Broken Pixels (The Chronicles of Mara Lantern, Book 4) (38 page)

“No!” Mara screamed and crumpled to the ground. She stretched out a hand toward the scaffolding.

“Remember the last time you did that. You nearly killed yourself. No more back-up bodies for you this time,” Abby said. “Just let go and you can become indestructible.”

Amid the clamoring voices in her head, one strange thought popped up.
If they are so indestructible, why are some of them wearing biosuits and helmets?

Mara felt something inside her rip. Looking down, she watched as light burst from a tear in her chest. It began to consume her.

“No!” She gritted her teeth and focused on the plasma-filled hoses snaking up the sides of the scaffolding. Tiny nearly colorless cubes fell away from the translucent lining of the hoses. They shed pixels for what seemed forever and then all three burst, spewing yellow plasma into the air that quickly turned to gas, forming a dense yellow cloud around the scaffolding.

A man ran screaming from the haze, clawing at his own chest, which seemed to be melting into a slag of shiny butter. He fell to his knees, and his yells turned into a wet gurgle as his entire body dissolved into a puddle of yellow grease that bubbled and evaporated.

The voices receded. The lights in the sky were dimmer. Mara looked at her chest, and she didn’t seem to be leaking light anymore. She patted herself just to make sure she was still solid and not emitting any kind of shine.
Still made of matter.

New voices, these not inside her head, filled the air. Mara could feel a rumble run through the roof under her. Rolling onto her side, she saw the crowd gathered at the front of the building was running away, along the edge of the roof toward the back of the building, directed by two men in white biosuits.

A woman lunged from the crowd at one of the men and pounded on the sides of his glass helmet. “We won’t make it! Help us!”

The evening breeze carried the cloud across the roof and swallowed the crowd in a bank of dense saffron-colored fog. Screams of agony filled the night, as Mara watched several people stumble through the churning mist and fall to the ground, only to dissolve and disappear. She grimaced and looked away as something occurred to her:
If these people are made of light, why can’t they just project themselves off the roof? They seem to zip around fast enough, in a flash, just like light.

Standing not too far away, looking out over the crowd at the front of the building, Abby raised her arms. Calling out to them, she said, “Share the light! Share it with the world. Share it now!”

Just as Mara was about to stand, thousands of signals sliced into her head like needles, sending her crumpling face-down into a heap. Once again she could hear the chants, the siren song of transfiguration and she didn’t have the will to push away the signals. That ripping sensation in her chest returned. Rearing up on her knees, she grabbed at her chest and screamed, “I can’t push them away!” As her eyes strained to stay in their sockets, light burst from her chest again, and her gaze settled on the two men in biosuits, who had been directing the doomed crowd of shimmers to the back of the roof. They emerged from the yellow mist and ran toward her. “Can’t push.” She knew she was babbling, but, with all the noise in her head, she couldn’t muster enough will to stop. A shudder
rippled
through her body as the light pouring from her consumed her.

Then don’t push. Pull!

Mara extended both arms, her hands splayed, as if grasping for a perch with which to pull herself up, clawing toward the two white-suited men as they approached. Both stopped walking, as if they had hit an invisible wall, and stiffened. Each raised his hands to the sides of his helmet and screamed as his luminescent face exploded into a sunburst that flew through the clear visor of his helmet hurtling like meteors toward Mara. Their empty suits collapsed to the ground. The balls of light struck Mara in the chest, and that overwhelming wave of energy washed over her as she fell to her back.

From the corner of her eye, she could see the sphere suspended within the scaffolding glow brighter for an instant, like someone had turned up a rheostat and allowed more energy to flow into it.

How could that be with it leaking plasma everywhere?

It dawned on her.

She scrambled to her feet and turned to the front of the building, where Abby cajoled the crowd to share their transfiguration experience with the world. The clouds above the transceiver building were ablaze with sheets of light as the endless stream of shimmers surrounding the butte continued to shed light into the skies.

