“Why don’t you cut the shit and show yourself?” I say out loud, knowing he can hear me. “This is getting boring.”
Up ahead, the screaming grows louder. I approach a room that I remember the Mogs set aside for interrogation. There’s a window to watch through. In the middle of the chamber, a set of thick chains hangs from the ceiling.
Sam is wrapped in the chains. Those are his screams. A viscous black acid trickles down the metal links and burns fresh scars into his wrists.
Setrákus Ra stands in front of Sam, but not the way I’m used to seeing him. His head isn’t pale and bulbous and black veined, he’s not eight feet tall and he doesn’t have that thick purple scar around his neck. This Setrákus Ra is a young man, like the guy I saw in the vision of Lorien’s history. His dark hair is slicked back from a widow’s peak, his features are sharp and stern and he looks distinctly Loric.
He’s one of my people. The thought is still mind-boggling.
He acts like he hasn’t noticed me, although I know that isn’t true. After all, he brought me here. I stand outside the interrogation room and watch him. Setrákus Ra paces back and forth, and every time he crosses in front of the chains, momentarily blocking them from view, the person tangled up in his torture device changes.
Sam becomes Six, her screams filling the room.
Then Adam.
Marina.
Nine.
Sarah.
I punch through the glass that separates the hallway from the interrogation room. It shatters easily and doesn’t hurt at all. I float over the waist-high wall and land a few strides away from Setrákus Ra. He turns to face me, smiling like we just bumped into each other on the street.
“Hello, John.”
I try to keep my gaze from drifting towards the vision of Sarah, tortured, unconscious, that hangs behind him.
She isn’t real. She’s not here. She’s at peace.
I make a show of looking around the room and whistle through my teeth.
“You know, back in the day, these dreams used to spook me.”
“Did they?”
“Now I know it’s just you casting about in desperation.”
Setrákus Ra smiles indulgently and crosses his arms. “You remind me so much of him,” he says. “My old friend Pittacus Lore.”
“I’m not like him.”
“No?”
“He showed you mercy. I’m going to kill you.”
Setrákus Ra circles around, putting Sarah’s body between the two of us. He gives her a gentle shove, and she begins to swing back and forth.
“How is my great-granddaughter?” he asks, making small talk.
My eyes track Sarah, then flick back to Setrákus Ra.
“Much better than when she was stuck with you.”
“She’ll come around,” he replies with a smile. “When I’m done with the rest of you, she’ll come back to me.”
“Will your army come back to you too?” I ask, tilting my head. “While you lick your wounds and hide out in my dreams, they’re abandoning you.”
His expression darkens, and I feel glad that I’ve struck a blow to his ego. He steps away from Sarah and towards me.
“The Mogadorians were always just a means to an end for me, John. A neutered species of beasts that made their own home world unlivable with their thickheaded love of war and pollution.” He spits on the floor. “The humans will make for much better subjects once they’re brought to heel. The others will be ashes on the wind.”
“Is this why you brought me here?” I ask, staring at this younger version of my most hated enemy. “To drive home how evil you are? Because I get it.”
Setrákus Ra smiles, comes closer, studying me. His eyes aren’t the pure inky black that I’ve seen before. They’re dark but normal, not changed through years of experimentation. The sick mind behind them is still the same.
“I am old, John,” he intones. “Those visions my great-granddaughter put us through, to see my youth again. . . . I felt something like nostalgia. Once Pittacus Lore was my friend. If he had only listened to me, if we had worked together, we could have spared the universe so much death. We could have uplifted all life.”
“Aww—do you need a friend? Is that what this is? The part where you offer me a chance to join forces?”
Setrákus Ra sighs. We’re only separated by a few feet now. I have to remind myself that it isn’t real. That there’s no point in reaching out and trying to rip him apart.
Even though I so badly want to.
“No, John. When I allowed you to live in New York, I promised that I would let you watch this world burn. I intend to keep my word.”
“Then what?”
“Like I said, you remind me of Pittacus,” Setrákus Ra responds. He drifts back towards Sarah, strokes a hand up her bluish arm and grabs hold of the chain supporting her body. “I tried to show him, just like I will now show you. I wanted you to know what you’re missing out on.”
Setrákus Ra yanks down hard on the chain. Impossibly, with a logic available only in nightmares, the entire ceiling collapses. The room is flooded with that viscous black ooze.
“I wanted you to feel my power.”
It’s like a dam breaking. Within seconds, the interrogation room is completely lost to me, and I’m awash in the inky liquid. It’s ice-cold and slimy against my skin. I try to swim against it, but it’s quickly over my head, stinging my eyes, creeping into my lungs.
I panic and thrash. For a moment, I forget that this is only a dream.
There’s a heaviness inside me now, like my guts are filled with thick sludge. My skin prickles. It feels like thousands of tiny mouths are trying to gnaw on me.
But I can breathe. I’m alive. The realization helps me to calm down.
I can see, even though there’s nothing around me except for solid, impenetrable darkness. As I float through the oily slime, I look down at my hands and light up my Lumen. It works—light shines in a halo around me.
The effect only lasts for a moment. In my glowing hands I can see veins of cobalt-blue Loric energy running beneath the skin. The sludge painfully burrows into my fingertips, drawn to that energy, and begins to eat away at it.
“Doesn’t it feel good?”
I look up. Setrákus Ra floats in the darkness above me. He’s dropped the whole young-Setrákus thing and now looks like I expect: hideous. He’s shirtless—maybe entirely naked, the ooze thankfully obscures his lower body—his skin startlingly pale in the darkness, the purple scar around his neck thick. His eyes, hollow and empty like a skull, bore into me.
There’s an open wound on Setrákus Ra’s chest. The gash is just to the left of his heart. That must be where Six hit him. She really was so damn close. Tendrils of the ooze lap at the broken skin, worm their way inside his body. The substance isn’t healing the wound; it’s filling it in, replacing the ghastly hole with a chunk of pure obsidian.
Another body floats in front of Setrákus Ra. It’s a Mogadorian woman with dark hair drawn back in thick cornrows. I notice that she has burn scars all across her hands. She seems to be unconscious. Setrákus Ra waves his hands over her, and the slimy substance surrounding us all moves at his command, burrowing under her skin, reshaping her.
I open my mouth, and although the slime rushes down my throat, I find that I’m still able to speak.
“This is where you are, isn’t it?” I say. “This is real. Your great idea of progress, it’s . . . this sewage bath.”
Setrákus Ra smiles at me. “You resist. But here, John, here I control the fate of all our species. Here, I make Legacies. I take the mundane and shape it, augment it to my will.”
He holds up his hand, two fingers extend towards me, and my arm raises in response completely out of my control. My Lumen glows, the ooze tendrils coalescing around my hand. It feels as if my skin’s being peeled away.
A ball of Loric energy is ripped out of my hand. My Lumen grows dim as the energy floats through the sludge. It’s slowly eaten away, transformed, until Setrákus guides it into the Mogadorian woman. Her body convulses for a moment, sending waves through the slime.
But then fire surrounds her. She turns her head and grins at me, her teeth bared like a wild animal.