Parallel Read online

  “You’ve been—” the Healer began to say.

  Take me to her, Aurora, Falia said to Aurora. The translocation band on her arm released a burst of light that tore a hole through time and space. Falia stepped through before the Healer could finish her sentence.

  Falia’s stomach twisted and kinked, spilling over and under itself. Traveling across Dimensions did not involve actual motion, but her body responded to the sensation with intense vertigo.

  She exhaled softly through her nose, waiting for the spiraling dizziness to subside. Firm ground appeared beneath her feet along with a brightly lit hallway strewn with alien bodies. The Graesian High Lord Tzalear lay curled on his side. His leg twitched intermittently between shallow breaths. Despite her best effort, Falia could not establish a connection with the Graesian’s shattered mind. He was not dead. Nor was he fully alive.

  Ryol’s crumpled body lying in a pool of silver blood obliterated any pity Falia might have felt for the Graesian.

  Falia screamed in a way only a mother losing a child can. Her pain stretched across the galaxy and shook the alien world. She cradled Ryol’s limp body as if Ryol were only a sleeping child, and wept, lost to the world in a flood of memories that blurred the line between reality and mere thought.

  Falia scoured her daughter’s mind for a flicker of life. Nothing remained, but still she clawed at the enamel of Ryol’s quieted mind in vain hope of tearing away the wall of death’s prison.

  Falia held her daughter and succumbed to the anguish, shedding tears that carried pieces of her soul.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Chereal

  Chereal meandered up the hillside, stopping occasionally to stoop and run his fingers through the closely manicured grass and purple flowers stuck in the act of opening their buds to the perpetual mid-afternoon day. At the top he looked down at the silver waters of the Trisbel River, which had not moved an inch in over three hundred years. It wound through the countryside before spilling over the edge of a thousand-foot drop.

  World’s End waterfall had been a spectacular sight centuries earlier when the waters still flowed. Now, droplets of water hung suspended in the air, destined never to find the bottom. The river, frozen by time, brought a tear to the engineer’s eye. Beauty and perfection were hollow imitations if not allowed to live and breathe. Chereal pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed the moisture from his cheek.

  The warm air was not stale despite the lack of wind or movement. He grunted slightly as he took a seat on the thin metal bench beside the living statue of a woman he still loved.

  “Another year,” he said to the woman and to the world. “It’s been a busy year. We’ve acquired three new worlds into the Alliance. They are young, but possess much potential. You would approve.”

  Chereal folded his hands in his lap and waited for a response he knew would never come. He sighed heavily before continuing.

  “We have yet to find another world with Eitr. I wish you would have let us use Earth.” Chereal looked into Falia’s frozen eyes. They caught the sunset at the perfect angle, making them appear to twinkle. The weak simulation of life and thought hiding beneath her frozen exterior made his heart ache with nostalgia.

  “But I understand why you refused. I do not argue it anymore. If nothing else, according to your predictions, the humans have another six hundred and twenty-three years before they are ready to join the Alliance. Perhaps then we can pull you from this Temporal Freeze.”

  The bench creaked beneath Chereal’s weight as he shifted to look at the high-reaching glass towers to his right. The sprawling city of Estria. The sleeping city. So different than the craggy buildings built into the cliff sides of Oleid. He wanted to return home. Home to the quiet city.

  “I know you’ll be sad to hear of planet Graes’ collapse. It was inevitable, I suppose. Little good their stolen Lenorean technology did them without Eitr. It’s absurd to think they succeeded in killing you in another Dimension. I’m glad that is no place I have ever seen. I don’t know what I would do in a Universe without you, Faliana.” Chereal placed a hand atop the woman’s. He felt the ambient warmth of her flesh beneath his.

  “Even if you are just sleeping. You look peaceful here, living in your mind with memories of Ryol. They’re every bit as real as this, I imagine. I envy that. Part of me dreads the day we find the solution to pull you from this stasis and return the Lenoreans to their rightful place amongst the Universe.” Chereal dabbed a second tear which was forming.

