Page 18 of Godslayer
Which is a lie. Because Idoknow what to do about it.
I don’t have any spark inside of me to give her. To replenish her.
But that’s what she needs.
And I know where to get it.
I don’t need Clara’s energy toseeother worlds. And as I think these words in my head, without even looking through my data display for frequencies, the worlds begin to appear. A chaotic and simultaneous overlapping, hundreds of layers deep.
It would be very easy to reach over and take what I need. The problem is, this particular space, on whatever grid is organizing all these worlds, doesn’t seem to be inhabited by anyone because we’re not only underground, we’re hidden from the train line. This place, in the same space in other worlds, is probably just rock.
There’s no spark to steal.
At least, easily.
Because the odds that there is no spark here at all, are so low, they might as well be zero, and here’s why:
Frequency is limitless. There are an unlimited number of frequencies because it comes in fractions, not whole numbers. Even if I only take the decimals out to three places, that’s aninfinite number of options.Infinite. Meaning, if I look long enough, Iwillfind someone to steal spark from.
But just because Icando something, doesn’t mean I should.
Unless it comes to saving Clara Birch.
Will she recover on her own?
I can’t know. Maybe she does, maybe she doesn’t.
So I have to look. I have no choice.
I hold her tight as I go inward, sifting through all the overlapping worlds crowding my overlay. One by one, I go through them. One by one, I find nothing.
It takes me hours to find a single worker, but there’s something wrong with it. It doesn’t have any spark to steal, for one. And it’s also… alien.
It looks human. A gleaming and smooth white body with arms and legs. But it’s not skin or clothes that it’s wearing. It’s some kind of carapace. Like a suit. And it’s got no face, so that must be a helmet.
A soldier?
No.
It’s not a soldier.
It’s abot.
Just thinking the word makes me shudder. Bots were outlawed so long ago, I couldn’t even tell you the date. Back when the gods first took over the world after the sandy Sweep covered everything, leaving nothing but dunes in its wake.
I stare at it for a few minutes, gazing across the veil. Wondering what it’s doin’. But then, the woman I’m holding in my arms shifts, pulling my full attention back to her.
Her face is nearly transparent now. Little blue veins appear under the thin skin of her cheeks and neck. Little spidery lines that scare the shit out of me as I hold her limp body in my arms.
I keep looking.
When I finally find a place that registers spark, I realize it’s been half a day since I started the search and Clara is nothing but a limp body in my arms. She’s still breathing, but for how long?
I turn my attention to the world with the spark signature, tryin’ to make sense of it. Because it’s not an empty room like the one we’re in, it’s a cave filled with massive cyan-blue crystals. The frequency associated with this place is extraordinarily low. 0.1440.
Which mimics the frequency of my own Delta City, but in an extremely low-energy way. And this contradicts what I’m lookin’ at. Because I’m getting the impression that those crystals are pure spark.
Did I just stumble into the source of everythin’?
