Topic: Mercator Arc
Sitting behind the steering wheel of the putter, he watched the inn through the flat windscreen. The hotel terminated the narrow, winding street, caught amongst gray buildings without signboards and warehouses where muted engines rumbled out of open loading bays. Beyond it a stretch of black gravel lead to docks standing in the dark green sea, boats still on calm water. Roaming vines draped from the roof of the inn’s porch, feeding off minerals from the metal. The chairs on the porch were empty, the picture windows behind them allowed slits of wan orange between drawn curtains. Years of rain stained the concrete façade in running stripes. The tall windows of the upper floor were like gun ports, dark and menacing. The Sea Breeze could have been deserted.
Kariden tapped into a local wavecast node, but if the hotel had a server, it was offline. He couldn’t use the wave to discover the occupants. He could have slipped into anyone running active, their weaves open to online content and experiences, or any form of communication, but the place was eerily quiet. He expected sleeping doxies at the bordello to be wave inactive, but a little inn like this . . . someone should be up and about. He didn’t like it.
They were expecting him. He didn’t exactly put Juildi’s lights out when he left. His intentions could have leaked into her weave. She might have gleaned what he was after. He checked the local security channels again. Didn’t seem as if Juildi had alerted anyone. Someone discharges a firearm in a place of business, and usually the owners have someone come and check things out. Meant one thing to Kariden, the brothel planned to handle him itself.
He pulled up Juildi’s knowledge of the inn, opening a little square window in his visual field. The images were better than nothing—people seldom pay much attention to where they are. There was a lot of floor and wall, the contents of her handbag, the innkeeper’s worry-weathered face, and the poncho-draped form of Alys. The stairs. Handrails and steps. Then a short hallway, the innkeeper opening a door with a metal key. The interior of the room and dizzying shifts of point-of-focus. Her experiences in the hotel became his. He closed the visual.
He checked his gear and put a fresh power shell in his Mekmore. He lifted a round tin from the passenger seat and pried off the lid, pulled out a pliable patty of dark and glitter speckled goop. By a weave command it activated, expanding like a tiny balloon and bursting into a cloud like dirty talcum powder. Dust. Kariden bought it at an apothecary, and though it was meant for household use, he programmed it for a number of special needs. The dust drew to his hand and sleeve of his raincoat, ready to form a number of implements, or simple devices.
The putter sat on the side of the street a few buildings away from the sea side hotel. He got out and gently shut the door, feeling a million eyes watching him, and eerily feeling utter emptiness. A bucketful of fat raindrops carried on the wind splattered against him and the car. The sun raced toward noon, a blot of blood drying beneath pus stained gauze. Gusts moaned across the surface of the buildings; his long coat slapped like a flag; trash blew across the road.
Kariden had his dust form a phonic array on his coat, and had his coat use it to listen for any voices, footsteps, or any sound of people hiding and watching: sniffles, coughs, clothes scratching against walls. He put a hand in the coat, gripped the handle of the Mekmore, and strode full of dark purpose across the street to the door of the inn as if he had prearranged pressing business. His coat heard nothing, yet that failed to put him at ease. It made it worse.
The wood of the porch was ancient and as gray as lead, imported scrap from Pavona or Cenestra. Fish and palm trees—things Mercator was never likely to produce—were painted here and there, fading into the background. He found the metal and plastic door unlocked, like an invitation, and he wondered if he really had to do this. Was the bother worth it? Would the truth matter, or make a difference in the scheme of things? Would anyone care?
Probably not. But it would matter to him. Bringing to light even a little bit of the evil in this ugly town would be a step in the right direction. The Rector beseeched him to help others, so had his mother those long years ago. If only he had. . . .
Kariden disassociated the phonic array and sent some of his dust slipping through the unsealed space between the door and the jamb. The microbots formed a rudimentary optic array; he pressed his palm against the cool jamb, linking with his dust and pulling its view into his visual field. The grainy picture mottled with data losses revealed a small room, empty as far as he could tell, with the registration counter and office to the right. Everything matched Juildi’s memory.
