The Animus Gate (Book One of The Animus Trilogy) Read online

  “I'm serious,” she continued. “In all the years we have been together, I have never seen you like this. We used to...we used to be so happy, ya hayati. We used to be two sides of the same coin. Wahashtini. I miss you.”

  His distant gaze did not move from the table.

  She stroked his hair. “Say something to me, my love. Talk to me. Where have you been? Where are you going?”

  His first words were a whisper.

  He cleared his throat and spoke again. “I have seen things, habibi. In the forest—things I did not expect to find anywhere. They resist understanding. The more I try to understand, the more I feel this fear. Deep within me. I try to walk away from understanding. But these things creep back into my thoughts. If I do not think of them, I cannot sleep.”

  “We need to get you help, hayati. These things you say are very worrying. In all the years we have known each other, I've never heard you talking like this.”

  “They will not understand what I say, my love. I do not understand what I say now. Perhaps if I can sleep...Yes, I need to lie down. I want to not think of things.”

  She sighed. “Let me make you some tea. Some tea to help you sleep. But we must talk to someone soon. You can't be wandering into the trees like this. When was the last time you ate? I must make you something.” His mother rummaged in the food cooler.

  “I think things I do not want to think,” his father continued.

  Saeed looked up from the table and stared directly at Darius. “And I see people...who I should not see...”

  His mother was talking again, but the sound of her voice was fading. The kitchen, the hallway, and the house were fading. He wanted to stay. But the world drifted into shadow.

  Now he was younger, maybe fifteen or sixteen. He was in the house again, but not the kitchen. He was sitting in his brother’s bedroom. Rali was about to go off to college. He wanted to get an engineering degree. Mostly to build things, but also to better understand the architecture of the ruins.

  “I found these notes in Papa’s study,” Rali was saying. He sat at the foot of his bed. Darius sat in a desk chair. The light was soft and dusty. Above Rali’s bed was a 3D trailer poster for the latest Captain Lazarus movie. Rali was proud of it. He’d saved up a lot of credits from his work at the gift shop to afford it. Darius thought he had paid too much money. Rali said that the right amount was what the buyer was willing to pay.

  Darius could barely see anything outside of the bedroom window. It was mostly a hazy shine of sun, with the vaguest outlines of the neighbor’s house next door. A dog barked periodically. Someone honked a car horn in the distance. He smelled his mother’s amazing cooking. The wooden floor of the bedroom was firm and cool beneath his feet.

  I am here, he thought. Am I here?

  “I know that Papa scribbles a lot of notes when we’re out in the field,” Rali was saying. “We all do. But these notes are...different. He’s also sketching things. I mean, things that I don’t recognize. Not ruins or relics. And he’s drawing this stuff like...like his hands aren’t steady.”

  Darius looked down at the drawings. There seemed to be dozens of them. He saw a pattern in them all. He didn’t back then, but he did now.

  Circles. There was a motif of circles everywhere, with an oblong object at the bottom, pointed towards the center. And in the center was some kind of trident. The head of a trident. Three prongs.

  “There’s also writing,” Rali added, “but it’s not English or Arabic. I don’t recognize it at all. The search AI doesn’t even recognize it. The closest match it can make is Raz Akandi, but the translation is still pretty garbled. Why Raz Akandi? They’ve never settled on Telamat, have they? There’s no record of it.”

  Darius held up his hand and stared at it. His skin looked incredibly detailed. He could see blood pumping in his veins. He could see the muscles beneath his skin. Was that his hand? What was a hand, anyway?

  “Darius, are you listening to me? I feel like we need to figure this out. I’m gonna study this some more. Maybe some people at the university can help.”

  He felt light as air.

  “Darius, I’m not shaking anymore. Look at your hands. Look at your hands, Darius...”

  He looked out the window, and the white light was even brighter. It began to fill the room. It began to fill him. Everything was white now. The room was gone. He was gone.

  Darius stood in the foyer of his parents’ house. He was four or five now. He did not remember this day, but now he remembered this day. Some people had come to visit. A delegation, Papa called it. They were from a faraway place. He did not remember them, but now he remembered them.

  They looked kind of like regular people, but they were taller and very slender. The colors of their hairless skin ranged from blue to green. Their eyes had no pupils. They just looked like huge pearls. If you looked long enough, you could see shifting colors in them. Papa used the word “iridescent.” He knew so many words.

  Their robes were fancy and shimmered turquoise and purple and bright ocean green. They moved gracefully.

  There were three visitors. It looked to him like two adults and one child. The shorter one seemed like a Papa to him. Something about his paunch. The taller one seemed more mother-like. She had a gold earring clasped over her whole ear that Darius thought was nice. The child, if it was one, was about Darius’s height. It seemed to be a girl too.

  The little one wandered into the Bakari’s living room. A plush, dark green sofa took up most of the territory. The girl poked at it and made a sound that was like a giggle. The Raz Akandi apparently did not know about human sofas. She climbed atop the sofa into a sitting position, and she bounced up and down.

  Her mother glanced into the living room, and she apologized to Papa. Her lips did not move as she spoke, which was strange, but Papa did not seem to notice.

