“I don’t know how they can want to explore on their own,” Sike said, and shuddered as he looked around. “This place feels so weird.” He craned his neck to look up toward the top of the bubble enclosure. The atmosphere thickened into semi-opaque white clouds as the ceiling went up, so I couldn’t really see what was beyond this dome.
“Our senses feel different here,” Dorian added. “It’s like I’m getting scrambled information, almost like the sensation of the heavy atmosphere from the lower levels but on my innate senses. I can barely pick up that thing’s aura, even though it’s supposed to be nearby.”
I tried not to let despair overwhelm me. We had to deal with this world just like we would any other place, regardless of the mystery surrounding our environment. It was eerie, but so was the Higher Plane. There would be time to contemplate this place later.
“Maybe your senses will get better with time,” I suggested gently, trying to find some hope. I took a step toward the first building, the beginning of the ruins. Its nearest wall had mostly crumbled and turned into a sizeable pile of debris, alongside heavy shrubbery.
“Stop,” cried a desperate, hoarse voice. I jumped. I wasn’t expecting another voice out here. It was an older man, judging by the tone. I jerked my head in the direction of the ruins. “Are you humans? Are you real? I need help.”
24
Dorian
When Lyra and I took a step toward the voice, Jessica let out a cry of protest. What is her problem? The man groaned from somewhere in the rubble, and I gave her the fiercest glare I could manage.
“We need to be looking for Dan,” she snapped. “What if this is a trick from this weird bubble?”
The man's call came again. I could smell him now—bloodied, which meant he was injured. He was somewhere nearby in the ruins.
“We have to check,” Lyra said, but it was in a low voice. As selfish as Jessica was, she could have been right about it being a trick of the environment. We had to investigate, though. It was our duty to help any survivors, and we knew of one survivor in particular who’d had a recent tangle with the Ghost that Jessica didn’t know about. Of course, that was assuming Joey had lived after disappearing through what I now suspected was a portal, but I’d seen humans survive against impossible odds before.
I pushed forward with Lyra, ignoring Jessica's panicked complaints. If she didn't want to use her strange powers right now, then I had no more patience for her.
“He's hurt,” I told Lyra. My senses were fragile and frayed at the edges, but I could tell that our survivor was not in good health. The stench of death hit me as we moved closer to the ruins. A sliver of an entrance revealed itself as we cautiously inched toward the side of the building where a pile of rubble lay. The debris concealed a partially destroyed part of the building. Someone had used the large punched-in wall of this part of the building to serve as an open den.
“Joey?” Lyra called tentatively. I could feel the hesitation coming off her and remembered the knife she’d picked up. It was the only clue to the survivor from the Black Rock office, but… he had to be dead, right? We had seen so much blood at the site of his fight with the Ghost. I couldn’t believe we might have actually found him, but then again, maybe we hadn’t. There were a lot of people missing, but Lyra seemed to have pinned all her hopes on finding the survivor who had slipped through our fingers.
Sike, Bryce, and Cam followed us with careful movements, sensibly hanging back. We were in a bizarre world. What if the monster could do more than invisibility, and had the ability to create scents or voices? I took another step forward, and my eyes found the rough shape of a figure as he limped out of the darkness.
“Human,” I called back. “Definitely human.” I hated that my ability to identify auras was strained. I should have picked up on his energy long before this. He'd been so close to us, but perhaps his weakened state had affected his aura.
Jessica stamped her feet. “We don’t have time for this. I'm going after Dan.” No one made a move to stop her. She stormed away, but her temper was merely a scratch to the back of our minds. There was another survivor now, and we needed to help him, whoever he was. I frowned. I hadn’t been imagining it; his aura was very weak.
Lyra called out again to the man. “Are you okay, sir?” It was perfectly polite and normal, the kind of greeting that a confused human might need in the chaos of a strange new world. It was rewarded with a strained groan.
“It's been so long,” the man croaked. His voice was dry and weak. He moved out of the darker shadows, and I finally saw him. He was in his late fifties, I guessed, with bedraggled hair strung over a balding area on his head. His eyes were sunken and tired, slightly mad as they flickered between Lyra and me. He was bloodied, in a tattered Bureau outfit that looked like it had been cobbled together by grabbing a few pieces from different uniforms. The Bureau patch was faded terribly. He shielded his eyes from the light as he moved forward, as if it pained him greatly.
Again, Lyra cleared her throat. “What’s your name?” She enunciated carefully, since the man appeared not to have heard her before… or perhaps he couldn't hear over the sound of his own wild mutterings.
“I can't believe… you're really…” He focused
