PHANTASIA (8 page)

“He’s still behind us,” Red said. The man had been burnt, and looked like a charcoaled body now, black as death, but continued down the desert as if unfazed by the flames.
 

“I thought he would be,” Raven replied. “Red, I want you to hang on as tight as you can to me, I don’t want us to get separated.”
 

“Separated by what?” Red asked. But when he turned to the front to look at her, he knew what she had meant. She was driving them straight into a whirlpool; it would tunnel them into different locations far underground, possibly across the entire desert, if they were separated.
 

She let go of the bike and gripped his arms, letting the bike drive on its own over the cliff of the whirlpool. She held on so tightly, he could’ve sworn her nails dug in through his skin. The bike leaped through the air as it crossed the edge of the whirlpool and then fell straight into its center. The last thing Red remembered seeing before everything went black, was that maddening eye, jumping into the whirlpool right after them.

Chapter 4: The Evil Eye

Red landed headfirst into a foamy undergrowth - unable to sense the stillness of the moment after rushing through the polarizing currents of a whirlpool. With his vision still distorted from reeling wildly at an uncontrollable speed, he gripped the soft floor underneath him and nervously scanned the area for any danger. He was alone, for the time being. There was no sign of the lidless eye, nor of Raven. He was surprised that the whirlpool had been able to separate them after their impossible grip on each other. Abruptly, his attention was drawn to the bright glow of the cavern he had fallen into, and the calm rhythm of a waterfall flowing freely somewhere nearby. He sat up and hunched over, counting to ten forwards and backwards with his eyes closed to let his delirium fade away, just as he had been taught to do so in academy.
 

My hand is gone.
The ringing sensation in his ears came back. He tried telling himself that it would be okay, that he would get a syntechdage installed once he got back to Crest, but the thought clung to his mind like a leech.
It was more than just a hand to him. Had it been anything else, his right foot, his left hand, it would have been just a limb; but what he had lost was his way of controlling the world around him.
My right hand…
dots of black creeped up against the fringes of his vision, inviting him once more to give in to the serenity of fainting. He focused on the light around him, desperate to anchor his attention to something. If he fainted, there was no telling how long he would be out for.
 

The glow of the cavern seemed to permeate everything around him, an organic gleam that betrayed the presence of boundless energy.
Cron,
he whispered to himself. Everything here must have been saturated with an extraordinary amount of it. The renowned energy source could be found inside any substance — its primary attribute being a bio-phosphorescent effect that it imbued to its container. The more Cron, the brighter the glow. After Cron was extracted, distilled, and purified into a more usable form through a cryptic process patented by MegaCORP called hyperproxification, it could be used to power anything from fleets of vehicles and entire cities to dimensional portals for space travel. He had heard that a gemini mothership could use as much Cron in a single day as all of Echidna City could use in an entire year. Every technologically advanced culture he had ever heard of, from every race he knew to exist, was fueled by Cron. He had learned that Xenosites showed a special affinity for the substance as well, suggesting that they used it for biological functions that appropriated extraordinary amounts of energy. But how they naturally synthesized the substance into a form of usable energy was still unknown.

The floor of the cavern was composed of a thick spongy foam with a fungal quality. The soft lather was colored a deep shade of coral and frothed about spontaneously as if it were actively fermenting. Some parts of the foam were as hard as rock, whereas others were so light and viscous they felt like the stretched remnants of a gaseous gel. Wherever the natural interior of the cavern could be seen underneath the foam, a glowing metal cut through like fragments of a lunar crescent. As he gathered his senses, he came to realize the enormity of the cavern. The sound of a waterfall came not from a single one - but from several of them, hundreds of cataracts that gushed rapidly from holes spread generously all throughout the sides of the giant cavern. He couldn’t imagine how deep underground the whirlpool had taken him; the ceiling of the place stretched out into an immeasurable blackness, and towards no direction was there a visible end. Even on the floor he landed in, wide cavities threatened to take him deeper underground if he fell in.
 

