The Eiken Boundary

This short story is set in the Legends of the Known Arc universe. If you enjoy it, please share! Also, drop me a note and let me know what you thought.

A middle-school field trip to one of the strangest planets in the Known Arc goes awry when an avatar relic is unearthed.

If you could fly into the Devastation and turn around to look at Phade from a distance, you wouldn’t actually be able to see the famous cross section of its guts because there’s no light on that side of the Eiken Boundary. All those photos you’ve seen on the wiki were taken with infrared cameras, from robot probes and a few daredevils who flew beyond the boundary and lived to tell about it.

Everybody learns about Phade in school, but most kids don’t really understand what’s going on. The photos in the lessons show a planet cut in half, but that’s not the case at all. It’s a whole planet, about three-quarters the size of Earth, and until the Cataclysm it was home to a flourishing ecosystem and a city-building civilization. The reason it looks like it’s sliced in half is because during the Cataclysm half of it got stuck inside the Devastation. That half is still there, you just can’t see it.

Mr. Anders told us to think of Phade like a basketball floating in our bathtub. Half of the ball is underwater, half of it is in the air. The surface of the water is the Eiken Boundary. The part of the ball that’s submerged is inside the Devastation. That’s the part we can’t see.

Now imagine you reach down and flick your finger across the top of the basketball so that it turns. Half the ball is still underwater, but because it is turning, the part that’s underwater is always changing. That’s what’s happening on Phade. At any moment during its eighteen-hour day, exactly half the planet is inside the Devastation, but since the planet is spinning, it’s always a different half.

Now, pay attention, because here’s where I explain the scary part of this story. Imagine you’re an ant on the basketball. If you stay in the same spot, eventually the place where you’re standing will rotate into the water. It’s just like on Earth when the planet’s rotation carries you from day into night, except on Phade, instead of night, the rotation carries you through the Eiken Boundary into the Devastation. The line where the landscape rotates into the boundary is called the Submerging Terminator. The place where it comes out again, nine hours later, is called the Emerging Terminator.

I know it’s hard to understand, and if you don’t get it, it’s okay.  Most people don’t, not even adults. Not even most scientists, Mr. Anders says. The main thing to remember is the ant on the floating basketball. If the ant doesn’t keep moving to stay on the dry part of the rotating ball, it’ll eventually get submerged and drown. It’s the same on Phade; unless you’re aboard Rail City or on one of the Terminator Chaser airplanes, the planet’s rotation will eventually carry you through the submerging terminator. And that would be bad. Really bad.

Weird stuff happens on the invisible side of the planet while it’s submerged. Geographical features move around, sometimes whole seas and mountain ranges. Other times, things emerge that weren’t there before. Rusting vehicles and machines of unfathomable purpose. Bones of unknown alien creatures. Crumbling remains of crashed airships. Sometimes, even caches of avatar relics. They call them anomalies.

Because the rotational period of Phade is eighteen hours, the ‘daytime’ lasts only nine hours. That’s not much time to find and study all the anomalies that might appear, and once they submerge, they’re almost always gone forever. A hundred years ago an entire avatar city emerged on the southern plains, gleaming and pristine, as if it had been built yesterday. By the time anybody noticed, it had rotated almost all the way to the submerging terminator, so they didn’t have time to do anything other than snap a couple of hasty pictures from space. Nine hours later, on the emerging side, a hundred scientists and reliquists were waiting for it to come back out, but there was nothing left but sand and a few traces of ancient roads. They’d completely missed the greatest scientific moment of modern times. They stuck around for a few more days, hoping it would re-emerge, but on the sixth day the dry desert emerged as a shallow sea and their hopes were dashed. That’s why these days the Terminator Chasers are always on patrol, looking for new anomalies as they appear along the emerging terminator.

Nine hours is not a lot of time, and Phade is a big planet, so the Chasers miss most of the anomalies until it’s too late. Still, they manage to find one or two almost every day, and the reliquaries of the cathedral at Rail City are stuffed with the artifacts they’ve recovered. They say that more pre-Cataclysm relics have been recovered from Phade in the past two centuries than all the other worlds of the Known Arc combined.

