Underland Press

By Simon Drax
July 13, 2009

* * *

The loudest voice in the world boomed,

"DON'T DO ANYTHING, YOU'VE DONE ENOUGH."

Oh, those idiots had nearly ruined it, ruined everything. Trista cursed in a language long dead, words never used by a human tongue. She gathered her weapons in a single sweep—short curved blade, her amulet and staff—and then Trista was at the Numi portal, bracing herself for the barest of seconds before she went through.

The Numi portal was flat and shimmering, an upright, door-sized panel of light that hovered and pulsed in the center of a spectacularly messy apartment, every inch of the walls covered with arcane equations and occult diagrams, X-Rays and weather charts and cybernetic schematics. Trista tensed at the humming edge of the portal, her frame lithe, her skin pale amber. Her hair was white, the color of bleached bone, cut in utilitarian pageboy. She looked like a teenager. She was more than 650,000 years old.

Gathering her strength for the pain of the crossing—and the battle to come—Trista shouted, "COVER YOUR EYES, IDIOTS, I'M COMING THROUGH," and she leapt shoulder-first into the thin glowing frame. There was a jagged flash and WHAM! of collapsed air, and Trista Ska Shearn, last survivor of the ancient Cantaran race was gone, somewhere else.

Somewhere else: a city of stone and steel and tall brooding towers, a city that shuddered under a sky gone mad, a sky turned nightmare.

Moments earlier it had been night. It had been raining.

Not now: now the sky burned an alien orange. Now a massive shadow the size of a planet descended like an inverted cup, stretching wider and wider over the city, a dome of lowering black. Winds howled and screams filled the trash-swirled air, sirens and alarms and scattered cries, the low-throated crack and crunch of buckling concrete, streets and buildings stretched to the limits of their structural endurance.

And on every monitor, every screen, every page, everywhere across the planet, two words burned: EXIT VECTOR.

Deep in the bowels of the city, in the dim light of a club wracked by combat and carnage, Billy Wolfgang and Saint Frost knelt over Mori Kim Marr's prone and lifeless body. "She—!"

There was a crackle, an explosion of light. "—COMING THROUGH!" A thick tube of blinding white energy slashed from one wall, shot across the ruined club and disappeared through the wall opposite, a wall that stopped an airborne and blur-streaked Trista. She bounced off, fell like a rag doll to the floor, steam curling from her limbs.

"Trista!"

"We didn't—!"

"Don't..." Trista grimaced, rising to her elbows, wisps of grey lifting about her face, an unpleasant odor wafting. The Numi teleport had melted the clothes on her body, reduced the fabric to ripped steaming shreds. She clawed toward Billy and Frost. "Don't... say... anything..."