Hatches, their edges barely perceptible when closed, opened in the featureless gray decking of Lia's platform as Ever ran toward her friends. Skeletal turrets in matte black metal rose out of them with a soft mechanical winding noise, topped with slim, threatening structures that folded outward like the pump handle of a well. Their lines were square and chunky, but she knew guns when she saw them. And they were aimed directly at Sephine, Jared, and Acel.
Her scream of warning was cut off by the high shriek of the weapons opening fire, and it felt almost as if her heart had stopped when the strafing ammunition cut through the small group of Blessed and Valley dwellers in burning lines of crackling white and blue.
But they didn't fall down. Ever saw Acel check himself after the initial burst of fire, feeling his chest and stomach and back in search of the horrible, gaping wounds the bullets had made. He found nothing. They stood there, in the line of fire, unharmed, for a brief, insane moment before ducking down below the deadly storm.
The guns were finding their marks in the remaining Damned, several dozen of whom were already lying dead all over the stone shelf. The weapons seemed to be aiming themselves, moving and whirring and adjusting with incredible speed and pinpoint accuracy, eating up the Damned like a fire burning through dry brush.
She realized suddenly that the bullets—or whatever they were—had gone through her friends, just not through their flesh. The machines had known, somehow, what to look for, aiming with superhuman precision around the innocent flesh of Ever's company while decimating the enemy.
Acel, Jared, Sephine, and the two rangers were pressed to the stone floor with their hands over their heads. The firing must have lasted for several minutes, at least, the streaming tracer shots lighting into the bubbling mass of Damned like red-hot cattle brands fired from a bow.
The quiet afterward was eerie and long; Ever could hear the innocuous scrapes and cloth sounds of her friends getting up and dusting themselves off across the stone of the platform.
When she turned back to the gray dais, Lia was standing there calmly, hands at her waist, back in her fitted gray outfit, and a circular shaft had opened in the center of the platform, its circumference lit faintly with white light.
Acel and Jared walked up; Jared took her hand quietly and squeezed it. She laid a hand on his chest, checking him for wounds, without even thinking about it. She blushed when she realized she was essentially caressing his chest and stomach in front of a group of people.
"I'm fine," said Jared, taking her other hand gently. Acel frowned and cleared his throat.
"The rest of us are fine, too, thanks for asking." Ever's blushed deepened and Sephine, of all things, laughed deeply as she walked up.
"We knew this place had defenses of some kind," she said, "but no one has ever seen them before. These make our weapons look like toys."
"I didn't know what to do," said Ever. "We didn't know—"
"I'm sorry," said Sephine. "I should have prepared you better. I thought I'd be here...no one expected...whatever this attack was."
"It's him," said Ever. "Azariah Thayne. I can feel him."
Sephine nodded slowly.
"I felt something too...a pressure—but I don't have much ability. Rest assured that Mother Greta will be watching, from below."
Ever wasn't sure how to feel about that; was she supposed to be comforted? Compared to Thayne, the old woman didn't seem particularly formidable. But then, she'd saved her once before.
"I'll take whatever help I can get," Ever said.
"In that case, she will guide you the rest of the way," said the blonde woman, nodding at Lia.
Sephine posted her remaining two rangers at the trailhead to watch for more Damned and joined them. Just as she was about to ask after him, Ever saw Rolan appear, scrambling down one of the cut rock faces where the walls of the notch sloped toward the edge of the cliff. The rangers tensed and aimed their weapons before recognizing him. He looked at them nervously and paused before continuing to where Ever and the others stood near Lia's placid projection.
"Rolan!" Acel shouted as he approached. "Where in damnation have you been?"
"I...I got pinned down," Rolan said, eyeing the strange ghost women before them anxiously. "Separated. It doesn't matter now. I'm sorry." He looked shaken, as defeated as Ever had seen him—which was saying a lot, given his demeanor over the past week.
"We lost track of him on that rockslide," explained Acel. "But then, everyone was pretty busy with other things at the time." Acel had the cuts and bruises to prove it. Aside from a number of small lacerations, there was a nasty looking bruise covering the side of his neck and jaw.
Jared was looking at Rolan oddly.
"There were so many of them..." Rolan said. "I got cut off from the rest of you." Jared nodded slowly, but his eyes lingered on the other boy for a moment before returning to Ever.
"Well, good to have you back then. Glad you're OK." said Acel, clapping him roughly on the shoulder. Rolan jumped as if he'd been struck.
Ever looked back at Lia, who stood to the side and gestured them forward. Ever started forward without speaking further, trusting her friends to either follow her or stay as they saw fit. It was past time to get this—whatever this was—over with.
