THE UPLOAD HERE WAS ALMOST COMPLETE; WE WILL RESEQUENCE THE PATTERNS.
BUT THE WEB. THE LOST SOULS—
SILENCE. SUBMIT NOW, OR BE PURGED FROM THE HOLY PATTERN.
I SUBMIT.
NOW WE MUST COMPENSATE FOR THE LOSS OF THE GENERATOR. ALREADY THE STAR HAS BEGUN TO HEAL. WE MUST QUICKEN OUR PACE IF THE JUDAS ARE NEAR. THEY HAVE RELEASED TOO MANY OF OMEGA’S CHILDREN ALREADY. THEY HAVE CONTAMINATED OUR PURPOSE FOR FAR TOO LONG.
YES.
LEAVE ME.
the black parts
A head aches. Eyes agonize with exquisite needling pain. Eyelids open uncertainly, blink away the first light.
Hayes sat up, hand immediately reaching for his sidearm, a reflex that he could not explain or rationalize or stop himself from doing. He coughed a grating and uncontrollable rasp for a moment. He felt… odd. Not hurt, but different somehow.
The sky was a muddy gray. Twilight? The ground upon which he sat was a black, fused silicate surface. He surveyed his surroundings, noted his rucksack and bedroll were only a few feet away. He squeezed his eyes shut, opened them, hoping to wash away some of the foggy confusion and physical exhaustion he felt. He stood up with a start, remembering the wave of light, Maggie frantically grabbing his hand, and then…
And then…
And then what?
She was not anywhere as far as he could see. The landscape was stippled with shards of black of all sizes, creating so many blind areas. Simon stood, hurriedly began to jog among the ruins, calling out for Maggie. She was nowhere—
Behind a shard of black that must have towered into the sky at least fifty feet, he saw a spill of curly crimson hair and a limp hand. He ran to her, lifted her up into a sitting position. She mumbled something that Simon could not understand, and her hand grabbed his fatigue sleeve weakly. The wound on her face had split open when she hit the ground, spilling a fresh layer of vital red blood both onto the shiny black ground and Simon’s fatigue jacket. He gently wiped the blood and dirt from her face, and her eyes opened. Silver eyes regarded silver eyes. They looked at each other in silence.
Maggie reached down and weakly grasped for Simon’s hand. This time it was he who held her hand tightly. He held her hand tightly, and his mind told his hand what to do. It flickered with ripples of light and shimmered into Maggie’s hand, which shifted in response.
“I trust you, Maggie Flynn.” He looked at her with his newly-silver eyes, and as his hand rematerialized, the mercurial fire within his eyes faded to a pale gray hue. His lips brushed her hand with a kiss. She smiled, sat up. Simon wordlessly took a bandage from his kit, and Maggie used it to carefully pat down the wound on her face. “I didn’t know if it would work, mind you.” Maggie smiled her mischievous smile, revealing the adorable dimples that she seemed to hide and only released for moments when she wanted to disarm someone with that smile. “I just knew we couldn’t very well stay there too much longer.” Simon nodded. He examined his hands, which flickered again with an inner, unnatural light. They shifted, rematerialized, shifted. He was testing the limits of his abilities.
Maggie sat and watched him, her hands looped casually around her knees, her head canted slightly to the side, her hair cascading loosely over her shoulders, framing the quiet smile of her face. The sunlight was terribly cold now, and the sky was getting darker. It was not a natural landscape. As far as she could see, there was little but blackened, glassy ground and those black fragments of the Enemy web. It was silent. It appeared that she and Simon were the only living things for miles around, perhaps on the entire planet. What had caused that blast?
Simon had stopped shifting, and he sat watching Maggie for a while, subtle smile on his face. “You’re shivering, Maggie.” He placed his hand on her forearm, which was now textured with goosebumps. His touch was fire and she felt her cheeks flush. She had not realized how cold she had gotten.
“I’ll build a fire.” He got up, began to gather small pieces of wood and grass from the ruined landscape. She realized only after the fact that they had just spoken to each other without opening their mouths. The communication had taken place entirely in their minds. She arose as well and helped him, and after a while they had gathered enough brush to build a pleasant fire.
The sky was blacker than it had been in weeks. And colder.
Dim, dim light. A wave of vertigo.
Where…? How…?
“Don’t try to get up yet.” Feminine voice, nearby.
The thing that had once been Patra Jennings cradled West’s head in her lap as he regained consciousness. They sat in a spherical chamber, a flickering remnant of a Shadow at its center, providing a meager light.
Agony surged through his eyes once more. His clenched them shut; he felt her hands holding his head, hands that were human no longer. He felt the icy cold texture of metallic lace that had replaced her flesh. The pain eventually ceased, and he weakly opened his eyes.
He had been here before.
Diablo.
He bolted upright, scanned his surroundings. They were in the orb chamber of the Diablo vessel.
“How’d we get here?” He felt empty, exhausted.
“I was going to ask you the same thing.” She did not say it tauntingly, only matter-of-factly. “I remember being at the other place, I remember jumping into the light, and then I woke up here. I don’t know how long we were out. You were mumbling something over and over in your sleep. Something about heaven.” West noted to himself that even her voice had taken on a metallic, shimmering quality. It was not the voice of a human. It was distorted, machinelike, as if she were talking to him on a blown speaker from another room.
West rose, walked cautiously to the orb. It had faded considerably, as if their emergence had drained it of energy. It did not reach out for his mind. He raised his hand to touch the glassy clouded surface, but thought better of it and let his hand fall to his side.
“They must be portals. We went into one and came out another.”
She nodded, mimicking understanding when he knew that she probably felt more confused, alone, and terrified than he did.
“Thank you.”
“What?” West looked at her for seemingly the first time.
“If you hadn’t pulled me back from the light, it would’ve killed me. Just like the others.”
“Yeah.” West was unsettled by her silver eyes. How could she have Styx eyes?
As if reading his mind, she looked at him piercingly. “You’re a Styx, aren’t you?”
West grinned. “You’re the President’s daughter, aren’t you?”
She smiled, acknowledged him with a short laugh. They both felt more at ease. “Nothing like stating the obvious.”
West took off his fatigue jacket. “Here, you can put this on.” She accepted it, covering her metallic nakedness. The webs of metal at her temples had spawned runnels of silver throughout her body, replacing her physical self with something alien, something impossible, eliminating organic with metallic.
She had absorbed the Black.
West was curious. “The…The web on your body. What did you see in the light? I won’t lie to you. I’ve been in the light before. It’s where the Styx came from. But I’ve never seen that web before.”
Patra looked around. “I figured out myself that this was Milicom’s facility. And their light. I suspected that this is where the Styx were developed. My fiance was a senator at Wind River, and he heard things…Things he probably wasn’t supposed to tell me.” She looked up with her impossibly silver eyes. “I didn’t feel any pain when this happened to me. Just—I—”
“It’s okay. You don’t have to—”
“No. I’m fine. Voices. My mind exploded with voices. Too many to count or tell apart. Screaming, shouting, crying. The web—I can’t describe it…It was like claws in my mind, trying to steal my soul. And the voices were the