He stood up and limped over to the closest waterfall with the intent of washing his face, but paused when he realized it wasn’t flowing with water at all. The liquid was of a rich seal brown color and ebbed with an unusual heaviness.
Umbriel
he thought to himself. He remembered studying the liquid, specifically, an entire ocean of it in Karth, the eighth planet in their star system. Like water, it gave birth to its own set of lifeforms. Strange and intelligent species of bacteria that were so large they were visible to the naked eye. He took a step back from the falls after recalling the fact, and decided he could do without washing his face. He couldn’t remember reading anything about umbriel in Avalonia.
I thought Karth was the only planet with umbriel,
he mused.
   

He reached for his microAI but then gasped with a choking suddenness when he saw that stump again — a plain white block covered in a kaptcha.
I lost my hand,
he said to himself over and over again until the reality of the fact settled in. It seemed ages, not a few hours, since he had lost it. An urge to react traumatically, to maybe cry or scream still drifted somewhere in his conscience, but he fought it whenever it pried into his mind.
This is combat
he told himself, he didn’t join the Academy expecting a safe trip to the end.
Even a single moment spent basking on an injury is a waste of time.
This wasn’t his first calamity from combat, even if it was his worst, and it surely wouldn’t be his last. He closed his eyes again, repeating the counting procedure over and over until the realization that he had lost his casting hand washed over him like a cool bath rather than a desperate shock. Briefly he wondered if this was how all of life’s tragedies were overcome — not with the audacious courage he had imagined in members of WEAPON, but with a patient sort of complacency that refused to accept reality for less than what it was. Raven suddenly came to mind, and he imagined how indifferently she would react if the same thing had happened to her.
Always cool and in control. ‘Focus, Red,”
she would tell him now.
He struggled to snap off his microAI with only his left hand to open its compass and check if she had landed somewhere nearby.
 

He tinkered with the settings of the compass so that it displayed altitude as well, and then saw that all four of his team members must have followed him and Raven into the whirlpool. Butz was at the same altitude as him, and only a few Tezras away. S and Magnus landed nearby each other, but far enough to be a day’s worth of traveling away from him and Butz. Ironically it was Raven who was the furthest from him. She seemed to have landed on a much deeper level, but judging by the speed of her dot - she was moving towards him as fast as she could,
or running away from something
he thought uneasily. He shuddered lightly, remembering that eyeless face and the crooked yellow smile twisted with sharp teeth, but knew that she wasn’t being chased by the bladed man. The eye was far away now, he could
feel
it, but something else told him that it was getting closer every passing moment.
You’re just being paranoid
he quickly told himself, and then forced the thought out of his mind.
 

Checking his compass again, he saw that Butz was heading towards him, and that Magnus and S were moving towards each other. He began hiking towards Butz, picking up the pace as much as he could to match the falconer. His loss of blood had left him with a permanent delirium, and the emptiness at the end of his right arm continuously threw off his balance. He tested the floor before every step as he went; some of the holes were covered with blankets of the coral foam, making it easy for a misstep to send him hurtling down to another level of the caverns. Twice he still managed to take a step too quickly, nearly falling through one of the many gaps on the floor. On the way to Butz he passed through a tunnel so narrow that it gave him the feeling the walls were closing in on him. The tunnel opened up to another chamber, but one with a low ceiling. Sharp grey stalactites hung from above like metallic scythes in this one, forcing him to carefully weave between their points. He noticed a light a long distance ahead of him, and then the certain movement of a pair of shadows in the chamber. His heart leaped for a moment, before he realized that it must have been Butz using a cast to create extra light. The thought hadn’t occurred to him, the glow of the Cron seemed enough — but he quickly copied the idea and created a ball of light himself, feeling more relaxed as the practice of extolling his energy calmed him. Casting with his left felt awkward at first, like he was forcing his body to misappropriate its energy, but he became used to it as he held his focus. Still, the motion lacked a sense of fluidity.
 