* * *
The room they found themselves in had no edges. The virgin rock of the mountain had been scooped and shaped and smoothed as if by an enormous sanding block, coated in the same gray material the dais was made of. The walls were circular; the corners where the walls met the ceiling and the floor were radiused. Whoever—whatever—had constructed this place had possessed abilities the Blessed could only dream of. She didn't know why that was still surprising, after all they had seen, but it was.
A staircase had descended from Lia's dais into this strange vestibule, which appeared to be a kind of entrance hall; Ever could see where a round tunnel continued farther into the mountain at the back of the chamber.
Lia walked—a display obviously intended for their benefit, as it seemed she could appear anywhere within the facility at will—to the exact center of the room and faced them. She opened her mouth and froze, the first syllable of whatever word she had been about to say repeating in a stutter; more of the strange blue shudders disturbed her image, rippling through the smooth illusion of her quiet form.
It wasn't until she heard the strange cackling that Ever realized something was wrong. The air in the room seemed to grow even more chill. Lia's slender body seemed stuck, caught in some invisible web.
"I know that laugh," she said, and her heart seized in her chest as whatever energy made up Lia's ghostly person convulsed, shuddered, and began to coalesce into a different form entirely.
"My children," said Azariah Thayne's voice, "why do you run from me? Why do you flee your Prophet?" Thayne's voice seemed to come from everywhere at once, as if the sound of it pervaded the very air of the room. It was pervasive and cutting, like the drone of cicadas on a summer day. His image was formed in blues and grays, a shifting kaleidoscope of muted light that stood where Lia had been, as if he had painted himself crudely out of the ruins of her. Ever could still see patches of what appeared to be Lia's clothing and features, rearranged in a crazy patchwork to make up the rudiments of Azariah Thayne.
"I don't know about the rest of you," muttered Jared, "but I'm getting really sick of this maniac."
"And his blasphemy," said Acel. He had readied his rifle—Ever would have been surprised if he had any ammunition left, but he held it at his shoulder just the same. "Who are you to call yourself Prophet?" he asked loudly. "That title is a gift, a blessing. Demon would be a better word for you. Or Adversary, though I think that's giving you too much credit."
Ever found herself saying a silent prayer of thanks for the bravery of her friends. An evil voice was speaking to them out of thin air, and they stood firm, rebuking it. She only wished she felt as confident.
The apparition cackled again, the motes of color dancing in the soft light of the chamber.
Thayne's form shuddered again, and Lia returned, flickering back into existence like a firefly winking into light.
"—experiencing unidentified interference," she was in the middle of saying, her words shaky and off key, slightly garbled. "Anomalous data signal breakthr—"
Then Thayne took control again, the bluish image reforming in his likeness like a thousand thousand shards of colored glass forming themselves into a sculpture.
Ever felt the pressure in her head again, but this time it was growing stronger with each passing moment. She clutched her temples with both hands; suddenly, the pain was so bad that her legs gave out. She felt someone catch her, faintly, but the world was growing dim and fuzzy: it kept getting farther away. She could hear somebody screaming. Only as the pain stopped and he was there did she realize that it had been her.
* * *
Jared caught her as she fell, easing her to the cold stone floor of the bunker. She was screaming as if someone was torturing her and clutching her head so tightly that he was afraid she would hurt herself. Acel helped him hold her down; Sephine bent over and peeled back one of her eyelids. Her eyes— green and fierce even now—were rolling wildly in their sockets. Jared felt tears building behind his eyes. The frustration—the fury—felt almost palpable. To watch her endure this—to watch her endure any pain—made him want to kill something, and the fact that her enemy wasn't there to be killed made him want to weep.
"It's okay, Ever," he said, stroking her hair as Acel and Sephine drew her arms away from her head with an effort. "It's all right. It will be all right." And he prayed, then, prayed as he never had before: prayed that whatever she was feeling might be transferred to him, laid on his own shoulders.
She gasped, suddenly, and then was still. Her screaming stopped, and for the moment she appeared almost peaceful, though she didn't wake up. Jared squeezed her hand firmly, as if he could press his help and anger and love—love?—into her very flesh.
* * *
"This place you've brought me to, child," said Thayne, his eyes closed in apparent rapture. "It's as if I've entered one of the kingdoms of heaven. The power...."
At first Ever could see nothing beyond his face—his real face, now, or a perfect image of it: the close-cropped beard, the raven black hair, the strong nose. Only his posture was different: instead of hunching, vulture-like, he stood easily, his shoulders wide and open, his face tilted upwards. As if he's praying, Ever thought. Just like he's addressing the heavens.