I think Phade must have been a really important planet back in the days of the avatars, but Mr. Anders says that nobody knows the world’s original name or anything about its first inhabitants. He says we call it Phade because in Olid the word phade means ‘stuck on flypaper.’ The name sort of makes sense. The planet got caught half-in, half-out of the Eiken Boundary when the Cataclysm wiped out the inner galaxy, and it’s been trapped there ever since. Like the basketball floating in the bathtub, the surface tension of the Eiken Boundary keeps it stuck in place, trapped forever between the light of real space and the invisible darkness of the Devastation.

Because of its situation, Phade is one of the most dangerous planets in the Known Arc. You’re perfectly safe on the ‘daytime’ side of Phade, but as far as anyone knows, nothing living has ever survived a submergence through the ‘night.’ If a microbe, or a plant, or a person goes through the Eiken Boundary, it doesn’t re-emerge in the same spot nine hours later. The trip through the Devastation doesn’t just kill you, it takes you. Your loved ones waiting desperately at the re-emergence point may find your empty clothes and your komnic, but there will be no trace of the living organic material that made up your body. The Devastation has eaten you.

So, why am I telling you this? I mean, other than to explain it because it’s so cool? It’s because right now I’m on Phade and I’m in trouble. My name is Gertrood Littlefeather, and in this story, me and my friends are the ants on the basketball.

None of us slept last night at Rail City. Even though the Eiken Boundary was invisible, we could still feel it out there, just a few kilometers away. Plus, it was the first time any of us had ever experienced the giddy lightheadedness of gravity on a planet smaller than Earth. Boen and I spent half the night seeing how high we could bounce on the hotel’s bed mattresses. When our komnics beeped the morning alarm and Mr. Anders called us to breakfast, we were all pumped up on adrenaline and sleepless excitement. Me most of all. Anybody will tell you I’m the class nerd. I get picked on, but I don’t care.

I especially didn’t care as we boarded the Terminator Chaser airplane. Even though my classmates all rolled their eyes when I tried to explain what we were seeing out the windows of the boarding tube, I knew they were just as excited. Mr. Anders just kept shaking his head and patting my shoulder. I knew he would correct me if I got any of my facts wrong, but he stayed silent. I know my stuff.

Launching a Chaser airplane from Rail City is pretty cool. The entire city is moving at six-hundred kilometers-per-hour on the rails, so they don’t use a runway like regular planes. I read about it before the trip, so I already knew how the plane is clamped to a platform facing into the wind, and when the pilots rev up the jets and release the clamps, you just sort of rise up into the air like you’re on an elevator. After all, you’re already going fast enough for the wings to generate plenty of lift. Even though I knew what to expect, I still wasn’t ready for the stomach-churning rollercoaster sensation.

I’d planned my spot in the boarding line so I would get a front seat behind the pilot, next to my best friend Boen and across the aisle from Mr. Anders and Ms. Howe, our volunteer parent-chaperone. The plane had big windows all along its length, but the only place you could also see through the front windscreen was the two left-hand seats of the first row.

I was a little miffed that the pilot’s fat head blocked some of the view, but Boen didn’t mind. She’s the calmest person I know, and the exact opposite of me. It’s almost like she’s an adult and not a twelve-year-old. She’s unflappable, says Mr. Anders, and he often gives her the classroom task of monitoring the students when his back is to the board and alerting him when any of them engages in nonsense. You’d think that our mates wouldn’t like her, but the opposite is true. Boen doesn’t judge people. Everybody loves Boen, a lot more than they like me.

Ms. Howe made a squealing sound when the plane rocketed straight up off the platform, and she grabbed Mr. Anders’s hand. I think that if she hadn’t been buckled to her seat she might’ve jumped into his lap. Boen looked at them across the aisle, then looked at me and raised her eyebrows. Mr. Anders didn’t look at all unhappy that Ms. Howe had grabbed his hand. He held it awkwardly until she collected herself and pulled it away with an embarrassed smile.