He severed the link and recalled the dust. He took a deep breath, and with apprehension and a pounding heart, pushed open the door.
A buzzer blatted.
Kariden startled, frozen in the doorway. The unexpected alarm was an old mechanical and electrical thing, and loud enough that anyone on the first and second floor should have heard it. Someone would come to investigate, that he was certain. But the muted reedy voice of an elderly gentleman called out from behind a closed door in the cramped hall space beyond the counter.
“Be with ya in a minute.”
Kariden slipped in and quietly closed the door behind him. He could sneak upstairs to the room where Juildi had left Alys, but that had been some time ago, the young woman could be in another room by now. He had to be certain. He crossed the small lobby under soft, cozy amber lighting. He walked around the fake-wood counter the color of dark red wine, eyeing the rickety skeletal robot propped up against the wall near the cased opening to the hall. The robot appeared inert, coated with natural dust and small fans of spider webs. He stepped into the unlit hall and heard a commode flush, grunts. Then running water. Kariden waited at the door.
When it opened, he didn’t give the innkeeper any time. The man’s comm channels were open and receptive, so Kariden flashed an image of Alys as he shot his hand out and grabbed the man by the face. The old man’s groan of surprise puffed hot against Kariden’s palm. The Raven assassin linked to the innkeepers weave, finding the man’s augmentative network rather simple. It surrendered immediately not wanting to risk damage in the struggle. Mil supported the man with his free hand and rendered him unconscious. Easing the caretaker to the floor, he accessed his fluid cache. Spurred by the image flash, Alys was on the senior’s mind.
Kariden threw the memories into his visual field. The innkeepers had been up to her room and coaxed her out with subtle threats. Alys had healed, of course, and Mil was glad for that, but it would take specialized medical equipment to erase the damage. He thought the med bay of any bulker would suffice, and the fact that no one had cared to added insult to injury.
The old man had grabbed her by the wrist and she crouched down, planting her feet into the floorboards, shaking her head. The tumble of the innkeeper’s thoughts left much speculation about what he wanted with her. There were threats and some vague idea that something was to be done with her. There was a sense of haste. Kariden did not want to tap the man’s auditory channels; auditory captures were often entangled with raw thoughts. Kariden could dive deeper into the man’s cache, but it would require an intimacy he was loath to share. The man’s surface presence was creepy enough.
The caretaker dragged Alys to another door. A man was waiting inside of it, a miner by the looks of him. A fury of tattoos writhed on his shorn head, marks of his guild chapter. The innkeeper pushed her through the door into the miner’s rough waiting hands. The door shut.
Kariden called up the time stamp and noted these events were recent. The miner was still up there with Alys. He let go of the old man’s face, restraining the urge to punch him. He pulled out his Mekmore and had his dust ready. As fast and quiet as he could, he bounded the stairs to the second floor and went to the room where Alys was being held.
Muted grunting and scuffling came from behind the door. Kariden sent dust slipping through the crack between door and jamb and crafted another low fidelity optic array on the other side. The blurry pixilated form placed the miner at the foot of the bed his back to the door, shuffling over Alys’s prone form, her naked legs hanging spread around him.
Mil Kariden clamped his yell of anger behind clenched teeth. Hadn’t she endured enough! Sickened, he had his dust buzz-saw through the lock bar. Unevenly hung, the door gave open a few inches. Kariden recalled his dust. The Mekmore revolver settled heavy and lethal in his grip. The bastard would pay.
He toed the door open, sighting down the hexagonal barrel of the laser pistol. But the miner had twisted while performing his profane act, head craned around, a grin flashing teeth, his arm outstretched, his hand open. Kariden brought the gun level to that hideous face. Then realized it was too late.
