The Rift Coda

“Fly there in stealth mode and report back verbally as soon as you get visuals,” I command.

“Okay,” he responds quickly. Levi and Ezra both shoot me a look.

“Look, he kept saying ‘affirmative.’ It was creepy. I asked him to be more casual with his responses,” I tell them both a little defensively. Levi rolls his eyes, but Ezra just keeps staring at me. I never told him the extent of what we acquired on the SenMach Earth—there was no time, with the whole deflowering me and then the going macho caveman act. I wasn’t exactly in the sharing mood. And now, I don’t even know what’s between us. He gave me an ultimatum to stop helping Levi with his Blood Lust. The fact that he thought he could give me an ultimatum at all made me angry. He had wanted me to choose, so I chose myself. I’ve had enough of people trying to control me. If he wanted to talk about it, fine. But at this moment, there are more important things to focus on … so I just ignore him.

We stand in silence and wait. I try to focus past the Faida’s anatomical machinery. I try to throw my hearing out beyond anything I can even begin to see. I filter out breath and heartbeats, growling stomachs and a low careening tone that is likely a Kir-Abisat thing, but I hear nothing else. I wonder if everyone on this Earth is dead.

“I have the base in visual range,” Doe’s voice says quietly. Arif looks at me and in that moment, I am anxious for him. “There are Faida on the ground and in the air.”

“What?” Arif exclaims as he half flies, half jumps beside me. “What are they doing? How many are there?”

“I told you. This program won’t answer your questions. It only follows my orders. Or Levi’s,” I say, trying to get him to back off a bit. “First things first. Doe, is there an active Rift here?”

“There is no Rift activity on my sensors.”

“Well, that could be good. If the Roones had won, you would assume they would just go back to business as usual.”

“Or maybe they are just exercising control. An open Rift isn’t necessary anymore. The Faida know the truth. At this point, Immigrants would just be a hassle,” Ezra points out astutely.

“We must go!” Arif says. He grabs my arm. I look at his hand and tense until he, very smartly, removes it. Softening his tone, he says, “Your drones are all very well and good, but unless they have the ability to see through walls, they won’t be able to provide us with any real information.”

“They can’t see through walls, but they can pick up life signs and read heat signatures. We should at least know how many Faida we’re dealing with and if there are any visible Roones,” I argue.

“You want us to wait? That is unacceptable! We must know if our comrades are alive. Ryn, you can’t tell me that if you were in my position you would be able to sit idly here.”

I sigh and run a hand over my scalp. My hair is up, in a messy topknot. The back of my head is sticky with dried blood, and the biopatch is beginning to chafe.

No, he’s right. I wouldn’t wait, but I would hope that there would be someone like me there to be objective. Someone who wasn’t involved emotionally and who could give me the most strategically viable option.

“It’s too risky to just go barging in, though. So why don’t you let Levi and me go down there. In our sensuits. We could get actual eyes on the situation.”

“Go down there? There is no down. Our base is a thousand feet in the air, inside a mountain. You can’t get there. And even if you could, you don’t speak our language. What could you possibly learn? I know of a place where we could land undetected.” Arif is almost frantic now. His wings are practically humming with energy.

“Just because you could land there before doesn’t mean you can now. If your side lost, the defenses would be shored up,” Levi says without hostility.

“You don’t know—”

“Ryn,” Doe voice says, and I raise a finger to silence Arif. “There is a squadron of fifty potential hostiles coming in from the east at 126 kilometers per hour. They will be at your location in less than a minute.”

“We have incoming,” I say to the group quickly as I inventory my options. If I open a Rift, we won’t have any answers. If this is not Arif’s faction but is instead a faction loyal to the altered Roones, we’re screwed. Obviously, they have some sort of device that trumps SenMach Rift cloaking.

I reach down into my pack and grab an extra sensuit, which I throw to Ezra. “Put this on,” I tell him. “Doe, have the sensuits go into stealth mode.”

“What is happening,” Arif says looking around wildly. “Where did you go?”

“I hope for your sake and ours that your side won, Arif. But if they didn’t, don’t let them take you alive.” I don’t feel great about throwing our newest potential allies to the wolves, but they did say they wanted to go home. If Arif and the rest lost, we are losing a squadron of Faida, which would be helpful for the sake of intel but wouldn’t make much of a dent in the numbers, not really. But that’s not why this is a massive risk, because if even one of them is captured and gives us up, we’ve lost before we’ve even begun. We might have forty-eight hours, tops, to warn our own people. But there is no “safe” when it comes to war. There is only risk and retreat. There is no point in retreat now. They already know we’re here.

Now, there is only hope.

I listen for Ezra’s heartbeat and find him. I touch him lightly on the hand and whisper, “Hush.”

The incoming Faida dive and land with such intensity that the ground quivers beneath our feet. I watch Arif and his troops. They have no ammo thanks to the pigs, so they have made themselves ready by taking a stance that is mostly crouched, presumably to take off in the air with considerable force. Everything is resting on a knife’s edge.

And then a Faida woman comes forward, and I watch Arif’s entire body relax. His arms lower, his legs straighten, and the look on his face goes beyond relief. It is almost ecstatic.

The woman he is looking at is all cheekbones and red curls. She does not smile. Her lips tremble, though, and she stops herself by covering her mouth with a single hand. Her other hand is outstretched, as if it has just received an impossible prayer in her palm. Or maybe she waiting for Arif to take it?