  Papa laughed. “It is nothing. She is an adorable child.” Papa was always good with children. Darius thought Papa was smart and strong. And he told the best bedtime stories. Darius sometimes liked to say “Open sesame!” when he went through a doorway in the house. It was their joke.

  Papa and the delegation fell into their conversation again. Darius looked back to the sofa, and the Akandi girl was gone.

  Darius went into the living room and looked all around. He could not find her. The sliding door that led to the back yard was ajar. It usually never was. Mama yelled at him and Rali when they did that. But she also loved them. Darius thought Mama was pretty and full of love.

  He walked through the door to look for the girl. He closed the door behind him like he was supposed to. The backyard was lush and green. There was a garden to his left, and it was full of vegetables. To his right was the swing set. It was white with thin blue stripes. The girl was not here.

  Directly ahead, the gate in the fence was open.This was worse than leaving the back door ajar. He peeked through it, and he looked down the street both ways. He thought he saw her rounding a corner to the west. She was hard to miss. He thought it would be bad if she kept going. He had to tell her about the gate and the door. You don’t want your parents yelling at you.

  He followed her down the street. The weather was very nice today. People smiled at him as he passed by. He smiled back.

  He came to the next street, but he did not see the girl. He kept walking until he came to an alley. Something growled in the alley, and he turned and saw a stray dog. The girl was there, cornered by the dog. It smelled back here.

  Darius shooed the dog away, and he came up to her. The fear that had been in her eyes faded away, and she asked him why the dog didn’t speak to her. Her lips did not move as she spoke, but he heard her quite clearly.

  He told her it was time to come back. He made pointing gestures, and he kept repeating himself until she was willing to give up on the mangy dog. She took his hand, and they walked together, all the way back home.

  The people on the street gave Darius and the girl funny looks. He didn’t care. The weather was to
o nice for that.

  They came home, and he carefully closed the gate behind them. He mentioned the importance of this to the girl, but she didn’t seem to care.

  Her mother came striding out from the house. She had the mother face of anger and relief. She took the girl into her arms and said a string of words to her. He couldn’t make them out clearly, but they sounded like mother words to him. Then she patted the girl’s cheek and set her down.

  They are people, he thought. They are just people.

  The girl said something back, quietly. Then mother looked at Darius with a feeling that he did not yet know. She looked at her daughter and nodded.

  The girl came over to Darius. She pressed a finger to his forehead, right between his eyebrows, and she said

  Ku atta kané

  The touch of her finger knocked him back as though struck by a magical hammer from one of Papa’s stories. The further he flew, the faster he went. He flew out of the city, into the sky, out of the world. Back, and back, and back...

  He was floating now. He was at a campfire. He was floating. There was a slow, dark river here. There were people all around. They were not like him. They were like the people he had seen long ago. The people he had seen just now, long ago. They were tall and very slender. Their skin was shades of green and blue. He heard them chant

  Ku atta kané

  He began to rise. The higher he floated, the more of them he saw. They stood motionless. They stood in the camp. They squatted in the tree branches of a jungle that was all around him. He looked to the river, and they stood in the river too, even where people should not be able to stand. There were so very many of them. They all gazed at him. Their eyes were like giant pearls made of age and time.

  Each one had a right hand raised, their palms outward, like a greeting.

  They had three fingers. They spread their fingers apart, and they said

  Ku atta kané

  He gently ceased to be. Then everything ceased to be.

  He woke up. He was again. He looked at the camp. The camp was again.

  Rali sat on the other side of the fire. He did not shake now. He did not wear the sheet. He only stared down at his hands.

  Darius looked at the camp again. The only people he saw were people. No one squatted in the tree branches. No one floated in the river. It was just him, and his brother, and the woman.

  Darius looked at the plants along the bank. He looked at the towering mushrooms around the camp. They were all connected. It was all connected. The apartness was the dream. But the apartness had a purpose. He held the purpose in his mind. He understood it. But with every passing moment, the words for it, the idea, receded. But that was okay. Everything was okay, because nothing mattered. Everything was a dance. It was all just a dance.

  He mouthed the special words. He did not know what they meant. He knew, but he did not know.

  He sat there by the fire, and he stared at Rali. Rali stared back.

  “I need some water,” Darius whispered after a time. He cleared his throat and spoke again. It felt like it had been days since he had last used words. “I need some water,” he repeated.

  He went down to the river for more water. He looked across the river to the trees on the other side. The trees were a ragged mass of blackness along the horizon, underneath a sky dusted with stars.

  He was in the jungle now.

  ✽✽✽

  They didn’t talk to each other about what they had seen or what they had heard. They rode down the river in silence, in their carved mushroom boats. The jungle hooted and screeched on both sides, almost as if it mocked them. Darius was alone in the lead boat, while Rali and Nadira rode together in a larger one. They had chopped staves from a tree, and they used those to guide themselves down the waterway.

  Rali seemed to be doing much better now. He was stable enough to pilot his boat, at least.

  After a time, Nadira said to him, “You know, I can’t help but notice some friction between you and your brother.”

  Rali snorted. “He can be an arrogant prick sometimes. He has no idea how lucky he’s been in life. He doesn’t know how much it can hurt to have to beg for someone’s help.”