Helixing through the air came twin stun balls, connected by a short conductive cable. Kariden tried to dodge but the stunner hit him square in the right shoulder, the electric surge spun him around off his feet. A hammer blow! He fell hard in a fit of convulsions, the Mekmore thudding and spinning under an armoire. It felt as if someone dropped a house on his chest. His shoulder throbbed and tingled. The weave there stunned just a much, filaments and networks shutting down and resetting. Luckily his coat had taken the brunt of the attack; it had been knocked off-line and was beginning to go through repair routines. Kariden managed to suck a ragged breath into his depleted lungs. He tried to get up but his body refused.
The miner grunted and released a long sigh, pushing into the abused young woman. “Ah, ya sweet l’le thang,” he laughed, smacking her butt. He secured his trousers, leering over his shoulder. He stepped over to Kariden, rockboots heavy, the cleats scratching and gouging the floor. The damage they could do to one’s face was unthinkable. Again Kariden tried to move, heart laboring. This bastard was going to kill him . . .
The miner stooped, red and orange dragons inked into his skin writhed out of his rolled cuffs as his large hand closed around the stun balls. They clicked dully as he shook them in his hand. Pocketing them, he scooted toward the downed Raven, his chuckles like knocking stones. Kariden locked onto the sinister glint in the man’s squinty eyes, hating him and fearing for the worse.
“Well, lad,” the man grinned like a joker. “Don’t go snoopin’ where ya fookin’ shou’nt.” He clapped Kariden’s sweat-slick cheek twice before standing tall. Kariden had no reply; nothing came to his mind. The miner’s face grew grim and he kicked Kariden hard in the ribs.
Mil twitched and rocked before regaining enough control to roll over and bring up his knees in response to the blow. He coughed. His ribs screamed. He didn’t think anything was broken. The man left the room as spittle ran out of Kariden’s mouth. He spat on the floor, managed to get on his hands and knees, surprised he was still alive. He crawled to the armoire, retrieved his gun. He used the chest to stand, his breath like the exhaust of a faulty engine.
The miner was gone. As much as he wanted, he had no time to chase him down and end the smug sonovabitch. His empty fist clenched and open. He turned toward the bed, trying to calm his shattered nerves.
Alys.
She lay motionless on her belly, head turned to the side in the wrinkled cast-about linen and her arms resting limp along her body. She was dressed but her bloomers had been pulled down and lay coiled around an ankle. Her dark hair lay twisting away from her face, a naked cheek like a slab of wax. Her eye looked out at nothing, and Kariden knew she was not here in the room. Her mind was elsewhere, on the wave, or in a cyberscape, or . . .
She couldn’t be dead!
No . . . he saw the gentle rise and fall of her back.
The enormity of what had just happened to her hit him. His stomach felt loose, wanting to purge his breakfast. He clamped his hands to his head, the Mekmore cold and hard against his temple. His knees might buckle, but he locked them. If anyone happened to come into the room he would kill them with his bare hands. No one deserved this; he choked down a scream of rage.
Kariden dropped his hands, letting the revolver hang loose in his fingers. He turned so that his right side was toward the door, his left toward the bed and the unmoving girl. He strained his ears for any sound in the hall. The door stood ajar by a hand’s width. The only sound he heard besides his breathing was an optophone in a closed room down the hall, the volume set high enough that the guest could not hear what was going on elsewhere. Like in here. As if everyone in the inn was in on the act.
He hated this place, this shitty town . . . shitty planet. The Rector put too much faith in him. One man to turn this place around? Impossible. No one cared. They came here to engage in primal behavior, paying for the pain of others.
The girl on the bed moaned. He turned to see her leg jerk as if she wanted to crawl further onto the bed. Kariden sighed, then holstered his pistol. There was an off-wave secure phonic array embedded in the collar of his overcoat that had not been damaged by the stun blast. He flipped the collar up and called the Rector.
Heartbeats slipped past. Kariden watched the door, anxiety crawling under his skin. Then came Doud’s gentle baritone, “Yes. Is this Mil?”