The excitement of the take-off was quickly forgotten as everyone craned their heads toward the windows to get a glimpse of Rail City. Even though they call it Rail City, it’s not really a city at all. It’s more like a gigantic, high-speed train that stretches for almost five kilometers along the rails. Instead of rail cars, it has a series of interlocking wheeled platforms upon which are mounted all sorts of modular structures, from apartment buildings to shopping malls to the airport from which we’d just launched. I knew from my research that the platform cars themselves were as wide as the football stadium back home in Boise, and there were twenty-three of them in all.

As for the tracks upon which Rail City runs, they wrap the planet’s equator in a big, unbroken ring that is 30,000 kilometers long. They were specially forged from a rare alloy that isn’t affected by passage through the Devastation, and their exact composition is one of the biggest engineering secrets of modern times. I explained all this to the boys in the seat behind me, but they just rolled their eyes and laughed at me. Boen nodded, though. She’s like me. She’s not a slave to teenaged meanness and mediocrity. She has intellectual curiosity. Mr. Anders calls it the spark. One day last year when I got detention for punching Jark on the playground he told me I had the brightest spark he’d ever seen, and it would get me in trouble if I didn’t learn to control it.

It’s always pitch-dark on Phade, which made the sight of Rail City even more spectacular. It was lit up like a giant sparkling snake, especially the cathedral platform about halfway back the train. In the darkness it looked like a gigantic starship floating in space, but when I looked more closely I could see hints of the rocky desert speeding by.

All of this was incredibly cool, but what makes Rail City even cooler is the reason it was built. Remember, you can’t stay in one spot on Phade without the submerging terminator catching up to you, just like you can’t stay in one spot on Earth without eventually experiencing the onset of nightfall. On Earth, if you fly toward the setting sun at 1,000 kph, you can keep up with the planet’s rotation and stay in the daylight indefinitely (it’s true, I looked it up). Rail City was created with the same principle in mind. Here on Phade’s equator, Rail City cruises at 603.5 kph, exactly the same speed as the planet’s rotation. In effect, the monstrous train stays in one spot while the planet rotates beneath it. It’s the only permanent settlement on Phade, and the only possible settlement. No fixed structure on this planet would last more than nine hours.

When I asked what would happen if Rail City broke down and the train stopped, the guide told us that if the problem couldn’t be fixed, the population would have nine hours to evacuate before the city was swallowed into the Submerging Terminator. He told us not to worry, that the shuttles at the airport are big enough to hold the entire population.

Once we moved away from Rail City the pilot extinguished the spotlights. Phade is a rogue planet, which means it doesn’t orbit around a star. Mr. Anders says that either its star was lost in the Cataclysm or it was torn away when Phade got embedded into the Eiken Boundary. Because it’s a rogue, Phade is cold and very, very dark. There’s barely enough heat from the planet’s core that the atmosphere doesn’t freeze. It’s breathable, too, but you need a coldsuit to last long outside. The ones they gave us to wear aren’t that great. They’re made for tourists who will only spend a couple of hours on the surface, and they smell like the last guy who wore them. I’m pretty sure I found a pubic hair on the one they gave me. I pointed it out to the guide, but she wouldn’t swap it. The ones the guides wear are a lot better.

As we flew I spent a lot of time looking for the Eiken Boundary in the darkness, but there wasn’t anything to see. The sky directly above us was smattered with stars, but beyond where I knew the boundary lay was only darkness. I felt a chill and knew I was looking down into the unimaginably vast gulf of the Devastation from only a few kilometers away.

It turns out that looking into the Devastation is exactly the same as looking into a pitch-black and starless night sky. The scriptures tell us that the heart of the Milky Way once blazed with the light of five-hundred-billion suns, but now there was nothing at all but a bleak darkness. Our seat back displays showed us the location of the sharp line of the Eiken Boundary, but out the window there was no way to tell where the planet ended and the darkness of space began.