Mara raised her arms into the air and closed her eyes, visualized all the shimmers and all their signals drilling into her head and welcomed them. She could see each one like the string on a kite—and she reached out, wrapping her hand around all them until it felt like she had grasped a thick cable, and she pulled it toward her, yanked it as hard as she could muster.

* * *

On the lawn below, in front of the transceiver building, so many people—the vast majority of them shimmers—had raised their arms to the sky, emitting those strange bands of light into the clouds that seemed to charge the air not just with electricity but with fervor. Standing in the middle of the crowd next to her shimmering husband, retired philosophy professor Margo Stillman was glad that she hadn’t transfigured yet. The last thing she wanted to do was raise her flabby arms in public. Not able to get into the spirit of things, despite the constant drone of chanting and cajoling beaming over the Sig-net, Margo eyed the crowd, a skeptical expression on her face.
What a strange sight.
She didn’t think she would ever be able to believe in this transfiguration nonsense, even though she had seen it occur dozens of times. For some reason she could not fathom, she was impervious to its allure. Unfortunately her husband, Bob, had not been.

She hoped this wouldn’t take much longer. Shifting her weight from one leg to the other to alleviate the aches in her feet, she reached out to Bob’s shoulder for support and balance. Her hand passed through him and sent that strange static-like sizzle through her skin. Snapping back her hand, she stared at it for a second and got angry.

Glaring at her husband, she said, “What am I supposed to do with a husband I can’t touch?”

Bob distractedly turned his chin in her direction, not bothering to lower his arms. Just as he opened his mouth to say something, his body collapsed into a brilliant ball of light and flew away.

Margo’s gaze followed the soaring light as it hurtled into the sky above the transceiver, building, along with hundreds of others, a meteor shower traveling in the wrong direction. Horrified, with her mouth hanging open, she pointed at the blazing trail of her husband, watching his light grow smaller and less distinct while it flew into the clouds.

Finally looking away, she spun about, preparing to yell for help, when she noticed that the surrounding crowd had disappeared. The gathering of thousands had turned into what couldn’t have been more than twenty people in front of the building—and none of them were shimmers.

After yanking the kite strings she visualized in her mind, the voices stopped—as if someone had sliced the necks of their owners.

The dead silence lasted only seconds, killed by thousands of screams ringing down from the skies above the transceiver building.

Mara’s eyes flicked open just as the first meteor struck her chest, exploding in her face and slamming her into the roof. From within the scaffolding, the sphere blazed brighter, bathing everything with golden light. Then more meteors plunged from the sky, each striking Mara, sending pulses of energy and shudders through her body. One after another rocked her body as it collided, exploded in a burst of light and fused itself into her skin. Lying on the roof, she could do nothing but twitch and recoil from the repeated impacts. The sphere grew brighter; the bands inside of it spun faster.

Not able to do anything else, she let her mind go, expecting to become a conduit for the energy passing through her, to feel raw power arc across her skin—and she did feel that—but she sensed more. She could hear the voices, remember the lives and feel the emotions of thousands of people. It was like she was inside their heads, shared their experiences—all them, all at once.

And then they were gone.

Mara felt empty—wrung out and empty.

“You keep missing the target.” Abby’s voice seemed to come to her from far away.

Mara’s eyes fluttered open, and she looked into the night sky. Apart from the glow of the sphere, it looked completely normal—no dancing sheets of lights, no auroras. And the voices were gone from her head. She sat up. Looking at herself, she was shocked at the state of her clothes and body—both were charred, covered with soot. She smelled like ozone, the air in the wake of an electrical fire.

Slowly standing, she tried to brush back her hair, but the frizzy nest would not budge, and she decided to ignore it. Scanning the immediate area, she spotted Abby standing at the front of the roof, her hand extended, the shining blue orb of the Chronicle floating above her palm.

“What did you say?” Mara asked.

“You keep missing the target. You come for me, but you end up hurting other people. You just slaughtered thousands of souls,” Abby said.

Mara jabbed a finger at her. “You said you wanted a battle, that they were your army. And now you’re getting weepy because they lost their first skirmish? You didn’t even try to help them when that plasma cloud melted a dozen of them.”