As she became more aware of her surroundings she realized that she was again in a version of the not-place where they had first encountered each other's minds. It was similar in that the very substance of it, the feel of the place, was somehow hazy, unreal, like a lucid dream. In every other way, however, it was different. Beyond Thayne a featureless gray void swept away. They cast no shadows. Looking down at her hands, she realized her body felt different; she could feel her hands, her legs, but they were fuzzy at first, prickling just on the edge of real pain, like waking limbs. It reminded her suddenly of the claims some Blessed scouts who had lost limbs in battle had made—that they could still feel their missing hand or leg, like a ghost of its presence.
The place lacked all sense of depth; though she and Thayne looked and felt real, their world was a featureless backdrop of gray. And yet there was something familiar about it...Lia's clothes. The color was the same: the neutral, medium gray that had clothed the strange woman-ghost who had brought led her here.
"Where are we?" she asked, not truly expecting an answer.
"Somewhere new," said Thayne, "and also someplace very old." He opened his milky blue eyes, meeting Ever's own, their endless, whitewashed cobalt depths wide and eager. "A place I've sought since I was alone and naked in the wilderness. One of the many keystones that will hold up the foundations of our future. And you have brought me here, Ever. You're fulfilling the destiny I foresaw for you—our destiny. This is the first step, the first milestone along the road."
"You can't hurt me here, Thayne," said Ever.
"Can't I?" he said, quirking his head like a dog. "That's what you don't understand, child. We're connected, you and I—joined together at some point long before now. Meant to lead our people forward to a new dawn—a new history."
"You're insane," said Ever. He sounded so sure, though; everything Thayne said, he said with the conviction of a prophet, as if he truly believed in his own moniker. She was sure he did.
Thayne didn't react, though she expected an outburst; he looked distracted, his eyes sweeping around the space as if he could see something she couldn't. She didn't have his complete attention, she realized. He was still caught up in whatever experience he was having.
Ever breathed in, slowly. There had to be something she could do. Some way to focus herself, to get out of here. But she had no idea where here was—the second time that dark morning that she had felt that way.
And then she thought of her family: of her parents—not her birth parents, but of Sister and Elder Orton, her real parents, the people who had raised her to adulthood. She thought of Dallin and timid little Aerie, and their cabin amid Bountiful's pines. She thought of her friends and their families, of Chy, dead so she could live, and all of the people she called her own, who called themselves Blessed, who were now scattered to the wind like so many hayseeds. If they were even still alive.
Ever realized with abrupt dismay that she hadn't even thought about them for days. They hadn't even entered her mind. She'd been so distracted with being held captive in Salem, with Thayne, with their journey North, that the people who were supposed to be the most important in the world to her had vanished from her thoughts.
The burning that came behind her eyes stung in a way it never had before. If she had been in the real world and not this un-place, she knew, she would already have felt hot tears on her cheeks. Here she only felt a tightness, and the surge of something familiar in her mind. It was the old familiar anger, the fury she felt when she healed someone, when her Saint's powers broke free from wherever they slept and changed reality to what she wanted it to be. It was that, but more: it felt colder, calmer. It was anger tempered by determination.
And that's when she knew she would fight him. Let it be here, then, she thought, collecting the ineffable energies that made up everything she was. She formed her cold rage into a focus of power and struck back at Thayne with everything she had, pushing him out with as much force as he had used to pull her in. Wherever, whatever this place was, she wanted him gone from it. Gone from the world, if possible, but gone from here, gone from her life. She put her will behind that thought with all the power of prayer.
The force of it hit Thayne like a thunderbolt: he screeched in pain, curling his body around himself and gripping his skull with long, pale fingers.
"Do I have your attention now?" Ever snarled.
There was a moment of perfect, eerie calm, a birds-stop-chirping-in-the-forest moment, and then Ever felt Thayne's response.
It was swift, and brutal, and it hit her like the ocean in storm. She realized several things in quick succession, then. The first: the only useful way to measure the abilities of a Saint—or, Ever supposed, anyone with Greta's "beneficial mutations"—was to compare them to another one. The second: compared to Azariah Thayne, she was a sparrow trying to outrun a hawk. No—a child fighting a hurricane. For that's what he was, she realized: Azariah Thayne was a storm, primal and unstoppable in its destructive fury.
At least, that's how it seemed when he caught her up in the grip of his will and smashed her with a numbing mental scream against the rocks of unconsciousness. The third thing Ever realized was that she was almost certainly about to die.
Thayne had been distracted, before, dazzled by whatever bright vision he had experienced upon coming to this...place. Now that she did have his attention, Ever was no longer sure that she wanted it.