One middle-school class every month is selected to travel to Phade as part of the church’s educational outreach program. You literally have to win the lottery. Actually, your school has to win the lottery, and the school picks one class to go. My school had an essay competition to choose which class would be the lucky winner. Mr. Anders told us to research Phade and its history and write five-hundred words on why we wanted to go. I’m pretty sure it was my essay that put it over the top. It was called A Comparative Study of the Eiken Boundary Inside and Outside of the Planetary Gravity Well at Phade. I find it fascinating that a ship in deep space can cross the Eiken Boundary without harm to its occupants, while on the surface of Phade anyone who crosses the boundary is never seen again. Boen wrote an essay about her uncle who had been an HRC officer and who had once visited Phade. Jark wrote some silly garbage about a boy who peed through the Eiken Boundary and woke up an invisible monster on the other side. Mr. Anders liked it enough to have Jark read it in class. Everybody else laughed, but I thought it was incredibly idiotic. Just like Jark.

When Mr. Anders told us six months ago that our class had won, we thought we were the luckiest kids in the Known Arc. Now, we all know better.

The pilot spotted an anomaly after only thirty minutes of cruising along the emerging terminator. We all grabbed our harnesses as he banked steeply and dropped the plane like a stone, setting it down on a rocky outcrop surrounded by sand.

The pilot turned on all the outside spotlights and the guides gave us a briefing about how to conduct ourselves out on the surface. They told us the ground was rocky and uneven and to watch our step in the low gravity. They told us to stay with our group and not to touch anything we found on the ground, not even if it looked as innocuous as a pebble. They showed us how to seal our coldsuits and turn on our headlamps. They showed us how to activate our emergency beacons in the event we got lost in the darkness. They told us that under no circumstances should we go outside the radius of the plane’s spotlights. They told us not to approach the anomaly or bother the reliquists who were tasked with examining and possibly retrieving it. We could watch from a distance, but we were not to interfere. If we saw anything that looked unusual, we were to notify a guide immediately. Finally, they told us that when we heard the boarding signal, we were to proceed immediately back to the aircraft. Anyone left behind would perish in the darkness.

Boen looked a little nervous, but I was as ready for this as I’d been for anything in my entire life. Up until this moment, all my adventures had been through the pages of a book or through the ancient stories in the scriptures. Now, here I was in one of the most exotic and dangerous places in the whole Known Arc, preparing to step foot on the most enigmatic world of all.

The thing they’d found was half buried. It looked like a black metal sphere with regularly-spaced protrusions all over its surface, about a meter in diameter, like a knobby metal beach ball. It looked new, as if it had just fallen from the sky and embedded itself into the sand. Maybe that was why the reliquists seemed so talkative. Most of the artifacts we saw in the reliquary at Rail City had been unidentifiable shards or rusted lumps. Here was some sort of mechanical relic that looked like it had been manufactured yesterday. To me it looked like one of those floating mines they used in pre-contact naval battles on Earth. I even said something to Mr. Anders, but he shushed me.

As things turned out, he should’ve listened.

I must’ve wandered a little too close to the reliquists at work because Ms. Howe abruptly yanked me back into the tight circle of my classmates, scolding me to stay with the group. A few of them laughed at me but I didn’t care. I was watching history in the making, and I was determined to make a little of it myself.

I nudged Boen and tipped my head in the direction of the rear of the group. She gave me a reluctant look but followed as I squeezed through the tight knot of kids. Nobody paid attention to us. Everyone was riveted to the professional reliquists, who were excitedly examining the beachball artifact with all sorts of scanners and cameras.

Standing away from our group but well within the floodlights of the ship was another, smaller group. There were six of them, all dressed in formal Janga robes, all white-haired and wrinkled. I’d seen them board the Chaser airplane back at Rail City, and I knew instantly why they were here.

“Those are Phaders,” I whispered to Boen. She nodded. Mr. Anders had told us about the Phader loophole in the church’s strict no-suicide doctrine. Because there was no way to prove that being submerged into the Devastation actually killed you, there was no religious law against it. Over the centuries, millions of people like the oldsters in front of us had made the pilgrimage to Phade for the sole purpose of riding the planet’s rotation into the Devastation, where they would meet their ultimate fate.