  “Then she truly will be gone. Living only in your dreams. I wonder if you’ll even want to return. I hope you do. The Universe shines a little less brightly without you in it.

  “Oh, but don’t listen to me. I’m a lonely old man appreciating the days of his youth now that it’s too late to do anything with them.” Chereal sighed. The weight of his years pressed upon him. “It is beautiful here. A perfect place to spend eternity if need be. Perhaps someday when Oleid’s sun dies, I’ll come join you.”

  Chereal hoisted his large frame from the bench and bent slightly to place a kiss on the frozen woman’s brow.

  “Until then, dream well, Madam Leader.”

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  TIME HEIST

  CHAPTER ONE EXCERPT

  The numbers on my arm said I'd be dead soon. Staring at them won't change that fact, so I don't.

  When you're a kid they tell you the numbers are never wrong. But part of you hopes that's a lie grown-ups tell children, 'cause seventy years doesn't seem very long.

  When you're a kid, dying's pretty much the worst thing in the world.

  It's not.

  Explaining that to the guy jabbering on the barstool beside me, however, would be a tough sell. One I didn't care to make. He called himself George, but it wasn't difficult imagining his friends and loved ones in the Uppers calling him Georgie.

  Now, say what you will about Georgie and his perspective on life and death—the kid had balls. The fact that he was down deep, drinking in this particular corner of the Lowers, however, didn't suggest he had much for brains. Oh well, can't win 'em all.

  There are good reasons why lost souls from the Uppers don't wander past the Middles for their life-affirming brushes with death. Mainly because you don't just brush death in the Lowers. Around here, death is an all or nothing sort of gig.

  Georgie cradled a glass of beer as if holding the damn thing was the same as drinking it. "How much time you got?" he asked.

  It's not polite to ask a man about his time. It's a social faux pas, if you will. But when you spend as much time on a barstool as I do, you allow for a certain amount of faux pas-ery.

  Georgie didn't understand the delicate interplay between this social custom and not getting stabbed in the Lowers. Didn’t understand that there's a time and place for everything. Walking out of Lucky Lou's with blood in your veins is all sorts of wrong if you go flashing the world your remaining time—especially if you have as little as me.

  People get weird around a dead man. They get to thinking they can do things that maybe they shouldn't. 'Cause murder is murder, but you'd likely find the Lord Almighty in a more forgiving mood if the asshole whose clock you’d cleaned only had a couple hours to live anyways.

  If there's a God I'm sure he'd understand the economics of the situation and give his blessing. If not, well, I don't suppose that's any kind of god a man in the Lowers would worship anyhow.

  But I had nowhere else to be and anyone wanting my time could have it for all the good it had done me—so I humored the kid. I pulled back the faded leather sleeve of my jacket and showed him what remained of my Life Tracker: three half-moon circles glowing red. The outermost circle shrank with every passing second.

  Georgie's eyes tried to jump out of his skull. The vein running the link between heart and brain via his throat did some sort of throbbing dance.

  "You have less than a day," Georgie said, shouting his mathematical prowess for the room to hear.

  On the tail end of such a bold proclamation it was in my best interest to give at least a half-assed look over my shoulder. In my experience, that's where people prefer to sneak up on you.

  Neon tubes buzzed and flickered on the ceiling, casting beams of light through the smoke-hazed room. Bass, loud enough to be heard in the Middles, shivered across the floor before ascending the legs of my stool and rooting itself to my ass like a leech.

  Lucky Lou's clientele come in a variety of shapes and sizes. A little bit of everything. Unity's grand mixing pot.

  In one corner guys with shifty eyes hawk their mind-altering nanites: Angel Dust, Quick Sliver, Pandora's Shame—you name it, they’ve got it. And they know you want it. Life in the Lowers isn't worth facing without something blunting the ragged edges.

  I had my fix of the Quick sitting at home waiting for me. It occurred to me, then, that being there, wrapped in the drug's loving embrace, might be preferable to Georgie's company. I would have made that exodus if not for the half glass of someone's bastardized interpretation of alcohol staring me down from the bar top. Soon.

