Chapter 1: Natalie
Present day
The night was always bright in the city.
Skyscrapers loomed over bustling streets. Highways wove their way around large buildings and small buildings and the occasional state-mandated patch of green. No stars were visible this deep into the city proper, no matter how long into night you waited—only a vague reflection from clouds of the ceaseless lights.
Natalie Bouvard ambled across the top of a fifty-story office building that overlooked the surprisingly sparse freeway, keeping to the edge so she didn’t trip over the mess of piping and satellite dishes and antennae that were scattered across the roof. She was technically visible from the street, but the building was so high that anyone who saw her would sooner doubt their sanity. She liked feeling in the middle of the city and apart from it at the same time; in the heart of things but still too far for any of it to touch her.
She stopped at the corner and stepped back into a lunge, stretching for the next jump. There were fewer and fewer reasons to be out these days; her family had sensors all over the city, disguised cleverly as fuse boxes or fire hydrants or bus stop signs. If anything happened, one of her mother’s teams could travel fast enough to take care of it. No reason for the heir apparent to brave the heavy winds of the city sky. No reason to stay up this late. No reason to ever leave home, really.
But the giant Bouvard estate was feeling stuffy these days. She couldn’t decide if that made her a cool street gal or an insufferable one-percenter.
Dante Price was dead.
She paused in her stretching. The news had hit her randomly in a newsletter she’d seen in her email: Local Teen Killed by Drunk Driver, with the photo of a familiar black teen. It had taken her a moment to place him.
He’d been a strange one. Showing up at spatial rips. Helping out that weird red-headed kid. He’d been annoying but not really a threat, so she hadn’t bothered to report his appearances; it seemed like something she was expected to handle. In fact, she hadn’t thought about him much until today, when she saw his face stare at her from a computer screen. And now she couldn’t stop thinking about him.
You don’t even know what you’re killing.
She tightened her ponytail as it bounced in the wind, glancing at the nearest lily pad to jump to: an unmarked behemoth of an office building, about a hundred yards away. There were plenty of structures like this all throughout the city: large, uniform, sleek and modern in design. Much of the highway-facing facade on this one was mostly glass, clear enough to see conference tables and cubicles and even the proverbial water cooler wedged in a corner next to a fake fern. A few of the offices still had their lights on, with people typing away at desks. Living the Silicon Valley dream.
She slipped a device from her pocket: a gray egg-shaped thing smaller than a flip phone. There weren’t many of these in existence; the Bouvard family always kept their best inventions for themselves. She hit the button on the side, and the gray surface started to undulate like quicksilver.
She ran toward the edge at a full sprint, arms pumping. It felt good to exert herself like this, to do this the most dangerous way possible.
She jumped off the building.
The bright lights of the city streaked underneath her. Cars honked. An ambulance siren echoed from somewhere a few blocks away. Gravity was quick to reclaim her, the wind howling past her ears.
She tossed the small object in her hand towards the other building.
The action made no sense to the eye; it was a casual underhanded toss, but the object arced a good hundred yards, unbothered by the concept of gravity. She watched it fly towards the roof of the next building, the wind still roaring past her, the freeway still zooming towards her—
She hit the small button on her ring.
The space around her warped.
It looked amazingly like hyperspace travel did in the Star Wars movies; there was a slight pause in time, and then everything around her seemed to pull and stretch, as if she were yanking space towards her like a carpet. She felt the breath squeeze from her lungs, the pressure threatening to pop her ears. She always wanted to keep her eyes open through the whole thing, but she had never managed it.
She blinked, and she was on the next roof, stumbling to one knee, the gray device in her hand again.
She stood and stretched. It was more of a mental thing—the telewarping never actually hurt the user—but she always felt a faint ache in her muscles after each use.
She leaned against a large metal box on the roof and took a breath. She used to enjoy her patrols. Like, really enjoy them. Enough to ignore the homework assigned from her private tutors and sneak out to start her own, unsanctioned patrol route. In hindsight, she knew her mother must have allowed this, otherwise it never would’ve happened. Young Natalie had thought she was being sneaky, but nothing escaped her mother’s attention.
But her brother had been around then.
Her mind veered away from that thought like a pothole. She blinked. Is that how she’d been handling it these past two years? Maybe she needed therapy. Though she didn’t think they had a family therapist, and her mother would definitely not approve Natalie spilling family secrets to just anybody.
The device at her hip beeped.
She unclipped it, but she knew what that meant without even looking. This device was larger, about the size of a tablet but thicker than most modern ones, and therefore a bit more cumbersome. She looked forward to the day her father could consolidate all of these gadgets into a few apps she could just download to her phone.
A rip in spacetime was happening soon.
She studied the screen as the program ran the numbers and rendered a black and green map of the city. Using sensors stationed all throughout the city—and possibly a private satellite—it could detect minor fluctuations in spacetime before they manifested into a physical phenomenon. It involved lots of crazy math and reality-bending science that was all beyond Natalie’s understanding.
The map zoomed in as the calculations became more precise. It seemed that the rip was going to happen somewhere around the business district, about four miles from her current position. She hit the enter button on the screen, a way to let the folks at home know she’d seen the alert and was on her way to address it.
She tossed her telewarp back the way she had come. With a normal vehicle, a trip like this would’ve taken half an hour, but this way she’d be there in minutes. Sometimes she telewarped in the middle of the air, overlooking the city from several hundred feet. She tossed the telewarper as gravity started to pull her down, air rushing past her. Then she’d hit the button on the ring and reappear nearly a quarter mile from where she had just been.
