Zero echo shadow prime, p.13
Zero Echo Shadow Prime, page 13
* * *
What was that noise!? Four Arms lurched from deep sleep and smacked her forehead against a wooden beam. She had decided to sleep under the bed—even though it wasn’t much safer than the rest of her hideout—and was now paying the price. Something had woken her. An incessant shuffling. She pressed her ear against the floor and heard footsteps in the room below.
She rolled away from the bed—perhaps a little too fast, because the room kept spinning. She struggled to keep balance as she climbed to her feet. Her bones felt like icicle skewers inside her flesh, and her body suit dripped with cold sweat. She staggered to the door and checked the lock—secure but flimsy. It probably wouldn’t stand a chance against an echo with hammers or blade saws or bullets…hell, even the most underpowered echo could probably kick it open. Four Arms had to fortify it. She couldn’t drag the bed over for fear of making too much noise. Her only option was to carry the armoire. She hooked two hands along the bottom and pressed two hands along the sides. With a muted grunt, she lifted the bulky piece and braced it against the door.
The footsteps downstairs came to an abrupt stop. Shit! Did the intruder hear her? Four Arms listened so intently she could feel the blood pump through the vessels in her ear canals. Why hadn’t Optic warned her about the intruder? Was Optic even awake? She was supposed to be on lookout duty. It was her turn.
Four Arms crept to the shattered window frame, and her mouth fell agape. Optic’s house was burning. A thin trail of fire hugged the north perimeter of the building and slowly scaled the wall. Optic was nowhere to be found. Her bedroom window was dark and vacant.
Grabbing her mirror, Four Arms flicked on the overhead light. It wasn’t nearly as bright as the sun, but it would have to suffice. Hopefully, Optic, with her heightened vision, would catch the signal.
“You look ghastly,” Khnum noted from inside the mirror. “It’s time to find respite from your withdrawal.”
Four Arms shushed him. She projected a series of flashes across the street.
Optic appeared at her window and waved her hand. She threw out a pile of bedsheets that unraveled into a makeshift rope. It barely extended halfway to the ground, but Optic seemed undeterred. She climbed out of the window, planted her feet against the side of the building, and eased her weight onto the bedsheet rope. The knot slipped almost immediately, and she fell two stories. Her foot hit the lawn in an awkward way. She yelped and crumbled to the ground.
Four Arms had to help her. She rushed across the room and yanked the armoire from the door. But then she heard a squeak. Followed by another squeak. And another. The intruder was coming up the stairs. Four Arms shoved the armoire back against the door, her heart pounding against her chest cavity. What to do? She returned to the window.
Optic looked terrified as she dragged herself across the lawn. Her gaze kept switching back and forth between the burning building and Four Arms. “Help me! She’s coming!”
“I can’t,” Four Arms mouthed. She had her own adversary to deal with. And why didn’t Optic warn me? Optic was supposed to be on lookout duty. Her negligence had created this quandary. She had no one to blame but herself.
The shadowy arsonist emerged from the south side of the burning house and closed in on Optic. Two thin pilot lights illuminated her flamethrower hands. Four Arms’s eyes widened with recognition. She realized she could stop this attack with a single word.
“Flame!”
The arsonist halted her pursuit and looked up at Four Arms. They studied each other in the light of the fire. Was she truly Flame, or just another echo who had acquired flamethrowers? Four Arms raised her four hands to identify herself. The arsonist nodded. She is Flame! Four Arms smiled. She had been worried for nothing.
But Flame returned her attention to Optic and bathed her in two streams of fire.
“No!” Four Arms cried. She darted from the window, ripped the armoire from the bedroom door, and flew down the stairs. The first floor of the house was surprisingly vacant—no intruder to be found—but Optic’s horrific screaming permeated the walls and beckoned Four Arms outside.
Flame was already rounding the end of the block, having abandoned her victim in a near-death state. Four Arms rushed to Optic’s side and rolled her in the grass. Too little, too late. Optic could barely squeeze a breath through her swelling throat. Her chest sank and her arms fell limp. Inside her giant glass lens, beneath Four Arms’s reflection, a turquoise iris dilated to black.
