Page 83 of The Devouring Time

Floating above the plinth is a glowing purple orb of what seems to be pure light.

“Magic,” Khephnes says, trunk flashing red and white in alarm. “I’m not sure what it is, but it’s very powerful.”

“This has to be what they don’t want us to see.” Bianca takes a step forward, as if drawn to the light.

“Probably.” Unease fills Khephnes’s mind-voice. “It might be safer to stick to the papyrus. The pile near the door—perhaps we might learn something from them.”

“We don’t have time,” I say. “The guards will notice we’re missing sooner rather than later. This is our only chance. We can’t waste it on papyrus scraps.”

Bianca waves her trunk in assent. “This orb is what they’re hiding from us. If it can help us learn anything about them, we have to take the chance and do it now.”

Before any of us can react, she stretches out her trunk and touches the light.

Her body goes instantly rigid, and the glowing orb brightens. Titus calls her name, but I’m the closest, so I instinctively grab her with my trunk to pull her away.

Purple light fills my mind, blanking out everything else.

55

The light dims, becomes a sphere hanging in a dark void before rushing away like a leaf on a stream. Other lights appear in different colors, whirling past and even through me. I can’t feel my body, though I still have all my other senses. A cacophony of voices rises around me, and I’m swept away by a river of force.

I sense Bianca beside me, though I can’t see her. “Sterling!” she calls, and then we’re carried back, back, back…

Darkness. Then, something reaches out, and it’s as though I’m both recalling a moment in time and watching it play out on a movie screen at once.

I was—we were—somewhere else.

Somewhere Outside.

Whoever is reaching out to us wants us to come to them. So we do.

Now they’re the ones Outside.

Their physical bodies are strange, swimming things, but we adapt quickly. They left behind their cities, their technology, and the glowing orb they used to summon us in the first place. We play with the detritus of their civilization, until others of them, the ones we didn’t replace, try to kill us.

So we kill them instead.

It’s a hard-fought battle, but we’ve already learned the secrets of the orb. We can move from body to body, though some of them are stronger-willed and fight back against the switch. But in the end, we triumph.

The orb lets us look through time, as through a glass darkly. It’s easy to see the paths that led here, but ahead of us are many choices, many possibilities. All of them include the eventual extinction of the bodies we inhabit, but other species suitable for us to possess arise in the future.

Our choice—no, it’s not a choice. It is merely our nature, and its directive is simple. We are The Ones Who Become, and in order to survive, we must become yet another species, another civilization.

We send scouts ahead into the many futures, switching bodies with likely candidates, looking for the best future for us to inhabit. Some of our hosts warn their people when we return them, and our scouts are killed when they try to revisit that branch in the river of time. We learn to use the orb to cloud the memories of our captives before they’re sent back. It’s an imperfect process, but good enough for our purposes, and most of us return from our sojourns unharmed.

When the time of extinction draws near, we select the best future we’ve been able to send scouts into and exchange places with the species there en masse, leaving their minds to face extinction in our old bodies. Once in our new time, we quickly kill those we haven’t replaced, before they can fight back.

The cycle repeats again, and again, through the ages of the earth. We Become, we scout, and we Become again.

The Tschchch are the species whose bodies we currently live in. By now, we’ve learned we can cultivate allies among potential future hosts. Seldom do they know our true plans—why should we tell them, when it’s so much easier to promise things like power? In this case, the Tschchch were at war with one another, four factions struggling for supremacy. It made the job of our scouts so much easier.

As is our custom, we settle into their cities, mimic their lives, because what else would we do? We did not begin existence as embodied creatures, after all, so surely they would know better than us what it’s like to be them.

But another extinction looms. It’s time to look to the future and find a new species to Become.

Bianca’s consciousness seems to grip mine, shocking me back to myself. Then she’s hauling us forward, fighting against the currents, into the branching paths of the future.

There’s something ahead of us, something she’s making her way toward. A beacon, almost.