When me and my classmates re-boarded the airplane to go back to Rail City, these six people would stay here, singing the Mass Chant and facing the approaching terminator until they were consumed by it. Maybe it would kill them. Maybe they would die in agony as their bodies were consumed by the mysterious void of the Devastation. Or maybe they would be catapulted into the marvelous wonderland that scripture tells us awaits beyond the Hero’s Gate.

They seemed so excited. So happy. Their eyes shone with more light than could be explained by a reflection of the airplanes floodlights. I suddenly felt a deep, urgent, and quite terrifying jealousy. One of them, a slender woman with a long, plaited braid of gray hair looked at me and smiled. I tried to smile back, but all I could feel was an odd bitterness. Yes, I was having an adventure here today, but the journey upon which they were about to embark was so many orders of magnitude more intriguing.

Boen tugged the sleeve of my coldsuit and nodded back toward our group. I shook my head. This was the first time I’d ever been to another world, and I wasn’t about to waste the opportunity to do a little scientific exploration of my own. Frankly, I wanted a souvenir, a remembrance of this moment, which I knew in my heart would be the very first in a long string of adventures that would define my life. I tore my eyes off the old smiling woman and turned them to the task at hand.

“Over there,” I whispered, pointing to a crumbling stone wall that to my eye looked artificially constructed.

I moved to the edge of the pool of floodlights, Boen trailing reluctantly behind. I took her hand and we stood there staring into the darkness. I wasn’t sure which direction we were facing but I tried to imagine that we were pointed in the direction of the planet’s rotation, and that somewhere out there in the distance, the Eiken Boundary was rushing toward us.

I peeled open my coldsuit mask and took a deep breath of the frigid air. Next to me, Boen did the same. It was cold and frigid and dry and dusty and utterly alien. I could smell jet fuel from the airplane and something else, something clean and sweet, maybe a memory of ancient forests that blanketed Phade before the Cataclysm ten-thousand years ago.

I’ve had religious experiences before, in church, caught up in the liturgy or the Mass Chant, experiences that were transcendental and illuminating. They were nothing like this. Standing on this alien world and staring into the vast and utterly-empty maw of the Devastation I felt something I’d never felt before. I suddenly knew my place in the cosmos, and my purpose in life.

I didn’t even realize how hard I was crying until Boen squeezed my hand. I wiped my eyes and sniffled and gave her a hug. I don’t think she knew what I was feeling, and I don’t think she shared the feeling, at least not at the same level as me, but having my best friend there at my moment of epiphany meant the world to me.

We spent a few minutes examining the ancient stone wall in the dim light, looking for any artifacts or signs of the builders. Something caught my eye, and I toed it out of the sand. It was a small, round stone of some sort of white quartz, shot through with crimson mineral intrusions that made it look like a bloodshot eyeball. I glanced back toward the group to make sure that nobody was looking, then bent and scooped it up. Boen looked on disapprovingly, but didn’t say anything. I dropped it into the pocket of my coldsuit. It was my first act of archeology. Admittedly, it was more like theft and I would have gotten in a lot of trouble if anyone saw me, but nobody did. I was undeniably pleased with myself. In my pocket, I had indisputable proof that Gertrood Littlefeather had trod upon the sands of Phade.

We were making our way back to the group when it happened. One of the reliquists shouted and then everything went dark. And when I say everything, I mean…

Everything.

The floodlights vanished. All our headlamps died. The lights from everyone’s komnics went out. The blinky navigational lights on the airplane stopped blinking.

Even more scary, the jet engines, which had been idling at a low whine, spooled down to silence. Somebody shouted, and a wave of muttering fear came from my classmates.

So now I’ve caught you up on all the backstory. Boen and I managed to make it back to our clustered group by following Mr. Anders’s calm voice. There’s still no light, and no sound other than the low voices and the wind. The only sign that we haven’t been prematurely swallowed by the Devastation are the few scattered stars in the sky, which seem brighter and more numerous now that the floodlights are dark.