“Butz?” he called out softly. The sound echoed through the chamber, and he suddenly worried that he might attract unwanted attention. He had forgotten that there was a good chance there were other creatures here. From what he understood about the desert, the deeper one went, the more likely it was to run into a late stage critter.
 

“Red? Is that you?” Butz replied.
 

“Yeah, hold on, I’m coming,” Red whispered back loudly. He heard the soft pur of Linx as well, and a surge of relief suddenly washed over him. But the feeling was short lived when he finally came face to face with Butz. The falconer looked far more disturbed than usual, like he had just woken up from a nightmare.
 

“There’s something here Red…”
 

“Huh? Something like what?”
 

“I don’t know what it is, but I spotted something moving underneath the foam when I first landed and I could’ve sworn it was following me.”

Red clenched his left hand into a fist and let a wisp of fire surround his knuckles. He vaguely recalled an image of one of the dangers bred inside umbriel — a body of collected microbes that moved like a single organism and hunted calculatingly. The specimen in the image were tiny, and incapable of higher levels of thinking, like problem solving, on their own, but they were able to come together to rapidly create larger collections of themselves with centers of thinking that functioned similar to brains. The more of the microbe that came together, the smarter the super organism they created. He let the wisp of fire grow into a ball of flame, and then looked around sharply for any movement but found none.
 

“Seems to be nothing here,” he remarked calmly, but didn’t let his guard down.
 

“Yeah I guess…or at least nothing that wants to be seen…” Butz replied uncertainly.
 

“Have you tried sending out a message to the control room from your microAI?” Red asked as he began to do just that.
 

“Yah, it won’t work. Maybe we’re too deep? I don’t know, something’s jamming the rays.”

They moved towards the center of the chamber where there seemed to be no foam, only a vast pit with jagged stalagmites that stuck out from the floor in queer angles. Red took a step into it, intending to climb down and away from the foam for a while, but then pulled his foot back quickly when ripples broke out at the top of the pit. A second later he realized that there was no pit at all; there was a lake of water at the center of this chamber. One that had stood unmoved for so long that it perfectly reflected the stalactites on the ceiling. The ripples he sent out broke the illusion, and he suddenly felt a pang of guilt for having disturbed something that must have been sleeping for millennia.
 

Butz seemed to be equally surprised but caught on quickly and returned to eyeing the foam suspiciously. Linx seemed relaxed, which gave Red a feeling of assurance. The Aeyz Cat had far better senses than them, and if there was anything of danger here, it would sense it first.
 

“Red…what was that thing? That half man - or whatever it was - with an arm that looked like a blade? And that eye… I’ve never seen or heard of anything like that. It looked like it had a life of its own. Was it a critter?”
 

“I don’t know,” Red sighed. “I’ve never seen it either.”
 

“It was after you, or at least it looked like it was after you.”
 

“Specifically, me?” He meant it almost as a rhetorical question, he knew it was after him. But he didn’t want Butz to think he was hiding something. He wasn’t, after all, at least not intentionally.
 

“Well, when everyone broke out, it seemed to ignore everything and go straight for you. And when Raven took you on her bike, it wasted no time in chasing you guys.”
 

“Hmm…” was all Red could reply, as he tried to piece together everything that had happened. “You guys shouldn’t have followed us into the whirlpool, it probably puts you in danger too.”
 

“As if I’d ever
not
follow my team into danger,” Butz grinned. He leaned against a stalactite and closed his eyes briefly. “This foam thing, it makes me want to fall asleep.”
 

“I know what you mean,” Red smiled. “It’s like a giant breathing blanket. Inviting in a strange way.” He felt a tickling sensation at the end of his arm but tried not to look down. The image of the stump never failed to bring back a sense of shock, despite his conscious awareness of his injury.