The blue bubble expanded around the charred corpse and blew Four Arms into the street. She climbed to her feet and watched the now familiar metamorphosis. Optic curled into a ball and levitated, while her hands mutated into a pair of flamethrowers. Four Arms braced herself for a possible retaliation.
The bubble popped and Optic landed on her feet. The two echoes stood several paces apart and shared a moment of tense silence. Optic was backlit by the burning house, and her expression was nearly impossible to read. Would she lash out? She certainly had the grounds. Four Arms could have saved her, and she’d refused.
Optic lifted one of her burners and shot a small fireball into the air—more of a test than a threat. Without a word, she turned and walked away. No retaliation, but also no good-bye.
“I’m sorry,” Four Arms cried. Tears rolled down her face.
Optic didn’t react. She continued down the street until she was out of sight.
Several minutes passed before Four Arms realized she was still standing in the middle of the street, alone and vulnerable. She listened for other echoes, but couldn’t hear anyone above the crackling flame and the rapid beat of her heart. She was filled with so much anger—at herself and at the world—and didn’t know how to release it.
Click. Four Arms pivoted toward the sound and found an echo standing on the front porch of her house. The intruder! She was the one who had cornered Four Arms in her room. She was the reason Optic was left vulnerable. Four Arms quickly sized her up: no offensive weapons, no defensive plating. Two reddish sacs lined her throat. That was it. Easy prey.
Four Arms made a snap decision. She was done hiding. She was done being afraid. If the rules of planet Echo required her to fight, then she would fight. She squeezed her three healthy fists and raced toward the house.
Throat Sacs slipped back inside.
Four Arms stormed into the living room, where Throat Sacs surprisingly stood her ground. The two echoes lunged for each other, but Four Arms quickly gained the advantage, pinning her victim’s arms and legs to the carpet. She raised her fist for the crushing blow, but Throat Sacs didn’t flinch. Instead, she spat a large wad of goo into Four Arms’s face.
She recoiled, having been rendered temporarily blind. She let go of Throat Sacs and tried to tear off the stringy mess, but the bond was too strong. In fact, her fingers almost got stuck in the process.
Throat Sacs twisted free and fled into the kitchen.
Four Arms stumbled after her, even though her vision was reduced to a few scattered fragments. Thankfully, it wasn’t her primary sense. She reached the backyard and heard the scuffing of feet against wood, followed by a sharp thud. Throat Sacs had scaled the fence, and Four Arms continued the chase.
They ran through several backyards and hopped several fences, until one time Four Arms’s feet did not return to solid ground. Her ankle twisted in a shallow pit, shooting pain up her leg, and she fell over backward.
Four Arms hastily filled her empty lungs as footsteps approached. Get up, she told herself, but her limbs wouldn’t budge. She tilted her neck and found the source of the problem. Her whole body was trapped in a web. The more she struggled, the more entangled she became.
Throat Sacs reached the edge of the pit, carrying a large boulder. The two echoes locked eyes. Four Arms was determined not to beg for her life, but her eyes betrayed her, turning upward in a desperate bid for empathy.
Her adversary gave a slight nod but maintained her solemn expression. “I’m sorry,” Throat Sacs said. She raised the boulder over her head, paused for a final moment of reflection, then brought it down.
* * *
Planet Echo had become a very different place by day 213. The population had transformed into a wide assortment of beastly creatures. Some acquired wings or propulsion systems and took to the air. Others acquired gills or membrane oxygenators and colonized the ocean. Four Arms even heard rumors of a mind-controlling echo amassing an army deep underground. Nearly everyone possessed multiple weapons systems—projectiles, explosives, lasers, blades, etc.
Four Arms had long since abandoned the comforts of her origin neighborhood. Her new home was a vast, open field—a beltway between two populous zones. She lurked a few inches below the cold surface, listening for hapless travelers.
Through many deaths and rebirths, she had developed into an ambush specialist. Her biggest acquisition was a large boring drill, which co-opted the bottom half of her torso. Her legs scooted toward her arms, forcing her gait into a ground-hugging crawl, and all six limbs had mutated into long, agile pincers.