  A squat metal cage sat in a shallow pit behind the dance floor. It was big enough for two fools with more aggression than brains to jump into the Stream and dream up ever more creative ways of killing one another for the amusement of Lucky Lou's patrons. Normally that's where I'd be. Fighting in the cage, getting my fix of the Stream. But seeing as how I'd be dead in less than twenty-four hours, I figured I deserved a night off.

  Between pixies grinding to the fluttering rhythm of their own heartbeats and Dusters flopping around in pools of their own bodily fluids, nobody seemed overly interested in Georgie's declaration of my remaining time. That's good; few people at Lou's would think twice before resolving a questionable business transaction with the rusted end of a knife.

  Yeah, I'm dead soon anyhow, but I plan to die on my own pitiful terms.

  "Don't you have someplace you'd rather be?" Georgie asked, leaning in close as if he were sharing a particularly juicy secret.

  "Nope."

  "But you're dying."

  "So are you," I said, saluting with my glass of rocket fuel before pouring a bit more of that clear liquid down my perpetually chapped throat.

  Georgie flinched. He instinctively turned his forearm away from me, as if that would help him if I decided to take his time. I had no interest in that. Interestingly enough, I was probably the only guy in Lou's who could say that with a straight face.

  "You don't have family you want to be with or something?" Georgie asked.

  "Kid, listen up, 'cause I don't know how much longer I got 'til that alcohol starts playing whack-a-mole with my brain cells. Hell, this might be my last moment of lucidity," I said, polishing off the remainder of my drink. "You need to stop worrying about me, and spend some time figuring out how you're gettin' out of here with all that time still on your arm."

  I belched to emphasize my point.

  Georgie ran a handful of fingers with nails polished to a high sheen through his finely coiffed hair. "What do you mean?"

  "What I mean is, you don't belong here."

  "How do you know?"

  "You're too clean," I said, "and that glass of inebriation in your hands hasn't made the journey to your mouth all night."

  Georgie studied his glass. The cogs were turning. He wanted to take a drink and prove me wrong, but he didn't want to sacrifice any of the time he'd so carefully hoarded over the years. You can tell the time hoarders. The ones too terrified to live for fear of dying. The ones who work up the courage to do something real dumb, instead of only a little dumb.

  Georgie had decided to do something real dumb; he came to the Lowers.

  "So? I'm a citizen of Unity," he said. "I can be here if I want."

  "Sure, being here doesn't pose a
problem. Leaving does."

  The kid pushed his stool away from the bar, its metal legs screeching against the floor. "You planning on stopping me?"

  I chuckled and pushed my empty mug down the bar. It slid along gouged grooves in the wood until a stick thin woman behind the counter stopped it with one hand while her other spun a tumbler full of unknown liquid with the skill and dexterity of a circus performer. She winked and blew a kiss through puckered lips. I leaned back to be sure it would miss and turned to Georgie.

  "You see that guy?" I said, hooking a thumb towards a man sitting at the opposite end of the bar. Half his face was hidden by shadows, the other half by a thin-brimmed hat pulled down over his eyes. Even from thirty feet I could see the scar running from his chin to his ear.

  "What about him?" The bottom-right corner of Georgie's lip twitched in an off-rhythm beat to his finger tapping the bar.

  "That's Jack Dunn. You ever heard of Jack Dunn?"

  Georgie shook his head no.

  "Figures. You never heard of him 'cause news from the Lowers doesn't make it to the Uppers. News, like shit, trickles down. You've heard stories of what it's like down here, hell, some of them might even be true. But you don't understand the severity of your situation, because you don't really understand where you are. This ain't Unity; this is the Lowers."

  I knew this because I'd once lived in the Uppers. Two miles straight up from where we now sat. Above ground with the sun.

  I ran a thumb along the ridge of the silver ring hanging from a chain around my neck, rolling its smooth edges between my fingers. A reminder of life before this. A reminder of Diana.

  The kid's head swiveled back and forth, studying the bar—and the general caliber of man therein—as if seeing it all for the first time. He swallowed hard, Adam's apple bobbing. "So, who's Jack Dunn?"