Unity by Elly Bangs (free e reader txt) 📕

“Condition black.” She took her headset down with shaking hands. “Oh God. It’s just repeating condition black. It’s—” I heard her voice die in her throat, and when I looked again her left eye had been replaced by a smoking charcoal cave.

Duke blew the vapor from the vents of his wave pistol and held it above his head. “Anyone else want to disobey a direct order? We are not at condition black. It’s a deception. Norpak hacked our satellite.”

But from somewhere in the crowd of Medusas, I heard a voice muttering, “Epak is gone. It’s all gone. Everyone’s dead.”

“Who said that?” Duke bellowed. “Step forward!”

No one moved.

“I said show yourself!”

Kat and I exchanged glances. We lowered our heads and started to very carefully step back from the convoy.

“Stinking traitors,” Duke hissed. He brandished a second pistol and started shoving his way through the ranks in the vague direction of the mumblings. “The next one of you—”

He cried out in pain and crumpled, clutching at a waver burn to his side.

“They’re all dead because of you!” someone shouted, and then trailed off into an uneven gurgle. In the space of a few seconds the entire convoy erupted in a symphony of waver shrieks.

Kat and I dove back behind the wheels of our rover, not daring to enter any line of sight with the bloodbath. Crazed and guttural shouts of panic and disbelief and rage rang out over the dust. We were close enough to hear the hiss of the burns. All we could do was hide and watch the ground around us sparkle and darken into circles of glass, like dry earth under fat raindrops.

Grenades detonated. Motors flared to life and died again. Metal crunched against metal. Throats let out blood-curdling screams and trailed off until only a chorus of faint moans remained. The smell of burning plastic and fat wafted over us.

We let a few minutes pass before we dared to look.

A few of the Medusas were still dying—those whose armor had absorbed one or two direct hits before overheating—but by the dim, flickering light of three burning rovers we couldn’t identify any survivable injuries.

We had all the fuel and water we could possibly need now, but I couldn’t find the will to say it.

“I was bluffing,” Kat said in a lifeless, shell-shocked voice. “About the Gray box. It self-terminated years ago.”

“Good thing you were able to hack the satellite,” I said.

She was kneeling by a fallen Medusa. She stared up at me and said nothing.

“Didn’t you?”

She looked down again.

I heard a sound and turned, and there was Duke, half-hidden under the smoking corpses of his personal guards. He’d taken a direct hit to the chest but was still rasping out his last shallow breaths. I knelt down to him, and he looked me in the eye and grinned, showing the blood between his teeth.

“Duke, what does condition black mean?”

He waved me closer. When I bent down, he clamped his enormous, gene-hacked hands around my neck and squeezed, just short of hard enough to crush my windpipe.

“If I can’t have it . . . no one can,” he said. Then he hacked violently, and his hot blood splattered the side of my face. The pressure on my larynx abruptly ebbed.

“If I can’t have . . . what?” I coughed. “What is ‘it’?”

Duke’s body twitched a few more times and then stilled.

In a daze, Kat answered for him:

“Everything.”

DANAE

I didn’t dare to ask a second time where the Whole was leading me, or what punishment they had planned, but with every step I was more afraid of the answer. Exile, or death, or whatever form of ‘isolation’ the Keepers had all been subjected to, would all have been over and done by now. Instead we kept moving deeper into the heart of this unfathomable place, and I was left to wonder if my punishment would be something as far beyond my comprehension as the structure around me.

The artery-corridor was frighteningly quiet. There was no noise except the shuffle of my two frayed boots and the nearly silent patter of the Whole’s many small feet—but very gradually I made out another sound: a soft white noise that resolved itself as we drew closer, becoming a din of overlapping human voices—

Some of them were screams. My heart was hammering in my chest as we reached the end of the corridor, but my other self’s bodies pulled me onward.

The great spherical chamber was overflowing with images and sounds, charts, graphs, numbers—blood. There was so much to absorb that for a moment I couldn’t make out anything, couldn’t bring any single aspect of it into focus, and then I realized:

I was seeing the war. All of it at once.

Land cities burned. Aquapolises imploded under pressure, module by module. People were running and fighting and sitting in wait, quietly conferring with each other, lying dead in piles—and ever present, behind every particular vision of suffering, was the relentless and churning expansion of the Gray. Glimpses of surging quicksilver lined every surface and coursed through the air.

“This is everything my eyes show me,” the Whole said.

At least a hundred child-clones were gathered throughout the chamber, dispassionately absorbing the torrent of imagery and data, now nodding their heads to focus the Whole’s will. Everything dimmed slightly and pulled back, bringing a single projection of the entire Earth into prominence at the center of the space. Like everything else, it looked impossibly real, from its cloud tops glittering with lightning storms, to its oceans and deserts and nuclear scars—and as I watched it turn, I saw that something was projected onto it in a patchwork of red and yellow and orange borders, as if the whole Earth was growing mold.

“Is that the Gray?” I asked in horror. “This is in real time?”

My other self nodded their myriad, identically young heads.

The false-color patches now covered nearly the entire Pacific Ocean and had already grown up onto