Book 3, Prologue—Part 1

Prologue—Part One

Kristy

“You don’t have to come back if you’re not ready,” Albright said distractedly as he typed out a quick email. Kristy resisted the urge to curse his laptop.

They were in Albright’s seldom-used office. This was probably the second or third time Kristy had been here. She could see from her seat a coat of dust on the sparse shelves lining the west wall, which held a single picture of Albright and his folks and a few knickknacks Kristy suspected were gifts from co-workers. Aside from the chair she sat in, the only other furniture in the room was the desk in front of her and the office chair Albright occupied. Even before the world had started falling apart, Albright had always been a “lead from the front” kind of boss. It was one of the reasons Kristy liked him. But the constant coddling since The Incident—as she referred to her near-death experience—was beginning to grate.

“You need the help,” Kristy said instead of the deluge of profanity that had bubbled up.

Albright sighed explosively, startling Kristy. She was further startled when he slumped and all but slammed his head on his desk. “Don’t I know it,” he said. He lifted his head slightly and met her eyes above his glasses that he somehow hadn’t mashed into his face. Without the glasses blocking his eyes, she could see how red they were and the bags under them. “But if I push you into the field too soon and get you killed, we’ll all be worse off. So, I’ll ask again: Are you sure?”

“I am,” Kristy said with more certainty than she felt.

Nearly eighteen months ago, a monster had touched her and made her forget how to breathe. Even the autonomous systems of her body had been altered, somehow. It had taken her six months to be able to breathe on her own again, coupled with thousands of hours of therapy—physical, magical, and mental—just to get her back to any form of normalcy… or as close as she could get. She had to sleep with a CPAP mask now because sometimes she just stopped breathing in the middle of the night.

Her answer seemed to bleed some tension out of Albright's shoulders. He straightened and finished his email before rising from his desk and holding out a hand for her. She rose as well and gripped his hand. “Welcome back,” he said with a bittersweet smile.

She returned it. Under normal circumstances, there’d be a bit more fanfare. But Elysium was stretched thin, and her old team was out in the field pretty much constantly. In fact, would she even have a place on her old team?

Albright answered her, as if reading her mind—or perhaps, because he had. “You’ll be placed with a new unit. Half of them are contract workers and the Boss and I would feel better with another seasoned officer with them.”

Translation: We don’t trust them and want them outnumbered.

“Got it,” Kristy said.

Albright released her hand and tapped a few keys on the laptop. “Lastly, about your request…” he led, raising an eyebrow at her.

She knew what he was talking about, but decided to wait him out. When it became apparent that Kristy wasn’t going to speak, Albright sighed again and rubbed his nose where his glasses rested. “Why?” He asked as he squinted into the air.

“He saved my life,” she replied. “Hell, he saved all of our lives. The two avatars out there are bad, but can you imagine the damage the Waker could have done? The loss of memory—” she stopped abruptly, unable to finish the sentence.

“He won’t remember you,” Albright said softly. “Your thanks won’t mean anything to him.”

Kristy had her doubts about that but didn’t voice them. “That’s not the point,” she said instead. “When someone saves your life, you thank them. It’s—it’s literally the least I can do.”

Albright dropped his hand, then brought it up again to adjust his glasses. The look he gave her was a mix of pity and understanding. “It’s—it’s not easy talking to him. In a lot of ways, he’s like a child. In others, like a monster. We’d only known him for a day, but it’s hard to reckon that one day against what he is now.”

Kristy shook her head. “I still need to do it.”

Albright inhaled deeply and tapped a key on his keyboard. “They’ll be expecting you at eleven hundred. You depart to meet up with your new team at thirteen hundred,” his smile was much more genuine for all the weariness that shone through it. “Good luck.”

Taking the dismissal for what it was, Kristy nodded and left. She had an hour to kill before the prison expected her, which was useful because she had never been there and had taken two wrong turns. Nobody knew exactly where the Citadel had come from or who built it, but it was evident it had been constructed with defense in mind. It was very easy to get lost, as Kristy demonstrated trying to get to the holding area. She had only been down there once about a decade ago when she had been first recruited.

A blush colored her grimace as she remembered how she had been back then, but she shoved the old memories aside out of habit. She was working on accepting her mistakes, but they still made her cringe when she thought of them. She distracted herself by studying the halls around her as she entered the holding area.

It had changed. The simple, almost medieval-style prison now looked like something from a sci-fi movie with scanners, enchanted turrets mounted at every intersection, and six-inch thick steel doors that slid up into the ceiling to let her pass. She eyed the turrets nervously as she handed her ID to the first checkpoint, sliding the card through the slot in the bullet-proof glass.

“Are those safe?” She asked as the guard clacked away at his keyboard, nodding at the turrets.

“Haven’t killed anyone yet,” he drawled, glancing at her with slight amusement coloring his eyes.

She made a face at the “yet” which earned her a chuckle.

He finished whatever he was typing and slid her ID back through the slot. “Down the hall, two rights and then a left down the stairs. It’s a long walk.”