Before we left Earth, Mr. Anders made us all practice counting-off so that while we were traveling he could make sure none of us had wandered away. He calls out, “Count off!” and my classmates respond. I am lucky thirteen and I call out my number at the appropriate time. All twenty-one of us are here, which makes me feel better. Somebody asks, “What’s happening?”

An unfamiliar voice responds. It’s coming from the direction of the beachball artifact so I assume it’s one of the reliquists. “We may have accidentally triggered the artifact. Whatever it did, it seems to have fried all our electronics.”

The enormity of our situation hits me. We are stranded in the desert at least a hundred kilometers from Rail City. No, it’s more than that, because Rail City is rocketing away from us at 600 kph. We’ve been gone at least an hour so it’s probably more like a thousand kilometers away, and getting farther by the moment.

I felt a sudden chill, and I shout without thinking. “Is the plane’s radio working? Can we call for help?” Mr. Anders shushes me but I hear a murmur of similar questions from my classmates. The reliquist doesn’t answer.

Suddenly there’s a dim light and I recognize the shape of the plane’s cockpit windows. The light is moving, vague and green, and I can see the pilot’s shape as he does something to the controls.

One of the guides calls in a trembling voice. “Oh, yeah, I forgot. You all have emergency lightsticks on your coldsuits. They’re in a left side pocket, just under your elbow. Pull ‘em out and crack them.”

I reach for the designated spot on my coldsuit and find a tubular pouch containing a small plastic rod. I yank it out and bend it until it makes a cracking noise and it begins to glow. Around me, my fellows are doing the same, and soon the darkness is replaced by a tight huddle of scared green faces with Mr. Anders and Ms. Howe in the middle. If anything, the adults look even more scared than the kids. Boen nudges me and I notice that Mr. Anders and Ms. Howe are holding hands again. I don’t blame them. I’d probably be freaking completely out if I wasn’t holding Boen’s hand.

The reliquists are standing in a cluster near the beachball artifact. It doesn’t look any different than before, but they’ve withdrawn to a safe distance, where they seem to be arguing with each other. Inside the plane’s cockpit, I can see the pilot and copilot flipping switches in the murky green light.

“Well, this is fun,” somebody says, and I turn to find Jark standing next to me. He’s pulled the hood of his coldsuit back, and like always his hair is sticking straight up. Even our present crisis hasn’t removed the smug sneer from his face.

Jark tormented me all through primary school for being so short, but in the past year due to some miracle of teen female biology I’ve gotten a head taller than him. I can tell it bothers him, and so lately I’ve been staring pointedly down my nose at him whenever he speaks to me. Today, though, ridicule doesn’t seem appropriate, so I just nod.

“I think we’d better get everybody back on board,” says the guide, and they corral us back to the airplane’s lowered stairs. We climb into the darkened passenger compartment and silently take our seats. In front of me, I can hear the pilot and copilot talking in low, worried tones, something about the APU and the BUT and the ELB. The copilot sees me staring and gives a reassuring smile. “Don’t worry,” he says. “We’ll get her started again. Even if we don’t, the air controllers at Rail City know our location. If we don’t report in they’ll send another plane to pick us up.”

Mr. Anders hears this and repeats it to the other kids. His announcement breaks the spell of silence and suddenly the passenger compartment is filled with nervous voices and trembly teenaged laughter.

I look out the window. The reliquists are still huddled around the artifact. They seem to be arguing. In front of me, I see the pilot glance at them through the window and mutter, “No way they’re bringing that damn thing on my aircraft.”

My eyes are drawn to another pool of light in the far distance beyond the reliquists, moving slowly away. It takes me a minute to realize that it’s the Phaders. They’re marching toward their destiny, beyond the Eiken Boundary. I silently wish them well, and it almost feels like a piece of me is going with them.

It suddenly occurs to me that whatever the artifact did to our electronics might not be limited by range. What if it had knocked out the power on Rail City, too, not to mention all the other planes and shuttles at the airport? If so, every living soul on the planet was doomed. Rail City would rumble to a halt and there would be no way to evacuate the six-thousand inhabitants. We would all be Phaders.

