He looked uncomfortably at his hands. “Kind of strong. Like I downed an energy drink.”

“Just wait,” Serassi said, and then her face broke into a smile. “It will grow. It will spread. First humans will feel stronger physically, as you two are already experiencing. Be capable of running faster, greater strength. Then greater intelligence will come. A more sophisticated moral sensibility. Then, in time, perceptive powers will develop. Don’t you see?”

She looked among them all. “It worked. The Gauntlet. I don’t know how Cora did it, but it worked.” She glanced at the symbols scrolling across the screen, lips moving silently as she tried to piece it together. “If she had failed, the stock algorithm would have stopped broadcasting those scrolling symbols, but they’re still going. Ah! I see my mistake now. I thought the symbol meant fall, but it didn’t. It meant jump. Cora jumped intentionally. She . . . she sacrificed herself symbolically. She won the moral puzzle. She won the Gauntlet.”

Mali gasped. Cora won.

Mali could barely process such a revolutionary concept, except that her mind seemed to be working faster than it ever had before. She scrolled quickly through what this meant—that the tingle in her fingers was the evolutionary jump. That she was one of the first humans it would happen to, and soon she’d be more perceptive, smarter, stronger.

But . . .

“But she’s still gone?” Mali asked.

Serassi must have heard the uncertain tone in her voice. “I’m afraid so. The screen is very clear about the death symbol.” She paused. “But she didn’t die for nothing.”

Mali felt dizzy again. Cora had won, but at such a heavy price. She glanced at the Axion guarding the door. His back was still turned. He hadn’t seen the information on the monitor, and neither had any other Axion, judging by the repetitive thunking in the central vestibule as his colleagues still tried to break into the portal door, not knowing that it was futile now. Not knowing the Gauntlet was already over.

“Serassi, if you’re experiencing the evolutionary jump too, if you’re stronger, do you think you can free us?” Mali whispered.

Serassi smiled in cold determination. She stood, stalking silently toward the Axion guard. She ran her fingers through her loose hair, twisting it back into a fresh knot, looking even more powerful and deadly than she always had.

The other captured Kindred along the opposite wall were all glancing at one another, and if Mali had to guess, they were exchanging psychic messages.

“I don’t get it,” Leon whispered. “What’s going on?”

“Watch,” Mali said. “And wait.”

Mali’s heart thumped hard as Serassi moved behind the guard. The guard heard her a second before she attacked and he turned, but Serassi moved impossibly fast, knitting her fingers in the air as Anya had done. The Axion went rigid. Serassi continued to move her fingers. The Axion started moving in a swaying way, no longer in control of his own body. He took a swaying step toward the rear of the room, toward the wall that had been torn off. Then another. The captives moved back, letting him pass. Serassi guided him all the way to the end of the room, where the floor abruptly ended in a twenty-foot drop into twisting, sharp wreckage.

The Axion stepped off and fell to his death.

Serassi turned, staring at her hands. “I’ve never been able to do that before. Take control of another’s mind and command their body. The evolutionary jump worked.” She looked at the other Kindred prisoners with a steady gaze that meant they were exchanging messages telepathically. Almost as one, the other Kindred stood.

“You must still be quiet,” Mali said. “The Axion will hear you.”

“Let them.” Serassi glanced over her shoulder as the Kindred prisoners strode purposefully toward the door. “We’re done being captives. They aren’t stronger than us anymore, and they’re about to feel justice.”

The Kindred started spilling out into the central vestibule. Redrage joined them, and even the Gatherer prisoner. Leon grabbed Mali, holding her back, but he needn’t have bothered. She was too stunned by all this information, and the sensation in her body, to be able to fight yet. Was this happening to all humans, everywhere? To Nok and Rolf on Armstrong? Even to the ones back on Earth? They stopped at the door, watching as the surprised Axion tried to defend themselves from the Kindred.

The battle happened fast.

The Kindred were not vindictive. They were not bloodthirsty or after revenge. They were simply cold and efficient as they and their Mosca and Gatherer compatriots dispatched every Axion traitor in the room.

Throats sliced.

Skulls crushed through telekinesis.

“You know what this means,” Leon said. “This means the same thing is happening throughout the galaxy. To all the planets and stations with humans and Kindred on them. The Axion won’t last long.” He wrapped an arm around Mali’s waist. “It means we’re free now. We can go to Theta and get Anya back!”