The business district was mostly dark this late at night. Not too far from residential areas, these buildings were rarely higher than a few stories and featured jigsaw-puzzle style parking lots. Shrubbery made a pseudo barricade around one brown complex. A faint light glowed yellow through the lobby windows.
The rip in question was scheduled to happen on that building’s roof. She double-checked the readings. The lines on the graph were jumping more, which was some complicated way to show that the rip would happen soon. These things weren’t always super accurate, but this reading seemed strong.
She glanced around, but that redhead kid was nowhere to be seen. This was well on the outskirts of the city; he likely wouldn’t be able to get here in time on foot.
The puzzle of him was more of a nuisance than a real mystery. Whoever he was, he had some bleeding-heart tree-hugger thing about XDs. She had once been tempted to take the time and explain why she did what she did, but that seemed like a waste of time. Maybe he was the prodigal son of some family in the know.
She telewarped herself onto the roof and nearly stepped on a satellite dish. The waiting was always her least favorite part. She moved the sensor around, but the reading didn’t get any clearer. She should take the time to position—
A roar of air whooshed behind her.
She whirled as a flash of light appeared just ten feet away, and a large mass tumbled through.
This one was larger than most, about the size of a bull. As always, the creature took a moment to properly form into something real. Its body undulated bright orange and yellow and purple, as if it were made of the stuff they put in lava lamps. Or maybe actual lava. The liquid-looking substance swirled and morphed and bubbled. Protrusions pulled themselves in the vague shape of legs as a grotesque, gurgling roar came from its body.
Natalie drew her weapon.
It wasn’t a normal handgun. The barrel was too wide, with strange blinking lights that probably meant something. Instead of bullets, a complicated mirror matrix shot energy blasts that dealt more damage and made far less noise. It looked more like a toy (for the unlikely instance she was ever arrested) and, by her request, it was purple.
The creature either didn’t see her lift the weapon or didn’t recognize the motion as a threat. It shivered and convulsed as it collected its form, the lava-like substance dripping onto the roof with a faint hiss.
Natalie took a step back, covering her nose against an acrid, sulfuric smell. She kept her pistol aimed on it, her trained mind looking for the likeliest weak spot. The goal was always to down these things with the least amount of shots.
She waited.
Why was she waiting?
She shook her head, trying to clear her mind, but right now she couldn’t get Dante Price’s face out of her head, the weird way he had been able to anticipate her moves, despite his clear lack of combat training. That had been a proper mystery, something that had kept her up at night with confusion.
The body in front of her now had what seemed to be five legs and a head, its mass still that swirling lava stuff. It stood up, groaning that strange gurgle.
Natalie reaffirmed her grip on the pistol. Now would be a good time to shoot it.
You don’t even know what you’re killing.
“You’re dead,” she muttered aloud.
The creature’s head snapped towards her.
She took another step back, nearly tripping on some wires behind her. “Stay there,” she said, feeling stupid. These things couldn’t understand English. So why was she talking to it?
The creature stepped towards her, proving her point. One of its back legs sharpened into something like a pointed hoof and stabbed into a satellite, breaking it in half.
Avoiding property damage was part of her job, but still she didn’t shoot. This was ridiculous. This wasn’t a freaking Disney movie. She was saving the whole universe from destabilizing itself. She had never once hesitated before.
The creature lunged.
She hadn’t been paying attention, and so she hadn’t noticed its three back legs curl up in preparation for a jump. She stumbled back as its front hoof sliced towards her and rolled to the side, feeling something hot and sharp tear through her jacket. She rolled and let her shoulder slam into the short wall around the roof, barely keeping her grip on her weapon.
The creature lunged again.
She shot.
There was no time to be precise, so she unloaded her clip towards center mass, each blast making a tinny shwoo noise as it left the barrel. The creature recoiled and whined in pain, each blast sizzling loudly as it carved through the lava substance. The creature slumped to the ground, its gurgling slowing into something more like a groan, until the whole mass shivered and stilled.
Natalie released the breath she had been holding, the smell in the air almost unbearable now. She fumbled in her belt for yet another device; her brother had used to call it a pokéball, to the point that some of the lab technicians referred to it as such in reports. It had amused her father but irritated her mother, so the term spatial compressor quickly replaced it.
She held up the compressor and hit the button. A curtain of light scanned the XD twice, and then shone a bright light, and the creature’s mass warped as it was sucked into the device. She moved it back and forward like a vacuum cleaner to catch every bit of the lava-like, extra-dimensional matter. Then she hit the button, and the outer part retracted, trapping the XD’s body in stasis in a carefully constructed pocket dimension. It would hold any amount of matter there indefinitely, untouched by outside environment or even gravity. Well, until the battery ran out at least.
She wasn’t sure if the size of the creature had any bearing on battery life, but she figured it was a good time to head home. She hit the button on her censor again, letting home know that it had been a successful capture with no damage. Well, no major damage—she glanced at the broken satellite dish with only a small pang of guilt. Her eyes caught on the dark acidic burns still smoking, where the body had just been.
You don’t even know what you’re killing.
She tossed her telewarper in the direction of home.
***
The story continues! Read SOULS AMID THE ETHER now!
Jennifer San Filippo 