“Yeah. I need a young woman taken to the Parish. You have my location?”
A pause. “Yes. Sea Breeze, correct?” Kariden noted the man’s worried tone.
“Yeah. And it’s hot.”
“I’ll send someone immediately,” the man said with understanding. The connection died. Rector Doud had parish agents stationed throughout Cratertown; he would send the closest pair.
Kariden went to Alys, feeling the moments crowding together, pressing against his chest. He glanced up at the door regretting having cut the lock and knowing he did not have enough dust to form a suitable defense. He would have to be fast.
He eased a hand down upon her shoulder. She stirred and moaned. Her eyes were still open, staring off into an alternative reality, one she could bear. Soothing words fell out of his mouth, strange sounds he hoped would allay as he slipped his hands into her warm armpits and heaved her along the bed, wincing as his ribs washed over in hot pain. He wanted to do too many things at once: he wanted to cradle and calm her and bring her back into harsh reality; he wanted to put the bloomers back onto her to salvage her dignity; and he wanted to hardlink to find the foul source of all this agony she had suffered. Time seemed all the more hectic as the sun raced around every twenty hours.
Hurry hurry hurry and get nothing done.
Rain began to strike the glass in the tall narrow window with brittle impacts. He hadn’t noticed the afternoon dimming beyond the dingy veils softening the light from outdoors. The room had grown darker as he rolled Alys onto her back, her eyes staring through the ceiling. He grabbed the edge of the bed covers and wrapped them over her, hiding the naked lower half of her body, never letting his eyes cross her groin. He brushed back dark hair from her face with trembling fingers. He traced a scar running down her cheek. This should never had happened. Kariden took deep breaths, eyed the door. It stood like a dead sentinel.
Face set with grim determination, Kariden reached in and pulled out his gun. He leveled it toward the door. If anyone should interrupt, they would pay for it.
Standing over her, he cupped his left hand over her forehead as if feeling for a fever; her skin was cool. He repositioned his hand, palm above the bridge of her nose. He scrunched his face. This would be another form of rape. One far more intimate.
His gun arm trembled, fatigued from extension and the weight of the revolver. He regained his composure.
“Alys. I’m gonna hardlink with you. Everything is gonna be alright.” He didn’t even believe his own words. He didn’t know if she heard him, but if she had, he hoped she believed him.
And she would . . . until it started.
He drew in a frigid breath and plunged.
A sound broke through the darkness. Two sounds forming one. It was a groan of metal against metal, then a squeak. Groan squeak. Groan squeak. Over and over with the same cadence. The familiarity pained Kariden’s heart. For some reason he thought of his childhood, of spring and blue unmarred skies. Of a breeze, in his face, then at his back. Of the green tops of trees bobbing in his vision.
Groan squeak. Groan squeak.
He felt blades of grass tickling his face, the earth solid beneath his prone body. He could smell the soil, rich and heady, and feel the heat of the sun warming through his overcoat. He opened his eyes and saw his arm stretched out through lush blades of grass. He moved his fingers, pushed them into the soil, felt the dirt trap under his fingernails. He scooped earth and watched it drain out of his loose fist. The groaning, squeaking metal continued ahead of him with an occasional rattle of chain.
Is this real, he thought. Has everything else been a fabrication?
He drew his hands and knees under himself and pushed into a crawling position, thinking he had never merged into a ‘scape quite like this one. The interface experience . . . had there been one? It felt as if there may have been, one so overwhelming he blacked out. He felt there should have been a fight to get into her cybermind. Instead the door was wide open, as if she were waiting for him.
He watched a beetle crawl amongst and through the bed of grass below him, stopping and sniffing at detritus, then finding its way. Kariden looked up finding a little girl on a swing-set. He stood, squinting from the overhead glare of the sun. The swing-set was an A-frame of simple metal tubes erected in a meadow of gentle rolling hills. Off in the distance the edge of a forest meandered. Above them, billowing clouds ringed the horizon keeping the crystal blue dome of the sky open. The scene could be somewhere on Pavona. Or Cenestra. Or even in one of the more successful eco-zones of his home-world of Tullis. Idyllic. A child’s drawing manifested.