She thought of Anya—the real Anya. She’d finally be able to repay her friend for all the times Anya had saved her life. And even better, she’d be with Leon. Together they’d rescue Anya, just as they’d freed Cassian. She smiled, thinking of being trapped in the shuttle’s lining with him, pressed so close. How she’d been so hesitant to trust him—to trust anyone.

Not anymore.

He leaned forward and pressed a kiss to her forehead. “Wherever we go, we’ll go there together. I promise.”

And she believed him. “We could go back to our solar system. Learn if Earth is still there,” she said.

Leon looked down at her. The storm was making the structure shake violently, but Mali felt as though they were tucked away in some other place: the calm eye of the storm. She and Leon. And now there was a real future for them, where she might be able to find her family and return to the desert where she’d been born.

She laughed.

“What?” he asked.

“Despite your best efforts,” she said, “you couldn’t avoid being a hero.”

He rolled his eyes, but the corners of his mouth curled upward. “Keep that to yourself.”

They watched from the recess room as the Kindred soldiers dispatched the last of the Axion with deadly precision. Mali flexed her fingers. She had transformed into something new: a new type of human, one more capable and, she hoped, wiser.

“Everything is working out,” she said, but felt that pang of darkness. “Except Cora isn’t here.”

Leon hugged her close, rubbing a hand down her back. He didn’t need to offer reassuring words; they could feel each other’s sadness and gratitude for Cora’s sacrifice. No matter how much Mali knew Cora had done something world changing, she couldn’t shake her sadness.

“I can’t believe she’s gone.” She let out a sob. And then more. She’d cried so rarely. Was this what it meant to be human? To feel such sorrow?

Leon kept rubbing her back as she rested her forehead against his chest. Then his hand stopped, and she felt his breathing go still as footsteps approached.

Mali jerked upright, wiping away the tears.

Cassian stood in the ruins of the central vestibule.

Blood streaked down one of his arms. His fingers were shredded as though he’d climbed out of the jagged wreckage of the puzzle chambers with his bare hands. The lines of his face were heavy with exhaustion, but there was determination written there too, along with a sheen in his eyes—the evolutionary jump.

“Cassian, you’re alive!” she said.

He gave a single nod. “Come with me. This isn’t over yet.”

Mali frowned as she and Leon pushed to their feet. “You mean the battle?”

“The battle will continue until the Axion are defeated—but in the meantime, we have something just as important to do.”

Cassian motioned for them to follow him as he stepped over the uneven floor. His movements were quick, anxious. Mali scrambled behind him as he led them through the devastation of the central vestibule, toward the place where the portal door had onc

e been. Now it was broken, crumpled in on itself, the opening crunched to only a foot high. Cassian dropped down to his stomach to crawl through.

“We’re going into the puzzle chambers?” Mali asked in alarm.

“Yes, and we must hurry,” Cassian said, “before the storm does any more damage.” He was already crawling through the narrow space. His head disappeared into the chamber, then his torso, then his feet. Mali glanced at Leon.

He shrugged and dropped to his stomach.

They followed Cassian through the damaged portal door. Mali’s heartbeat thumped as she spilled out into a room with gridlike panels on the walls, the ceiling halfway torn off, lights flickering. Her breath stilled. She knew the puzzles were over. Yet for years she’d heard rumors about the Gauntlet, and she still expected some shocking illusion to appear at any moment.

“We’re going after Cora, aren’t we?” she asked.

Cassian nodded. “This way.”

“But she’s dead. Serassi saw it on the monitors. It was real. It had to be or else the evolutionary jump wouldn’t have happened.”

“It was real,” Cassian confirmed as they climbed through a maze of identical chambers, each one more devastated than the last. The wreckage sliced Mali’s hands, bruising her knees as they dropped down from trapdoors and crawled through broken wall seams. Sparks snapped and popped as the storm continued to rage outside. “Cora did sacrifice herself,” he continued, moving quickly to try to beat the storm. “She fully believed that she would die when she jumped, which is what the morality puzzle required.”

He shuffled through a torn wall seam, then dropped to his knees, leaning over something on the floor. Mali and Leon pushed their way through the seam behind him, spilling out into another wrecked puzzle chamber. Mali froze.

“Cora,” she breathed.

Tags: Megan Shepherd The Cage Science Fiction
Source: readsnovelonline.net