Arif says something in Faida and then—as with a jolt, as if he’s just now accepting what he’s seeing with his eyes—he races to her and they embrace tightly. I let go of the breath I was holding and lift my head to the sky. This all could have gone very badly. It still could. Whatever is transpiring between these two is fiercely intense. I almost feel like looking away, but there is too much at stake to allow them a private moment. Despite their intimacy, this woman could be compromised. Even worse, this could have been Arif’s plan all along—to get us right here, lulling us with stories of rebellion and spycraft. I put my hands on my holster, my fingers a breath away from the trigger of my sidearm.

The two of them begin speaking in Faida. It is a language as light and airy as their wings. Words fall into and over one another. It’s almost like Mandarin, but less nasal. I try to follow what they are saying, or at least the tone. For all my linguistic prowess, though, I have no idea. Finally, after a few minutes, Arif points over to where we’re standing, still in stealth mode. Our cover blown, I deactivate my suit, and Levi does the same. The woman walks over to me.

“My name is Navaa,” she tells me in Roonish without even the tiniest speck of emotion.

“Hello,” I say matching her deadpan tone.

“Arif tells me that you rescued our squadron from the Spiradael Earth. And while I am pleased at his return, I also find the circumstances unusually convenient.”

“Interesting,” I tell her as I plant my feet firmly in the ground, legs locked, shoulders back. I may not look like an angel, with the hair and the perfect skin and all, but I won’t be intimidated. “Because I felt exactly the same when I discovered your people were trapped on an Earth that wasn’t theirs.”

Navaa tilts her head to one side, eyeing me warily, as I do her. “I see,” she says slowly. She doesn’t trust me and I don’t trust her. I’m surprised that Arif himself isn’t being more cautious. How does he know that these Citadels haven’t been drugged by the altered Roones, forced to forget their rebellion and made to recommit to the other side by torture, psychological simulations, or both?

“You will come with us to our base. There are many questions, on both sides. But there are no answers here, not in this wasteland. It is a place so full of death and regrets I can’t concentrate.”

“No, wait.” Levi jumps forward. I look to him and then to Ezra, who speaks only English and Arabic. As annoyed as I am at him, I can’t help but feel badly at how lost he must feel. “How did you even know that we were here?” Levi continues. “There isn’t an active Rift on this Earth.”

Navaa locks her eyes onto my own. “I am a Kir-Abisat. I felt the Rift open the moment you arrived.” She continues to stare at me. There’s no misinterpreting that look. She knows. She knows that I am Kir-Abisat, too.

CHAPTER 4 (#ubca2da7c-28d1-5585-ad0f-d48d883733ff)

Arif carries me in his arms. I expect it to feel dangerous. I expect my own control freak issues to take over and hate that I’m at Arif’s mercy, but I’m wrong. In the drag and drift of his movements, I find a sort of peace on the airy current. It’s so quiet up here. There’s just Arif’s heartbeat and the wind, which blows like a tiny whistle.

The base is indeed set inside a mountain. It is majestic and imposing, but it is not weathered or aged. This place looks new and gleaming. From what I can see there are six stories, separated by huge panels of tinted glass and metal beams. The metal isn’t silver or steel, but a sort of copper color, almost the same color as the mountain itself.

Every other floor has a massive length of decking, which must almost certainly be used as launching pads. What a sight it would be, to watch thousands of Citadels take off from this vantage. Terrifying sure, but beautiful nonetheless.

Arif angles us vertically. He hovers for a second or two, I suppose to lose his momentum, and then he softly touches down and deposits me on the concrete landing. “Navaa will want to debrief me. And then she will debrief you. I hope you will not be insulted by this security measure. I’m sure you can understand her reluctance, just as we understood yours,” Arif says quietly in my ear.

“I can absolutely understand it, as long as you understand just because your girlfriend seems like she’s in charge doesn’t necessarily mean that she is,” I warn as I watch the rest of our party land. Levi’s jaw is set determinedly and Ezra … well, actually he looks a little joyous. And as annoyed as I am that he doesn’t seem to understand the seriousness of the situation, I’m also a bit jealous that he can be like that, that he has the ability to live inside a moment without thinking of a thousand things that might be coming next.

I turn back to Arif in time for him to say, “Navaa is not my girlfriend. She is my wife. No one is controlling her. The drugs don’t even work on her.”

“Oh. Well, you must be very happy that she is safe, then,” I tell him honestly. Arif just nods briefly. It seems more and more that the Faida are a reserved people, logical, tightly wound.

“I am feeling many things at once. Of course I am happy, but I am also concerned. I have no idea what happened in our absence and no clue as to how many casualties we suffered to achieve our goal.”

“Understandable,” I say as the massive windows slide back automatically. Navaa is at my side once again. She doesn’t touch me, but we are herded nonetheless into the building. The ceilings are high enough for me to have to crane my neck to see them. There is technology here—monitors surveilling our surroundings and computer terminals. Each of the stations stands tall and isolated, almost like a kiosk at an airport for checking in. There are no desks and no seats. I guess the Faida don’t sit around.

The walls are white and bare, but there are wooden beams to break up the space. While this base looks modern, it also has a strange sort of rustic feel to it as well. I suppose you get to a point in your technological evolution where you want to hold on to things from the past so that you don’t get too far away from who you were. Humans haven’t gotten there yet. We’re still at keyboards and plasma screens.