Her jaws grew to monstrous proportions—stretching over her head to accommodate the three rows of razor-sharp teeth—and left little room for anything else. Her eyeballs receded into her skull and sprouted through the roof of her mouth like tonsils. Fortunately, she didn’t have much need for eyes. Her sense of hearing was so acute, she could detect an echo approaching from over a hundred yards away.
The key to Four Arms’s predation strategy was the spinneret inside her throat, which she had inherited from Throat Sacs on day three. It projected a sticky web-line, which Four Arms used to reel victims into her hiding hole.
Four Arms enjoyed a great deal of success with her new anatomy, but she wasn’t the most dominant echo on the beltway. That title belonged to Optic. Four Arms had lost track of so many echoes over time: Flame, Normal, Lustrous, Throat Sacs. They got lost in the shuffle of traded traits and morphing bodies. But Optic’s story was legend.
Soon after leaving the burning cinder that was her hideout, Optic was ambushed and killed by Many Eyes, a strange-looking echo whose entire body was covered in eyes. That trait would have been a burdensome acquisition to most echoes, but to Optic, it was disastrous. Her giant, ocular cavity multiplied many times over, carving deep, debilitating grooves into her body.
Robbed of her ability to evade predators, Optic fell victim—over and over again—to the biggest and strangest echoes in the neighborhood, until she had grown into a heaping, mutated mess. Her head and limbs shrank into the ever-expanding folds of her skin. And her body mass grew to encompass an entire city block.
Then one day, all of Optic’s unwieldy traits seemed to click with one another. Her skin thinned out—becoming almost as light as air—but not at the cost of durability. Her flamethrowers developed into an internal furnace. And the deep caverns that had pitted her body grew into an elegant network of air passages. She used her internal furnace to ignite the air inside her body, caught an updraft, and took to the sky.
From that moment forward, Optic was no longer a perennial victim. She became the most feared echo in the region—the alpha predator—an enormous floating death cloud who rained fire on any echo unfortunate enough to get caught underneath.
On the morning of day 213, from the safety of her subterranean hideout, Four Arms watched Optic pass overhead. The mere sight of her old friend caused her great anguish. Guilt was considered a liability on Echo, yet she still harbored inconsolable remorse for not helping Optic that early Echo night. If she had, her friend’s life might have taken a different, less tragic turn.
But the truth was, Four Arms still needed her old friend. They hadn’t spoken since they’d parted ways, but Four Arms, nonetheless, had figured out a way to take advantage of her. Optic’s kill rate was so high she often neglected to finish off echoes who were partially burned by her wide-area assault. Four Arms would then burrow under the scorched earth and pull these injured echoes into her subterranean jaws.
A couple hours after watching Optic pass over the area with little activity, Four Arms was ready to reposition her hideout. But then, she heard a buzzing overhead. She crawled toward the surface and opened her jaws to unsheathe her recessed eyeballs. A tiny glimmer of light reflected high in the sky. Eye Globe. Like many echoes on the beltway, Eye Globe clearly fell under Optic’s genetic influence. She was a transparent sphere of eyeball soup with a tiny propeller on the top of her head—small and vulnerable, with no weapons systems.
Four Arms cast a web-line skyward. It just barely connected with Eye Globe’s underbelly. The line pulled taut, and Four Arms started reeling in her prey.
Suddenly, a larger echo swooped in and caught the line, casting off Eye Globe and yanking Four Arms from her hiding hole. Before Four Arms had the wits to sever the line, she was sixty feet off the ground.
She sailed over the open field like a weighty kite. Her escort was Tricopter, whom Four Arms knew as a generally nonaggressive echo. In an increasingly chaotic airspace, Tricopter had evolved for evasion. She sported three rotating helicopter blades, which she used to quickly change her trajectory and speed. And she was now using that ability in an attempt to shake Four Arms off her trail.
