Distortion Offensive

Less than a month ago, Ullikummis reappeared when his rock prison crash-landed in the Canadian heartland, and the stone-clad Annunaki prince had soon indoctrinated a small group of loyal followers from the local populace. Three Cerberus operatives had been among those would-be followers, including Brigid Baptiste herself, who had found the stone lord’s Svengali-like instruction almost impossible to resist. Accompanied by their colleague Domi, Kane and Grant had led an assault on Ullikummis’s stone base, freeing Brigid and the others and destroying the eerie headquarters that Ullikummis had created from the rocks and named Tenth City. Ullikummis himself had been pushed into a superhot oven by Kane, where his rock body had been blasted with jets of fire until it was reduced to ash.

“Come on, guys,” Brigid called, her cheery voice intruding on Kane’s somber thoughts.

Kane looked up and saw Brigid wading in the shallow waves of the ocean, her pant legs rolled up to just below her knees.

“It’s lovely and cool,” Brigid told them.

Grant had located a large, flat rock, which he used as a seat while he removed his own boots and carefully folded his trench coat. “My feet have been in boots so long I think they’re getting engaged,” Grant rumbled as he wiggled his dark-skinned toes.

Kane snorted at his partner’s remark, wondering for a moment how long it had been since he had last been dressed for anything other than action. His gaze swept out across the rolling ocean, watching the early-morning sunlight play on its ever-changing surface as it rushed to meet with the shore. Even this early, Kane could see several small fishing boats making their way out into open ocean. Then he turned, taking in the beach and the little fishing ville that had been built along its edge, the clutch of little two-and three-story buildings that sat as a solid reminder of man’s tenacity to survive. Down there, a little way along the beach, a few struts of rotting wood marked where the fishing pier had once stood, jutting into the ocean. Kane had been on that pier when it had collapsed, battling with a beautiful, sword-wielding dancing girl called Rosalia. As Kane smiled, recalling the antagonistic nature of the dancing girl, his eyes focused on two figures crouching in the shadows of the broken pier. Definitely human, neither figure was moving.

While Grant and Brigid kicked at the water with their bare feet, Kane padded silently across the sand, taking to a light jog as he made his way toward the pier and the figures underneath. Kane noticed the remnants of a little camp fire as he approached the pier, a clutch of broken shells—two dozen in all—littered all around it. He could see now that the figures at the pier were quite young, still teenagers, a boy and a girl.

“You okay?” Kane called as he slowed his pace to a trot.

Neither teen acknowledged him; neither even looked up at the sound of his voice. They were sitting on the sand, very still, the girl’s legs stretched before her while the boy had pulled his knees up and had his arms wrapped around them as though to stave off the cold.

“Hey?” Kane tried again. “You guys need some help?”

An alarm was going off in the back of Kane’s mind, an old instinct from his days as a Magistrate, recognizing danger before he had consciously acknowledged it. There was something wrong with the teenagers, something eerie and out of place. They were just sitting there unmoving, like statues.

When he reached the wrecked underside of the pier, Kane crouched beneath the low-hanging crossbeams and made his way to the two figures waiting there. They were too still, and Kane unconsciously checked for the weight of the Sin Eater handgun that was strapped to his right arm, its wrist holster hidden beneath the sleeve of his denim jacket.

“You kids all right?” Kane prompted again, slowing and looking around the shadow-thick area of the pier as he warily approached the young couple.

The girl had dirty-blond hair that almost matched the wet sand of the beach, and she was dressed in a T-shirt and cutoffs that showed off her girlish figure. The boy had dyed his short hair the color of plum, and wore a ring through one nostril that glinted in the early-morning sunlight over the fluffy beginnings of an adolescent’s beard. Like the girl, he was dressed in cutoffs, though his shirt was long-sleeved where hers stopped just past her bony shoulders.

For a moment Kane took them to be dead, but then he saw the slight rise and fall of the girl’s chest. She was still breathing at least, and Kane scrambled over to her, grasping her by her shoulders and shaking her.

“Wake up,” Kane urged. “Come on, now.” In his days as a Cobaltville Magistrate, Kane had seen people in various states of semiconsciousness and delirium, and he knew the first thing he had to do was try to rouse the suspect. He slapped lightly at the boy’s face to try to pull him out of whatever trance he had fallen into. “Hey, hey—snap out of it.”

Brigid and Grant had left the sea and traipsed over the beach to join Kane at the little shelter beneath the ruined pier.

“What’s going on?” Grant asked as he ducked his huge frame to peer beneath the wooden crossbeams.

Kane glanced up at his colleagues, seeing that Grant wore his coat and boots once more, while Brigid Baptiste remained barefoot, carrying her own boots in one hand by their wide openings.

“I thought they were dead, but they’re not,” Kane explained briefly. “But I can’t seem to wake them up.”

Brigid made her way beneath the jagged crossbeams and knelt beside Kane, while Grant stood at the opening.

