Jodi Meadows - Infinite

My SED buzzed in my pocket, but I couldn’t answer it. I focused on jumping over the tangle of roots the centaurs jumped over. On ducking ice-white limbs. On putting one leg in front of the other.

Shouts filled the area. Then a thundering growl. And the world thudded hard as something dropped. I stumbled, but one of the centaur children reached back and took my arm until I was balanced and running on my own again.

“Ana! Sam!” Stef’s voice came from just ahead. “There you are! I—”

Blue lights flared, targeting the young centaurs as we broke out into the open. The rest of the herd was far to our right, gathered around the fallen troll, so now it was just four humans and two scared centaur kids.

One of the boys screamed. The herd’s attention shifted.

“No, don’t!” I moved in front of the boys and held out my hands. They tried, unsuccessfully, to hide behind me. They were both much bigger than I was. “Don’t shoot. They’re just kids.”

“They’re centaurs .” Whit kept his weapon up. No one else moved, either.

Sam stayed off to the side, looking between us. “Don’t shoot Ana.”

“They’re just kids,” I said again.

The herd of centaurs rumbled closer, swords and spears lifted and glinting with blood in torchlight. Suddenly, we were surrounded. All of us humans. The young centaurs.

Stef swung her laser pistol toward the approaching army, but there was no way she’d overcome a thousand centaurs.

One targeting light still aimed at the young centaurs. I didn’t move from my position guarding them. And the other centaurs were deadly quiet as they appraised the situation.

No one moved. I could hardly breathe.

And then shadows appeared in the forest, falling toward the torchlight as they abandoned natural shadows. These were tall and thin, not attached to anything. They hmmed quietly, singing among themselves.

Gradually, the centaurs’ attention shifted from us to the shadows approaching from the other side. Heat billowed across the cool space as one shadow pushed forward, ahead of the others. It paused near me, a slender black rose blossoming inside one of its tendrils before it shivered apart.

The sylph had come.

HOPE KINDLED INSIDE me, then was smothered when, as one, the herd of centaurs lifted their weapons and screamed their rage to the sky. Ground shook under their pounding hooves as they ran to meet the sylph.

The sylph keened: awful, dissonant wailing. Shadows surged forth, sending waves of heat throughout the gathered humans and centaurs. What had been a midwinter night now became like summer as the sylph songs morphed into terrible cacophony.

The two young centaurs sobbed and dropped to the ground, clutching each other, clutching my legs. I tumbled down with them.

Sam and my friends cried out, but an insubstantial wall of shadows forced itself between us, carefully not burning delicate human flesh. But they were going straight for the centaurs, who just wanted their children back.

“Stop!” I pulled myself up from the tangle of limbs.

When I tried to throw myself into the mass of shadows, one of the centaur boys grabbed my wrist and shook his head, a panicked look on his face.

I used my free hand to cover his knobby knuckles, sharp with the strength of his grip, and smiled a little. “It’s okay.” No idea if he understood, but when he released me, I turned and shouted, “Stop!” again.

The sylph and centaurs kept moving toward one another, and the centaurs were about to be boiled alive—

I sang one long, sustained note. The pitch fell, and my voice cracked with winter and nerves. Though Sam had given me a few tips on how to best project my voice, we’d never arranged real lessons. There’d never been time.

But the sylph nearest me shifted and turned at the sound of my voice, peeling itself from the mass of shadows. It hovered around me, waiting, matching my note.

If music were water, this would have been a ripple. The angry keening dropped, and the sylph all seemed to gasp and face me. They watched me, though they had no eyes, no faces. They were but tall shadows, with tendrils that flickered toward the sky as I fumbled to free my hands of mittens, then found my SED and searched through the music function.

I chose Phoenix Symphony. Some of the sylph already knew it, and it was one of my favorites.

The first chords rushed from the speakers like a waterfall, and I let my voice fade beneath the powerful sounds of the piano, violins, and thunderous bass.

I pushed the volume as high as it would go, so that every sylph heard. They halted just before they reached the line of centaurs, and the incredible heat faded to something more bearable.

Behind me, the centaur boys scrambled to their feet. One touched my shoulder, and his gaze fell on the SED clutched in my hands. The light from the screen illuminated his face, scratched from our run and his fall to the ground. But he smiled when his hand passed through the SED glow, and he said something I could neither hear clearly over the music, nor understand.

My SED screen flashed; on the other side of the sylph swarm, Sam had synced his SED with mine. Phoenix Symphony played all around.

The boys needed to return to their people. The centaurs just wanted them back. That was why they were here. And surely the sylph wouldn’t let the centaurs hurt me, if they tried.

I put my SED in my pocket, speaker facing up so the music remained loud and clear, then reached up to take each centaur boy’s hand. Together, we walked around the sylph, which sang and danced along with the music, though still watchful, as though waiting for the centaurs to attack again.

We broke through the line of shadows and found the centaur herd almost motionless. Their eyes narrowed, but that was all.

One of the centaur women crashed through the herd, her arms wide. The boys leapt out into the thin strip of land between us and bounded to her, and sylph fanned around me, including me in their line as they sang melodies and countermelodies of the first movement of Phoenix Symphony.

The boys hugged the woman—their mother?—and the lead warriors of the herd seemed to look over my group. Four humans armed with only lasers and music, and dozens of sylph.

The shadows coiling around me must have been the deciding factor. One of the leaders turned and shouted some kind of order, and the herd began moving away, their hooves like thunder in the ground.

One of the centaur boys ran back, though. He stopped midway between our groups and called out something as he pointed southeast. Showing me where they were going. Then, in a high and eerily beautiful voice, he sang along with a measure of melody as it flowed from the SED, and from the sylph.

Only a moment later, he was gone, lost among the other centaurs.

The music swelled, and I turned back to Sam and the others. Sylph parted, forming a clear path.

As I headed for Sam at the other end of the dark tunnel, tendrils of shadow snaked out and wrapped around my wrist or touched my hair. But the tendrils were incorporeal. I felt nothing but warmth where they touched me.

Sylph song surrounded me, layers of harmony in otherworldly wailing and whispering. A few sylph swayed, as though lost in music.

“Are you okay?” Sam reached for me, and our SEDs were muffled as we hugged.

“I’m fine.” I pulled back, relieved to be reunited with my friends. “They were just scared children. They were new. Like me.” My smile felt forced as I gazed from Stef to Whit. These were my friends. They’d agreed to come on this incredible and possibly futile journey with me. But they were oldsouls. They’d never truly understand the connection I felt with other newsouls, even if the newsouls were centaurs.