown, autumnal fur, glowing gold in the spots where the sun beams touch. On the being’s head are a set of antlers, as long as his upper body is tall, with six points on each. And in his hand is a sword, it’s sharp edge slathered with a black blood.
“Look, Amara, that thing from Phyrxian,” Crick doesn’t need to point it out. It has fallen far below us, but the path of its descent, through leaves now torn and boughs broken, is evident enough. It lies panting on a mesh of cracked tree limbs, its black eyes wide and fearful, its mouth hinging open and closed like a trap door in a thunderstorm. The stench of fetid blood drifts up to us through its freshly sliced skin.
The Phyrxian Bowel Monster struggles up to its feet, one of its spindly hands draped over a dark chest wound. It shakes its flat head back and forth, a high pitched whine burbling from its throat. It snaps its head up at the antlered being, who floats with hardly a hair moving on his body. It turns quickly, then skitters its way up the tree behind it, making its way back towards us. The antlered man sighs, and it sounds like several voices all huffing out a breath concurrently. The Bowel Monster has disappeared in the eaves of the treetops, so silently that there’s only the occasional chatter of leaves to draw our attention. The quietness is heavy. The sword shifts in the the antlered man’s hand, his padded hands and long fur squeaking on the leather hilt.
And then I see how and why I had been knocked out so hard. Flat Top leaps from the leaves with such stealth that I can not belie
ve Antlers could possibly be aware of him. I make to shout, but Flat Top is fast, and on top of him before my vocal cords can even tighten up around the air from my gut.
Flat Top keeps coming, though, through Antlers. The deer man softly shimmers away, like a cloud blowing apart. Flat Top descends towards us, its wide eyes even wider in surprise, while Antlers appears above it, its body tranquilly following in the direction of the sword. It looks as if he just cut through something. That something proves to be the beast from Phyrxian’s bowels. It delicately comes apart, a clean cut from shoulder to thigh, barely a few threads of black blood escaping from within. The two halves come apart, and pass to the sides of the branch Crick and I are on. We can hear the crack and brack as it crashes through the foliage, on its way to the forest floor.
“Crick!” I crawl to him, his pale skin mottled with purple and watery green marks. His eyes have closed, his dry lips are rolled back above his gums; no breath seems to pass through his stony teeth.
“He’ll be fine, Amara.”
The bottom of the antlered one’s green robe flutters in an unfelt wind; it has a smell emanating from it which is deep and full, like moss sustained by waterfall mist. I look up into his eyes, which are opaque, blind, buried under a furry brow.
“What? You... how do you know my name?”
“We met, long ago, in stories you knew as a child.” His mouth barely moves, but it fills the air, like several people singing softly, of various ages spanning a lifetime.
“I... I don’t understand. This man... he needs...”
“Help? Trust in me, Amara. He’ll be fine. Better than fine, in fact. Here,” He reaches his hand down to me, lifting me up from the bough. The fur is soft, the leathery pads on the inside of his hands as cool as old forest leaves. Touching them, there is a calming light which passes through my body. It makes my stomach rise up to meet my heart, so the two are beating, like a butterflies wings at morning’s first light.
“My name is Jack Karnos,” He reaches down and gently lifts Crick up in his arms. His broken body, even with its rope tight muscles and great big beard, suddenly looks small in Jack’s arms.
“The Pilot is very much looking forward to meeting the both of you,” He says.
“The Pilot?”
“Yes. Come.” He nods towards the open space ahead of us, and a tangle of vines come together at our feet, forming a bridge that leads deeper into the forest. Jack Karnos walks forward, stopping a few steps in when I do not immediately follow.
“Come, Amara. There’s not much time. For us. For Will. For all the worlds and every being which lives in them. Your part in this story is very important, as is Crick’s. We must hurry. We must meet the Pilot.”
Chapter XI: “Beyond the Cusp of Nowhere”