“I’ll go back into town and see if I can get some medical help,” Grant announced. “Stay in touch,” he added, tapping the side of his face with his finger before turning to make his way up the beach. He meant by Commtact, and didn’t need to spell that fact out to his colleagues.

“What’s happened to them?” Brigid asked as she shook the girl gently, trying to rouse her while Kane focused his attention on the boy.

“No idea,” Kane admitted. “Flesh is cold so I’d guess they’ve been out here all night, but this is more than simply the effects of exposure.”

“I concur,” Brigid agreed as the blond-haired girl finally started to groan as if waking from a deep slumber.

“Wh—” the girl groaned. “What is…it?”

“It’s okay,” Brigid told her in a sympathetic voice. “You’re okay, you’re safe.”

The teen boy was waking up, too, and Kane reassured him in a sharp, professional tone as he held his head steady and stared into his eyes. The pupils were normal and reactive, and there was no trace of blood in the whites.

“What happened to you guys?” Kane asked, turning his attention from one to the other.

The girl was staring at Brigid, her eyes wide. Slowly, she reached up and grabbed a lock of Brigid’s vibrant hair. “It’s so colorful,” she muttered. “Does it hurt?”

“My hair?” Brigid asked, perplexed. “No, it doesn’t hurt. It’s hair, just like yours.”

The girl shook her head, smiling with disbelief. “There are things in your hair,” she said, “hidden in the angles. They live in the shadows, making the tangles their home. The tangles of your hair turn back on themselves, creating non-space, like a tesseract. That’s where the things live. That’s where you hide your memories.”

Brigid looked at the young woman, a disconcerting sense of fear gripping her. At first she had thought that the girl had seen lice there, but that wasn’t what she was describing at all. A tesseract was a dimensional anomaly, a place that appeared bigger on the inside than it did from without. An advanced mathematical concept, a tesseract was something that a girl of that age wouldn’t normally be speaking of, Brigid reasoned. And yet, the way she had used the term, it was as though she could see it as she looked into Brigid’s glossy mane of sunset-colored hair. To see the impossible.

“My name’s Brigid,” the woman offered, trying to remain calm despite the strange turn in the conversation. “What’s yours?”

The teenager looked at Brigid, her blue eyes fixed on the older woman’s curls as she ran them through her fingers once more. “Pam,” she said. “I’m Pam. Your hair hides lots of secrets, Brigid. I wish mine could do that.”

Beside Pam, the other teen had started muttering, too, and Kane helped him to his feet and led him out of the dark shelter of the pier with Brigid bringing the girl along shortly after. “Watch your head,” Kane instructed as he ducked into the sunlight. “Let’s walk it off together, okay?”

Kane walked the youth in a little circuit across the beach, instructing him to take deep breaths and get himself together. As they walked, Kane’s Commtact came to life and Grant advised that he had found the local doctor and would be along shortly.

A couple of minutes later, having quizzed the teenagers some more and assured themselves that the two were all right—physically, at least—Kane took Brigid to one side and asked what she made of them.

“They’re whacked out on something,” Brigid concluded. “The girl’s seeing visions wherever she looks. She told me the sea was being dragged to and fro by the moon.”

Kane grimaced. “That’s kind of true, I guess. You know, with tides and so on.”

To Brigid, it sounded as if Kane was trying to convince himself. “Teenage girls don’t say things like that, Kane,” she told him. “She was talking about a tesseract being hidden within the angles of my hair. A place where I kept my memories.”

“They’ve been smoking something, all right,” Kane growled, looking around the campfire for evidence of cigarette butts or drug-taking equipment. There was nothing there; all he could see were the shells of smoke-damaged shellfish, cracked and empty.

“Or perhaps eating it,” Brigid realized as she crouched by the empty mollusk shells to put her boots back on. “I think they had a little snack out here, Kane—look.”

Kane cocked an eyebrow as he picked up and examined one of the empty shells between thumb and forefinger. “Breakfast?” he suggested.

“More likely a midnight snack,” Brigid told him, gathering up several shells and peering at them. They were different sizes, and each had been burned so that they were streaked with black, but they appeared to be of the same creature type.

“What are they?” Kane asked.

Brigid peered at them for a long moment, turning them on the palm of her hand, her brow furrowed.

“Baptiste?” Kane urged when she didn’t respond.

“I don’t know,” Brigid admitted, mystified. In another person, this admission may have seemed innocent, but Kane knew that Brigid Baptiste had a phenomenal knowledge base, augmented by a rare natural quirk known as an eidetic memory, which meant she could visually reproduce in her mind’s eye anything that she had ever seen. And as an ex-archivist and natural scholar, Brigid Baptiste had seen quite a lot. In many ways, she seemed more like a walking encyclopedia than a person when challenged to produce theories.

When Brigid looked up, she saw Kane’s puzzled expression.