“Thanks,” she said with a bemused frown, the door to her right sliding up into the ceiling.

After walking for ten minutes, she came to the first right. She grimaced and picked up her pace, nearly jogging. She only had an hour for her visit and she’d already eaten into a sixth of it. Thankfully, all the physical therapy she had been doing had kept her cardio in top shape. She decided to speed up yet again and broke into an easy run.

She was twenty-five minutes into her hour visit when she finally reached the checkpoint to the main holding cell. Sweat beaded her lip and temples but she was otherwise presentable as she slowed to a stop at the station.

The station was two heavily fortified booths with a reinforced steel door between them. There was a good fifty feet of open space in front of the booths, with a yellow square marked on the ground dead center of the room. As she entered, four large turrets oriented on her, pulling her up short.

“Please step into the yellow lines and present your ID to the camera,” a voice said through the intercom.

Keeping her hands open and spread to the side, she slowly walked forward until she was within the marked area. Making her movements deliberate and smooth, she produced her ID and faced it forward.

“Little to the right.”

She adjusted.

“Uh, sorry, your left.”

She adjusted further while resisting the impulse to roll her eyes. She got the feeling they didn’t get a lot of new people down here.

“State your full name,” the voice said as Kristy felt the tingle of magic settle over her.

“Kristen Hortense Coolidge,” she said. “I go by Kristy.”

She didn’t know if that last part was needed but a lot of verification magic can be finicky.

“Aaaand you’re good,” said the voice as the magic left her and the turrets powered down. “Come on over and I’ll go over the rules real quick.”

She hesitated a moment before stuffing her ID in her pocket and crossing to the door, which lifted into the ceiling with a quiet hiss of well-oiled metal. On the other side of the door was a small walkway with two reinforced booths with glass panels on either side like you’d see at a bank in a shitty neighborhood. Only the left booth was occupied, a man in his early thirties with a high hairline sitting in a computer chair.

“So, real quick, there will be two yellow squares like the one you were just in,” the man began before she even reached the glass. His name tag read “J. Price.” “You’re going to step into the one closest to the walkway and stay there. He’ll already be in the other one. Under no circumstances are you to leave that square unless you are leaving, do you understand?”

“Will I be shot?” Kristy asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Oh no,” he said, waving his hand like the idea was silly. “Bullets don’t bother him much anymore so we don’t use them. No, enough lightning will pour into the room to vaporize steel. The yellow square is the only safe spot.”

Kristy’s eyes widened. “Jesus,” she said. “Is that necessary?”

He shrugged. “Someone thinks so,” he said as he slid across the booth to another terminal. “In my opinion, he’s an ideal prisoner. Polite, quiet, remembers everyone’s names. He should be angry as a hornet with how he was treated by the old guard but he’s been nothing but cooperative and chatty for me.”

Kristy frowned. “Was he mistreated?”

Price looked at her, then at his monitor, then back at her. He seemed to make a decision with a shrug. “Officially, no. Unofficially, they found any excuse they could to shoot him. It’s one of the reasons bullets don’t work on him anymore. Albright found out about it and made a big stink, which is when this facility was made in a hurry and the personnel switched up,” he rolled back to his other terminal and typed rapidly. “Now I have a cushy, boring office gig babysitting the most polite monster I’ve ever met.”

“He’s not a monster,” Kristy said without thinking, with heat. She regretted it but didn’t lessen the glare she shot at Price.

“You haven’t seen him,” Price said, not noticing or not caring about her anger. “Alright, you’re good to go. Place your hands on the yellow squares.”

Kristy blinked and looked down, there were two squares on the booth. She put her hands on them. A moment later, the door behind her slid closed and the door on the other side slid open.

“Remember: Stay in the yellow square,” he reminded her.

She nodded and started to walk down another long hallway. About a hundred feet down another, thicker door slid up into the ceiling. She passed three more doors until she entered a large, cavernous room. Most of the room was a pit that fell away… apparently endlessly, as she couldn’t see a bottom as she approached. In the center of the room was a platform supported by a pillar. The platform was about a hundred and fifty square feet and contained a small bed, a sink, a shower, a toilet, one chair, and one table. The platform was dead center in the room and was two hundred feet from any wall.

Sitting on the floor in the only clear space on the platform, was a man with pitch-black skin.

Kristy wondered how she was supposed to go over when a walkway began to extend from under where she was standing. Red LEDs spelling out “DON’T WALK” lit up on the floor in front of her, so she waited impatiently for the bridge to finish extending. It took over a minute, but once it was done the lights fleshed to green and the “DON’T” disappeared. Kristy snorted and began to cross.

Before, if you had asked Kristy if she was afraid of heights, she would have said no. Now, on a walkway above a bottomless chasm that didn’t have handrails, that was barely wide enough for two people to pass each other… she might have to amend that.

She frowned in thought. They wouldn’t allow a civilian to be in danger of falling, and Kristy knew he received regular visits from friends and family. She reached out to the side and was relieved to find her fingers brushing up against an invisible barrier.