Four Arms had no interest in dueling with Tricopter either. The echo was too big to fit in her mouth and too agile to catch under her drill. Please, just let me down! Four Arms wanted to say. She wished she could reason with Tricopter, like in the old days. But Tricopter didn’t have ears, and Four Arms had lost her ability to speak a long time ago.
Tricopter seemed to be heading into Optic’s zone of destruction. Was she suicidal? Or did she have some wicked strategy in mind? Four Arms had no interest in finding out the answer. She began to reel in the line, closing the gap between them. Meanwhile, the giant death cloud grew closer and closer.
Optic belched a long-arced flare at the airborne echoes. Four Arms quickly released some slack and dropped altitude. The flare passed right over her head. The web-line, however, caught fire. Four Arms remained dangling just long enough to anticipate her imminent fall.
The line snapped.
With the ground rapidly approaching, she launched another web-line at the only thing she could: Optic. The line connected to her underbelly, and the slack pulled taut. Four Arms exited free fall and swung under Optic, through multiple flares and fireballs, then up again, landing on her massive dorsal side.
She clung to a fold of skin, terrified to let go, as it flapped in the high-altitude current. Optic’s back was a vast maze of folds, curves, and caverns. Four Arms had no interest in lingering, but she couldn’t jump away either—the immense drop would surely put her in a blue bubble.
Four Arms vibrated as an ominous rumble swelled beneath her pincers. A flare erupted along her backside, searing her flesh. She yelped and crawled from one skin fold to another. A second flare swirled inches from her face. Four Arms slipped and tumbled over the terrain.
Don’t force me to hurt you, Four Arms desperately wanted to say. Why was Optic fighting her? Because she didn’t recognize Four Arms? Or because she did?
A third blast engulfed Four Arms in a pillar of fire. She released the skin fold and fell into a long tunnel. Her body jerked left and right as it careened down a network of internal canals. She finally landed on a soft patch of flesh.
Four Arms exhaled a wisp of smoke from her charred lungs. She was alive…barely. She found herself in a veiny, pulsating body cavity not much larger than herself. The air was hot and putrid, yet she couldn’t seem to inhale enough of it. Her chest heaved to little satisfaction.
The entrance tunnel had contracted into a tight sphincter. Four Arms needled her pincers through the hole, but the surrounding muscle was surprisingly resilient. Or perhaps she had simply lost too much stamina. Either way, she couldn’t pry it open. But she also couldn’t afford to remain much longer in this gastric oven. The sweltering heat permeated her skin, threatening to cook her internal organs. Very soon, she would die. If she couldn’t go up, she had to go down, even if the excavation guaranteed causing Optic a great deal of pain.
Four Arms placed the tip of her drill against the soft cavity floor. I’m sorry, old friend. The cone began to rotate.
Optic bellowed and flexed her massive body. Four Arms almost lost her footing. She had to employ all of her leg strength to keep the drill steady. Chunks of organic sludge flew up as she made her descent. Optic shook and roared, but Four Arms kept drilling into the beast. Soon she reached brain tissue, and it was all over.
The largest blue bubble in Echo history expanded around Optic, ejecting Four Arms into the air like a rocket. The event attracted hundreds of spectators, who looked up in awe as they witnessed the impossible. Optic, the most terrifying echo who had ever evolved, had been defeated. But what they witnessed next was even more bewildering. Four Arms—the great victor who sailed across the sky, certain to meet her death—did not hit the ground. She simply vanished into thin air and was never seen again.
8
PRIME
Charlie paced the perimeter of the containment cell, examining every crevice, searching for a weakness. Whoever built this place certainly did so with superhuman robots in mind. But Charlie knew her abilities were largely untested. Rivir couldn’t have accounted for everything.
{Charlie_Nobunaga:mindspace> Alan: Let me start by saying I didn’t kill you. You’re not even dead. I only placed your body in a coma. When your father and Jude returned to the office, I told them what you had said. I told them what I had done. Together, we decided not to revive you, and together, we fabricated your death.}
Alan buzzed like a mosquito in the back of Charlie’s mind, offering weak palliatives for his vile decisions. She resisted the urge to lash out at him. Escape was her number-one priority, and to have any hope of escape, she had to stay focused on the room.
