Mindee Arnett - Avalon

She backed away from him, her wide, tear-reddened eyes fixed on his face. She was afraid of him. Of course she was. He’d just killed a man right in front of her. An ache far deeper than muscle flourished inside his chest.

“Step back, Jeth,” Vince said. Jeth did so, reeling with guilt.

Sierra reached out and pulled Cora toward her, embracing her in a tight hug. “It’s okay, Cora. It’s okay. You’ve got to calm down. Remember what we talked about?”

Cora pulled away from Sierra, her expression confused.

The soldiers were banging on the door now, threatening to break through.

Cora’s screams grew even louder, the terrible noise like something being rent alive.

“Calm down, Cora. Calm down,” Sierra said.

Something like an electrical charge began to swell inside the room. Cora’s shrieks seemed to pierce Jeth’s skull. He dropped to his knees, the gun slipping from his fingers. He bent over, hands pressed against his ears, trying to block it out. Around him the others were doing the same. Except for Sierra, who was trying in vain to calm the now-hysterical Cora.

A sound like ripping metal mixed in with the screams. Jeth forced his head up, looking for the source of the new noise. A giant hole had appeared in the wall to his right, giving him a clear view of the kid center. Beyond it, he saw more holes appearing before his eyes, as if that first one had been a pebble dropped into still water.

Anything in the path of those holes either vanished completely or was sliced in half. The rock wall came crashing down as a hole tore through its base. Jeth watched in horror as more than a dozen soldiers fell, their bodies in pieces.

Cora kept on screaming, the sound out of control now. The lights began to flicker and the floor to shake. Jeth looked left as another hole appeared on the opposite wall. This one was smaller than the first one, but it wasn’t empty. Pieces of the soldiers cut down in the other room were inside it, their bodies phased into the wall itself.

“Stop it, Cora,” Sierra was saying. “You’ve got to stop, sweetie.”

Jeth looked back and saw some of the remaining soldiers had worked up the courage to peer through the first hole. In a moment, they would be inside. Jeth closed his eyes, summoning the will to pick up the gun in front of him. It was so hard to move with Cora’s screams inside his head. He grabbed hold of the hilt and managed to point it one-handed toward the soldiers.

A hot, searing pain went through his hand, and a scream tore from his throat. He looked down to see the gun had vanished.

So had his fingers. They’d been sliced off at the knuckles.

Jeth gripped his wrist with his uninjured hand, too shocked to scream again. There wasn’t any blood, as if the phase had cauterized the cut, but there was plenty of pain. He was sick with it, his head spinning and his stomach gripped with nausea.

“Jeth!” Lizzie screamed. She crawled over to him and grabbed his shoulders. Jeth wanted to push her away but couldn’t. His entire body was locked down by the agony rolling through him.

All the while, Cora kept screaming. Another hole appeared in the floor in front of Jeth, less than a meter from him and Lizzie.

Lizzie let go of him and turned toward Cora. She grabbed her hand. “Make it stop, Cora. He’s our brother. Our brother ! Don’t you know what that is? Don’t you understand?”

Cora’s screams lessened a fraction in intensity. Jeth slumped forward, as if the strength of those screams alone had been holding him up.

“Please, Cora. Concentrate,” Sierra said.

Cora’s screams abruptly ceased.

Gathering what remained of his energy, Jeth turned his head to look at her. She stood encircled by Lizzie and Sierra, both of them kneeling in front of her, holding her hands.

“Send us away from here,” Sierra said. “You can save us, Cora. Send us to the ship. All of us. You remember Avalon, right? And Milton? And Viggo? They’re there, waiting for us. Come on, Cora. Come on.”

“I’m sorry, Cora,” Jeth said, somehow managing to speak through his delirium. His voice sounded no louder than a whisper, yet somehow she must’ve heard him as she shifted her gaze toward him. Her dark eyes glistened with tears. There was something so familiar about her, Jeth realized. Something comforting. He gasped. “You look just like her,” he said, seeing the resemblance for the first time. “So much like Mom.”

Then Jeth rolled onto his back as blackness began to slip over his eyes like ink pooling around the edges of his vision.

And just before he felt himself go under, a bright light filled his gaze.

And then there was nothing.

Nothing at all.

JETH DREAMED HE WAS TRAVELING THROUGH METASPACE, only the gate he had used was faulty, the Pyreans afflicted with a nameless disease. Then he saw those Pyreans. They swarmed around him, no longer hard and stationary like he was used to, but fluid and moving like fish swimming in the ocean or leaves caught in the wind. They whirled about him, tickling his skin with their bodies, pushing him onward, guiding him through this never-ending sea of blackness. He heard them chattering, their thoughts connected to each other and to his.

Don’t be afraid, they seem to say.

And he wasn’t. There was something soothing about being here. It was like not having been born yet, but being wrapped in the warmth and darkness of a womb.

He thought he might stay here forever.

It seemed he already had.

Jeth woke in a daze. Black spots clouded his vision, and he blinked them away. He felt as if he’d been asleep a very long time.

“Where are we?” someone said, the voice muffled and distant.

What happened? Jeth strained his eyes, trying to get his vision to focus. His head ached and his right hand felt strange, tingling and sore.

Then he remembered.

Jeth sat up, bracing himself with his left hand as he examined his right. The fingers were gone. A sick feeling gripped his stomach, and he lowered his hand again before he passed out.

He concentrated on his surroundings instead, his mind disbelieving the message his eyes were sending him. He was no longer in a suite on the Northern Dancer but in a cargo bay. Rusty water pipes and exposed wiring hung over his head. He would’ve known this place anywhere. It even smelled familiar.

This was Avalon .

“How’d we get here?” said Shady from where he sat a short distance away. He stood up, his legs unsteady.

Jeth glanced around. The place looked as if it had been struck by a tornado. Debris covered the floor—crates and plastic bins, some of them blasted open, a table leg, the back of an armchair. The crates and bins had been here before, but the random pieces of furniture were new. Jeth squinted. Why were there furniture pieces in Avalon’ s cargo bay?

Then he shuddered as his gaze fell upon a strip of clothing still wrapped around a severed arm.

Heart lurching into his mouth, he jumped to his feet. Where were the others? He spotted Lizzie at once, and then Flynn and Vince. “Where are Sierra and Cora?” he shouted.

Jeth stumbled through the mess. He came across Renford’s body and cringed away from the sight. “Sierra! Cora!”

Vince and Lizzie were calling for them now, too. As he continued searching, Jeth slowly put together what must’ve happened. Somehow, someway, Cora had phased them onto Avalon, along with parts of the Northern Dancer . But where was she? Still on the other ship?

“Cora!”

“She’s here,” Sierra’s voice called back to him. Jeth finally spotted them on the far side of the bay. He raced over. Cora was lying on her back, her eyes closed. A thin trail of blood ran out from one nostril.