  “But it sounds like he helped you.”

  Rali sighed. “Yeah, he’s not all bad. He just needs to realize that he’s just as human as the rest of us. That day will come.”

  Nadira checked her visor. On the river, without the thick forest canopy above them, she could get a clean uplink. So far, there were no indications that they were being followed. And the money transfer to Bakari Antiquities had been approved. It was now up to Zara to contact her insurer and collect the payment.

  Things were looking up. She figured they could scope out these ruins and be on the road back to town within 48 hours. With some ingenuity, the Federation could be just as efficient as the empire.

  They completed the river leg of the trek before nightfall. Then they set up another camp along the bank. They still did not talk much. When they did, it was not about the night before. It was about the jungle, the city, the empire, or anything else besides the mushroom tea.

  Darius built another campfire, even though no water needed boiling that night. And it was not to keep warm. Not in a place like this. The brothers built fires in the jungle for two reasons. One, so that they could see big and hungry things coming, and two, so that they had a convincing set of provisional weapons to ward them off.

  No matter what life-bearing planet you were on, most creatures had a natural fear of fire and intense heat. They weren’t scared of shock batons or rifles until those were actually used—and both types of weapons run out of ammunition.

  From Nadira’s vantage point, she directly faced the river. At night, especially with the campfire and the torches, there wasn’t much to make out. The gloom was close. But this far away from the city, the sky held a rolling blanket of stars. Red and orange nebulae pooled here and there in the vast expanse. She tried to remember what the constellations were in this part of the galaxy.

  She activated her visor to help her scan the night sky. One of the lights in the firmament was moving quite a bit faster than the others. Possibly a satellite.

  She zoomed in and scanned it, but she couldn’t get an ID. Considering her security clearance, this was not a good sign. It was unexpected.

  “Guys...” she said.

  She set up a recursive algorithm to trace the object back to its possible origin. It appeared to be coming from the direction of the city. And it was flying low.

  “Guys...”

  She stood up now. The object was too far away to get anything useful from low-light enhancement, infrared, or ultraviolet. But considering that it was vectoring in their direction with an ETA of about 90 seconds at its current speed, her sensors would start giving her actionable data very soon.

  “Guys...I think we’ve got company.”

  ✽✽✽

  By reflex, the brothers grabbed the torches and threw them into the river, and then they scattered the campfire. It was probably already too late, but that wasn’t the same thing as definitely too late, so it was worth spending a few precious seconds to cover their bases.

  “Leave the hammocks!” yelled Darius. “Leave the water bag! Just grab what you can carry, and let’s go!” He unslung his machete, slapped on a pair of visors, and enabled night vision and infrared. “Same as before. Nadira, you’re behind me, and Rali brings up the rear. Come on, come on!”

  Darius pushed through the trees as fast as he could safely manage. He hoped the boost from the timewalker brew could help them gain some distance.

  He spotted a gorabel bush a few paces to his left and swerved to grab one of the fruits. These were full of gases and spores that were deadly to humans—a handy if crude grenade. Half a kilometer later, he spotted a sapwood tree and sliced off a few pinecone-like seed pods. These were soaked with something similar to pine tar and were highly flammable. Get enough of those together, and you could make a natural napalm pr
etty quickly.

  They didn’t need guns. They had the jungle.

  As Darius reached back to toss the sapwood pods into his bag, the craft went buzzing over them. Instinctively, the group stopped and looked up, but they could hardly see anything through the thick canopy.

  Neither the make nor model of this craft appeared on Darius’s visor as it collected and synthesized glimpses of it through the tree branches and towering mushroom stalks. It looked like some kind of personnel carrier, but the visor didn’t recognize it.

  It kept going. And it didn’t slow down. Darius’s shoulders relaxed a bit.

  Rali turned to Nadira. “Can you think of any reason why that thing would be flying all the way out here?”

  “Plenty of reasons,” she muttered, “none of them good.”

  “Well, it’s not the police,” said Darius.

  “Why’s that?” Nadira asked.

  “Because they don’t mask their IDs. That means it’s probably the gang. Which means we don’t have to play nice.”

  “Are you prepared to be like that?” asked Nadira.

  “I wasn’t until last night,” said Darius.

  “What changed?”

  He looked back at her. “You did. I did. We all did. You know what I’m talking about.”

  “You don’t know what I saw,” said Nadira.

  “If it was anything like what I saw, you know that the stakes are a lot higher than we thought. There’s something in those ruins. Something very important. Something that we’re...connected to. I don’t know how. But I intend to find out. So let’s keep moving, but keep your eyes peeled. If they’re waiting for us and not just sweeping the area, we don’t want to walk into a trap.”

  The forest didn’t sound much different now than it did during the day; the background noise never let up. There were creatures in the gloom whose periodic growls and yowls made them sound as big as a truck. And there was a quiet but constant symphony of chirping, clicking, and tapping noises. The wind constantly moved in the trees, making them creak slowly like huge wooden doors. Brooks babbled and springs sprang. Darius thought he heard something large snuffle just off to his left, but when he looked, there was nothing there.