Alys’s escape.
Groan. Squeak. Kariden approached, watching the girl’s legs fold in and out, hands clutching the chain, dark hair flying out then scarfing around her neck. Alys—who else could it be—swung without a care in the world. And here he was, an interloper, a stain upon her paradise who had to dig up the source of her pain like the scoop of a hydraulic shovel hell-bent on destroying her world.
As he stepped slowly around the end of the swing-set, she turned to gaze upon him, her eyes large and blue, sucking up the world. For a moment a sitting ghost enveloped her, the woman she was somewhere on the other side laying on a bed in the room of a creepy old inn. He stood in front of her and she drug her bare feet through the sandy trough to stop. Her small face slipped into resignation.
He recognized that species of submission and fear stole into his heart. It was the look of some poor bastard that knew the beating was about to start and there was no stopping it. “I’m not here to hurt you,” said Mil, squatting to one knee at her eye level.
The little girl said nothing. Her fingers moved on the chains.
“Do you know why I’m here?”
She hesitated before shaking her head, hair flying. The ghost of her adult self flashed and was gone, like an errant signal.
Kariden had trouble speaking to her in this form. He knew she was not a little girl and he tried to hold on to that fleeting ghost of her true self. But maybe this is her true self now, cut down to the core. . . . He wanted to slap himself out of these sick feelings. No matter what he did in this cyberscape, he could never harm Alys as much as she had been hurt before. All that he required was that she remember. The pain of that memory couldn’t be more harmful than the edge of that blade.
Could it?
Mil Kariden felt he wasn’t qualified to know. Just do it. Just do it and get it done. If not, back out of this and forget it. Drop it. He pushed away the lingering dread that he might not be able to back out and sever the link, that maybe he wasn’t in control here. He sighed. “You—you were hurt once.” Alys peered at him waiting. “Do you remember that.”
She dropped her chin and stared at him from beneath her eyebrows. “They said you’d come back.”
Kariden frowned, not understanding. “Come back?”
The adult ghost flickered on, phased into solidity, the little girl gone. Alys appeared to him healed of her wounds, or from a time before she was abused. Her idyllic ‘scape seemed less substantial, faded and lifeless. Sitting in the U-shaped band of the swing’s seat, she wore an unadorned white short dress and her hands and feet were black as ink. It was henna, wild errant strands and threads traced up her wrists and ankles, forearms and shins, leaving a tight web-work of lace and filigree covering her fingers and hands, toes and feet. Dark hair fell in waves against her throat.
“They said you killed my father,” she whispered. “And that you’d come back to finish me.”
“No,” Kariden sighed.
“And here you are, just like they said—”
His voice rose, “No. You’re mistaken—”
“—except I’m not going to let you. . . .”
The ‘scape shattered into another and Kariden found himself naked on his knees between her legs, inside her on some dingy whore’s bed, the only illumination in the room from hot orange paintlight sprayed in several bowls on the twin nightstands. Incense burned as he pushed her into the mattress, hand on her throat, her head back, mouth open to scrape in breath. The knife in his other drew a red swell across her flattened right breast. Her body clenched from the pain, throat scratching out a wail. Her frantic hands smeared the blood and he cut again, slow. Deliberate. Then a knick across her cheek.
His weave linked to hers. His experience overriding.
To no avail, Mil Kariden fought to disengage from the experience he relived as her attacker. He pressed the blade into her flesh again and again. Then the scene shifted and every cut was a line of wailing fire across his torso and face. The man’s hand was a hot clamp squeezing his throat and the rod if iron inside him hurt, and he never wanted to be here and he never wanted to do these things with these men. Anguish he never felt possible crushed his soul to dust and he wanted to die, to die and be done with it . . . to escape.
