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As soon as they disappear into the station, I notice Valerian glaring at me.
Of course. I said the forbidden word. Soma.
Was that why Maxwell bolted so fast too? Is Soma something you never talk about—like Fight Club from that Earth movie? Or is it because Maxwell is the Nutcracker and didn’t want to teach an enemy dreamwalker any new skills?
Puck. If he is the Nutcracker, what if his whole team hadn’t died of the virus?
What if he’d killed them?
I rattle out my concerns out loud, ending with, “Should we run after them?”
Fabian shakes his head. “They have Chester’s probability manipulation to keep them safe.”
“But he couldn’t keep himself safe,” Itzel says.
“Maxwell was vetted,” Valerian says with finality. “I say we’ve wasted enough time on this world. Let’s head to Necronia.”
“What?” Itzel exclaims. “We’re still doing that? Our group is half the size we were supposed to be, and we just lost our most powerful allies.”
“Bullshit,” Stanislav says, his accent thicker than usual. “Your most powerful ally is still here.”
“The chort is right,” Fabian says. “Assuming he means me, of course.”
“We can’t not go,” Felix says, almost regretfully. “Nostradamus’s prophecies are not something you want to mess around with.”
“Fine.” Itzel readjusts her mask. “I just want to go on record saying this is a bad idea.”
Felix mimes writing something in an imaginary notebook. Pretending to close it, he says, “Noted.”
Valerian turns on his heel and strides into the train station. The rest of us follow, vaulting over corpses when necessary. I do my best not to think about dead bodies decomposing and whether the virus is still live in the air around them. Because terrifying. And super gross. A sprint down the corridors later, we find ourselves in the hub and in front of the purple gate that is our destination.
“Ready?” Stanislav asks.
Everyone nods, though some, like Itzel, less enthusiastically than others.
“Let’s go then,” the chort says and enters the gate.
Fabian and the others follow, and I go last.
Stepping out on the other side, I realize Chester’s probability manipulation powers hadn’t failed him. Far from it.
If this is Necronia, he’s lucky to have missed it.
Chapter Twelve
We’re inside a small canyon, surrounded by gray mountains, with a sky blocked by gloomy clouds up above. My eyes have to adjust to the lack of light, and when they do, I realize a legion of people are crammed into the hub like rotten sardines.
They’re wearing masks with nightmarish designs and loin cloths, along with itchy-looking bras on what might be the females. Their skin is ashen, and they have tattoo-like carvings all over their bodies that glow from the inside.
The only place free of these people is a two-foot-wide tunnel that leads from the hub canyon into a crack in a mountain ridge—a crack that looks like a gap in the teeth of a dead titan.
My teammates gingerly advance into the people-tunnel. Behind us, the tunnel fills with silently moving bodies, cutting off the way back—which doesn’t fill me with warm fuzzies, not even a little bit.
“These must be corpses,” Ariel whispers. “I can’t believe this is happening again.”
She’s probably right. Now that she’s said it, I could swear there’s a stench of death seeping through my mask’s powerful filters.
“For their sake, I hope they’re dead.” Felix points at one of the carvings. “Doing that on a live person would be against the Geneva Convention.”
“We’re far from Geneva,” Ariel mutters.
“Well, yeah,” Felix says. “Nor are we in Kansas anymore.”
Nobody replies to him, and we continue through the tunnel in silence until Felix speaks again in a loud whisper. “Those masks look like they were designed by H.R. Giger.” Without waiting for a follow-up question, he explains, “He did design work on Alien.”
I know the artist he’s talking about and have to agree. The masks depict people and steam-powered machines interlinked in an eerie, almost sexual symbiosis.
Dylan says something in an unfamiliar language, seemingly addressing the corpses.
“What did you say?” Felix asks her. “That sounded like a mix of German and Vietnamese, with some Klingon thrown in.”
“It sounded nothing like German,” Fabian says, giving Felix a cold look. “If anything, it reminded me of Russian.”
Stanislav glares at the werewolf. “Sobaka. That’s nothing like Russian.”
Stern-looking LEGO letters appear in front of my eyes, and I assume in front of everyone else’s also:
Let’s stay quiet and figure out what they want.
We follow Valerian’s suggestion, and it soon becomes clear that what the corpses want is to herd us through the crack in the rock.
When we step out of the crack, we find ourselves in a bigger canyon, which is filled to the brim with more animated corpses, thousands upon thousands of them.
Valerian’s LEGO letters appear again:
Dylan, try speaking with them.
She begins yelling in the same language, facing this way and that.
At first, there’s no response. Then every single one of the thousands of corpses replies in unison. Their speech—a strange dry rustle, like dead branches rubbing against each other—creeps into my bones, chilling them below zero kelvin. This is what hell would sound like, I imagine, and though the corpses seem to be using the same language as Dylan, through their withered vocal cords, it sounds exponentially uglier and more terrifying.