Everybody shouts and hollers as the lights come back on. The copilot turns and winks at me with an I-told-you-so expression, but I can tell that he’s relieved, too. It only takes a moment before I hear a whine as the jets spin-up. The hum turns to a deep, satisfying rumble and everyone applauds.

Boen is smiling and laughing as the pilot comes over the intercom and tells us that he’s in contact with Rail City, and that we’ll be lifting off for the return journey shortly, just as soon as they complete their systems check to ensure that nothing was permanently damaged.

Ms. Howe looks especially happy. Her eyes are bright with relief and she’s holding both of Mr. Anders’s hands clutched tightly in his lap. Mr. Anders is breathing rapidly like he’s just run a marathon. His eyes are bright too. He glances at me and raises his eyebrows, then winks. Mr. Anders is such a cool guy. He gets me, more than anybody else, even my parents. Especially my parents. I’m going to miss him when I start high school next year.

Eventually two of the reliquists board the plane, looking in equal measures excited, scared, and dejected. Apparently the spectacular artifact out there is simply to dangerous to recover in an aircraft filled with middle-school kids. If it were me, I’d risk it, but the pilot is having none of it. I can hear him on the radio calling for a different aircraft to recover the artifact. He has a quick, heated discussion with the reliquists before ordering them to take their seats. They insist on staying with their companions outside to wait for the next airplane, claiming that the artifact is simply too unique to leave behind. The pilot shrugs and reminds them that the replacement aircraft might suffer the same fate as this one, and if it loses power in flight they will all be killed.

This doesn’t seem to bother the reliquists. One of them is a woman with dark hair and dark eyes who reminds me of what my mom looked like when she was younger. I catch the woman’s eye and for an instant I can see a great depth, a burning intellectual curiosity to which I immediately relate. I’ve never seen anything like it in my classmates or friends, or even in the adults I know. I feel an immediate and powerful kinship. This woman has purpose. A big, grandiose purpose. She’s trying to understand the hidden ways of the cosmos. I look at the red-and-yellow Corps of Reliquists badge she wears on her shoulders and I try to imagine what it would be like to have a job that on a daily basis sends you to the most exotic places in and beyond the Known Arc, searching for ancient relics and studying the fabulous civilizations lost in the Cataclysm.

She seems to sense my thoughts, and her eyes wrinkle. She nods solemnly, and I take it as an invitation. She may not realize it, but her brief glance and smile has beckoned me toward a life I never before imagined.

The sand blown up by the jets briefly obscures the scene outside, but as soon as we climb a few dozen meters I can see the circle of reliquists around the artifact, bathed in the subdued green light of their glowsticks. They look like the prophets of old around a magical altar, perhaps summoning the spirits of the avatars. I can’t tell which one is the woman who caught my eye, but it doesn’t matter. As soon as we get back to Rail City and I have a chance, I’m going to ask Mr. Anders what it takes to become a reliquist.

Something catches my eye far in the distance, a dim, slowly moving speck that looks like the light cast by a firefly. The Phaders have walked a long way, longer than I would’ve thought possible. My komnic still isn’t working so I don’t know what time it is, but I guess they have less than six hours before the Eiken Boundary sweeps over their location. As we climb, the firefly-light fades away.

Boen is smiling at me.

“What?” I say defensively.

Her eyes twinkle with gently mocking delight. “You haven’t said a word in five minutes.  I don’t think you’ve ever gone that long without talking. What’s wrong with you? Why aren’t you trying to explain something?”

“Bite me,” I say.

We both settle into our seats. She’s right, for the time being I don’t feel much like talking. For the flight back to Rail City, I’m on the side of the plane facing the emerging terminator and the empty skies of the Devastation. I press my face against the glass of the window and stare into the void. Maybe it’s just me, I mean, I do have an overactive imagination, but I swear to you that the longer I look, the more it feels like something inside the Devastation is staring back.

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Story copyright 2021 Patrick Cumby.

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