The blue pools that were his eyes darkened, condensing into a deep cobalt, then a midnight blue darker than black, and then he struck again, and the fabric of the void wrinkled with tension.
* * *
Jared almost wasn't fast enough to catch Ever's body as it blew backwards toward the entrance to the antechamber. Only a slight twitch of her muscles gave him warning. She was light, however, and he got a shoulder between her and the wall before she could be carried farther. He was shocked at the force of the blow, particularly given that she hadn't been struck by anything he could see.
For the past minute and half, he, Acel, Sephine, and Rolan had watched dumbly, with increasing anxiety, as Ever struggled with whatever power the Thayne-ghost was throwing at her. He'd known something was happening when Ever's eyes rolled back in her head and she made fists the way she did when she was in the throes of her Gift.
Thayne's apparition had frozen when Ever did, though the strange blue aura still shimmered wildly from time to time.
"Ever," he said, easing her onto the floor. She struggled weakly, murmuring something incomprehensible, and was silent again. "Ever, wake up. Wake up. You have to—"
* * *
"—wake up, girl! This is it! This is the beginning of the end! You've led me right to it! I can feel her, feel her all around me. She's the key, this angel—this demon. All the knowledge of the ancients is at my fingertips, mine to command with the merest thought...."
Thayne was rambling, badly, standing over her with his blue eyes again unfocused, staring into nothing. She groaned inwardly and passed a hand over her face; she was still in the not-place, but she could feel, even here, a dull pain thudding in her head.
She tried to get up, but couldn't. Her body felt weaker than it had when she was four years old and had scarlet fever—sensation remained, but she could barely lift her arm. Look past Thayne, she saw the gray void flicker, once, then again. For just a moment each time, the strange not-world disappeared and reality came back. She concentrated harder, focusing with what strength remained to her, willing the antechamber in Lia's bunker to materialize around her. The opaque gray became translucent, and suddenly she could feel hands on her—she could see the faces of her friends, gathered around her, leaning over—then Thayne looked at her again and grimaced. Their faces vanished and the pain in her head grew unbearable. She screamed.
And then someone else was there: not Lia, but a familiar presence—
Together, child, said Mother Greta, the shape of her mind clear and oddly comforting. Ever waited a beat, then felt Greta's presence entwine with her own, an uncanny sensation that felt like nothing so much as a joining of hands. She felt Greta's mind as Greta felt her own; it was as if their personalities shared a common body, or had become offshoots of some central consciousness that ultimately made them one.
Then they pushed, together, and Greta's light and will infused her own, and the gray world went white.
The not-place became suddenly clearer, as if she had opened her eyes wide instead of peering through lowered lids, and she felt, rather than saw, a much wider plain open around them. Unlike the not-place, this felt very real, an endless field of gentle amber shimmering with golden lights like stars.
Thayne was a dark lesion in it, a blot shadowing everything around him. He was close, and huge. In it were his eyes, the deep, disturbing blue eyes that had come to haunt her dreams. She saw-felt as Greta-Ever struck out, a bright slash like lightning, touching the Thayne-blot with power subtle but great, and one of the blue pools went dark.
She heard Azariah Thayne scream, a piercing, vulnerable sound. He lashed out, a counterstrike both terrifying and wild, its swing cutting a swath of nothing through the broad golden plain. Where the wave of his backlash cut, the golden stars went out—not in fiery bursts but in quiet blinks, as if Thayne's touch had simply reduced them to non-existence. The wave rushed toward them, swallowing light.
What strength Greta had granted Ever seemed to dissipate, then: she was again keenly aware of the weakness of her body and mind. The delicate Greta-Ever, Ever-Greta balance that they had maintained began to shift. She couldn't tell whether it was she, Ever, or she, Greta—which one of her pushed or pulled—but they separated enough for Ever to regain a sense of her own identity, and then the part of her that had been Greta changed again.
The crest of the Thayne-wave reached them and crashed: as it curled it ate the amber sky entirely, and Ever felt a sad, dull fear steal over her. There was no fighting this.
Just as the curl of Thayne's darkness swept over the huddled point of light that was Ever and Greta, the old woman separated entirely and seemed to surround Ever, squeezing her inside of her own light and rushing forward like a bulwark.
There was no explosion, no great catastrophe: only a split second of crackling rush, and then Ever opened her eyes.
* * *
In the quiet of her bedroom beneath the Valley floor,Mother Greta fell to the cold concrete floor, the pain in her head white andhot and final.
Thank you for reading! I hope you're enjoying the story as it draws to a close! Please consider voting and adding Exile to your library and reading lists!