“They needed to learn to help themselves. They could have easily projected themselves off the roof, but they kept thinking of themselves as solid beings, kept acting like they had to plod around the world like lumps of dirt. They couldn’t begin to conceive of the power they had at their fingertips, yet there will be others, and I’ll make sure they embrace their true potential.”

Mara nodded at the Chronicle. “Going somewhere?”

“Not very far,” Abby said. Her gaze flicked to the Chronicle, and it expanded into a translucent bubble that enveloped her and collapsed. She was gone.

Mara tiredly closed her eyes and disappeared in a flash of light.

When she opened them again, she stood in the repository, behind the receptacle that contained Ping. Abby stood less than twenty feet away staring with flat, lifeless eyes at Sam through the glass of his own tube.

Mara stepped from her hiding place, and Abby turned to her. “I’m impressed. You’re developing new talents. You’ll have to show me how you tracked me so quickly.”

“Anticipating you doesn’t take talent. You’ve used the Chronicle to find people from other realms back in our world. I figured you could do the same here. It was just a matter of time before you came after Ping and Sam,” Mara said. “Not that it will do you any good.”

“Do tell. We both know you can’t bring yourself to hurt Abby. You’ve had plenty of opportunities and each time, you demur—that means,
chicken out
, dude.” She extended her arm toward Sam’s receptacle and a bolt of lightning shot from her palm.

Mara froze Time.

The jagged line of lightning hung frozen in the air, stilled less than a foot from the glass of Sam’s receptacle. Mara waved a hand over it, and it blurred and dissolved into a shower of shiny pixels that faded away as they fell to the ground.

“One day Ping will have to explain to me how I can stop lightning but not light,” Mara said out loud to Abby’s frozen face.

Nodding toward her friend, Mara released Time, and Abby staggered forward, as if pushed. She turned toward Mara, who had raised her hand and said, “Don’t say a word. Just listen to what I’m telling you, because your life depends on it.” She paused for a rebuttal and didn’t get one. “Right now I’m conducting a little experiment. You see, in this room, Time is running a tad faster than normal. I’m not sure how much faster, but I can feel it moving.”

“What is the point?” Abby asked. She didn’t look worried.

Mara raised a soot-covered finger. “Just bear with me.”

After about ninety seconds, Abby’s body tensed, and she reached for her eyes. She blinked and shook her head. “What are you doing to me?” she screamed. “I’m going blind.”

“That’s the Quintivir wearing off. The virus is reasserting itself. In a minute or two you should start to experience stage-two symptoms. That would be muscle contractions and spasms. You might last another minute or two after that before your organs liquefy.”

Abby clawed at her pocket. Mara held out her hand and showed her the copper medallion. “I took the liberty of holding this for you.”

Staggering into the console in front of the receptacle next to Sam’s, the one that had been prepared for Mara, Abby steadied herself and looked up to Mara. “How can you do this to me? I’m your friend. You can’t just let me die like this!”

“You’re right. I can’t just kill you,” Mara said. She looked at Abby’s feet, and her shoes disappeared in a flash of light, replaced by a pair of white socks.

Abby stumbled again as she looked around blindly, confused by the sensations around her feet. “What’s happening? What are you doing?”

“Not letting you die,” Mara said. She narrowed her eyes at her friend and then glanced at her empty receptacle. Abby disappeared in a flash of light and reappeared inside the transparent tube. The console in front of it lit up and lines starting crawling across the graph on its monitor.

Two days later, Mara stared at her own face as it looked up from the metal table that had just been retracted from the wall. Dr. Canfield had given her permission to visit the morgue, but now, as Mara’s stomach turned and her throat caught, she doubted the wisdom of coming here. She flashed back to the day she and Ping had broken into the makeshift morgue near the Portland airport shortly after the crash of Flight 559. That time, he’d taken her there to see the corpse of his counterpart, but, as unsettling as that was, it was nothing compared to seeing her own body lying on the slab.