She stepped off the bridge onto the platform and hurried to stand in the yellow square marked a few feet from the edge, before getting a good look at the man who had saved her life. She absently noticed the bridge retracting behind her.

Kristy hated to admit it, but Price had a point. Colm didn’t look the same. Even when he had been breathing air into her with his black skin, he hadn’t looked so… alien. There was something still human about him. But the thing—the man in front of her now looked like something out of a horror movie.

He still had the basic shape of a human. Two hands, feet, and a head. But his limbs and torso were stretched, grotesquely so. They were too long, with tendons and veins standing in sharp relief against his too-tight skin. His head seemed to float in the air on a neck that looked too thin and long to support it. His prison uniform hung off him like a tarp.

Kristy’s mouth was suddenly dry.

“Do,” she paused to clear her throat. “Do you know who I am?”

He shrugged, and despite his weird proportions, the movement didn’t look alien. “Jeremy told me you were one of the people I knew before.”

Jeremy must be Price.

Kristy nodded, sitting down on the floor like he was. “You saved my life.”

He smiled. The expression was small, muted. On other people, it might be one of those smiles that didn’t reach the eyes. “I did?”

Kristy nodded, giving him a fragile smile. “You did,” she said. “The monster that took your memories did something to me and—and I couldn’t breathe. You were the only one who noticed and helped me long enough for our medic to come and help me.”

His smile grew more genuine. “I’m so happy.”

There was something wrong with his voice. It was wrong to say it didn’t change, but the emotions she was used to hearing… there was something off.

“Yeah,” Kristy said. “And, well—now I’m returning to duty. To help people like you helped me and—and I wanted to thank you. I know you don’t remember, but, but it’s important to me that I thanked you in person.”

He nodded. “Alice says that if someone does something you like, you thank them.”

This wasn’t how she imagined this.

She knew that most, if not all, of his memories were gone. But when she heard that he had started speaking again, she thought—she thought that there’d be something of him there.

“You’re welcome,” he said after a moment. “Conner says that’s what you say when someone thanks you.”

Kristy smiled while she cringed inwardly. This isn’t the man she needed to thank. That man might… probably doesn’t exist anymore. She sighed.

“It’s hard,” he continued. “People come here and they tell me about me. But that’s not me. That other me isn’t here anymore. And it’s hard. Hard for you, because you want the old me. Hard for me, because I can’t be him.”

Kristy watched in wide-eyed fascination as he straightened and stretched, growing a couple of feet while still sitting. So much of his height had been hidden by his slouch.

“But if I meet him, I’ll tell him you stopped by,” he said, his smile changing subtly to be a little more inclusive.

Kristy finally realized what was wrong with his voice. It wasn’t monotone, but it was like what Beats did with certain sounds. All the sharp edges and deep valleys had been removed as if the emotions had been bleached away from his personality. He still felt them, she hoped, but they were—they were blunted, for lack of a better word.

“Are you okay?”

Kristy had no idea why she asked. She’d barely known him before the Incident, and he seemed—if not content, then at least calm. But something about his voice just called out to her.

There was a flash of emotion on his face that he quickly hid. If she hadn’t been focused on him she never would have noticed. He regarded her silently for a moment before his eyes twitched behind her and back.

“I’m fine,” he said, his voice losing even more emotion.

She didn’t know how—she had no basis to judge any of this on. But she knew for a fact that the man in front of her was more than he seemed. That flash of emotion she saw unlocked some insight into his character. She almost pressed him for more information but paused. She looked around at where she was, remembering what Price said about the previous guards.

This… shouldn’t be how you treated someone who had saved millions of lives.

She tried to engage him in conversation, but his responses were simple and monosyllabic. It was clear he was done talking, and when the bridge started to extend behind her, she was relieved.

“Thank you for talking to me today,” she said.

He watched calmly as she rose to her feet and straightened out her clothes. She turned to leave.

“What do you call me?”

The question brought her up short. She turned back to him. “What?”

“Conner calls me Liam,” he clarified, lifting one massive—if thin—hand as if holding the name. He lifted the other. “Alice calls me Colm. What do you call me?”

Kristy blinked. “Uh. I called—call you Colm.”

Colm dropped the hand that held the “Liam” name and made a fist with the other. “Colm. Hm. Thank you.”

The bridge finished extending and a loud announcement forcefully suggested Kristy vacate the platform. She hesitated for a second before giving Colm a final nod and leaving.

“You’re supposed to say ‘you’re welcome,’” she heard him say.

She turned back with a wry smile. “You’re welcome. Goodbye, Colm.”

She wasn’t sure what to make of the meeting, except that the man in that room wasn’t what he seemed. She placed her suspicions in the back part of her mind where Albright wouldn’t be able to see them with a casual inspection and went to meet her team.

Before she crossed the first door, she paused and looked back. Colm was standing now, and without a frame of reference, looked gigantic. He was taller than the shower by several feet. He gently raised one hand and waved. Kristy waved back.

She sighed and went through the doors. Her new team was waiting for her.