The man stopped his pumping and the hand at his throat released then found his cheeks, squeezing his mouth. “Look at me you bitch,” he snarled with laughter hiding in his tone. The man’s face hove into view through blurry tears.
Kariden saw his own countenance and a scream of denial exploded out of his throat.
The viewpoint shifted and again he was the tormentor. Alys lay bloodied beneath looking at him with a sardonic smile as he remained atop her, still hard between her legs. This wasn’t a memory, it was a cyberscape. Sickened he pulled out of her and dropped the knife where it fell in the folds of the sheets.
“I didn’t do this,” Kariden muttered between hard breaths as Alys propped up on her elbows and backed away from him. She lifted the blade. “Someone hacked your weave. Altered your cached memory. They lied to you!” The knife was tight in her fist, intention burned in her eyes. “They lied to me!” Alys pulled herself up onto her knees.
He had to get out of her ‘scape.
Immobilized, Kariden watched as she held the knife in both hands, blade down. She lifted it behind her head. He had a strong feeling she could actually kill him, or rather he no longer believed he was staring at Alys, or was even in her head. It made sense now.
Someone had been waiting for him. The miner. Juildi had alerted him and he had come here to set up a router in Alys’s weave, that’s why he couldn’t remember having a typical interface, there had not been one. He had been shunted quite deftly to a secure wavecast node. Which meant someone had his protocols. Who? And how? Surely not Juildi—his weave would detect that kind of exploratory probing. His people had learned how to safeguard their weaves from Allodian renegade posthuman machines; it was unlikely the common folk here could rival such deplorable monsters.
Didn’t really matter, now did it? He slipped up somewhere and they had him. And if he didn’t act fast, Alys’s arcing knife would slash into his throat or chest. This artificial experience represented the true threat that someone could direct his weave to attack his cardiovascular system. In the accelerated subjective time of the ‘scape, he couldn’t save himself by letting go of her head and breaking the connection. His reaction would be too slow. He had to override the router.
As the blade came sweeping down, he frantically searched for router node attached to one of many possible weave trunks leading into Alys’s brain. Signals pulsed through his weave, returns sampled—there! He had it. Kariden trembled on the verge of screaming as he attempted to disable the router with the effort it took to pull an asteroid out of a well.
Suddenly he was looking down at the scene as Alys plunged the knife to the hilt into the neck of the man kneeled before her. The cyberscape began to wrap into a sphere below him, his twin losing fidelity and resolution, disappearing. Alys crouched on her knees, frozen into position. The sphere, a remnant of the constructed experience lodged in young woman’s mind, drifted away into the white void and popped like a soap bubble.
There was nothing left but Alys as she was in room with her scars, sitting in the swing, the chains hanging from nothing, her hands clasped around them. Her eyes and the corners of her mouth accused him of terrible things.
Kariden stood before her on the threshold of her mind, at a loss for words. He felt tired and the battle half over. “Do you understand what’s going on?” he finally asked.
She said nothing, turned her head.
“They’ve tampered with your hard cache. It’s altered your natural long term memory. It forces you to remember what they want you to remember and not the truth.”
Her feet dug into the nothing below her and she rocked back and forth in the swing, her feet planted, her knees flexing. “Leave me alone,” Alys whispered.
Kariden stepped forward, kneeled to one knee. “Your problem is mine. These same men . . .” the next words were hard, they jumbled up in his throat, refusing to be sound. He pushed them out, “they had me kill your father. They told me he was the monster that did this to you.” He saw tears spill from her eyes and run down her cheek. “I need to find out who is responsible for doing this . . . to us.” He reached out and cupped her jaw, lifted and turned her face toward his, her eyes floating in her pain. “I’ve sent for some good people to come and take you to the Parish. Do you know what that is?”
Alys nodded in his hand.
“They will help you, heal you. Send you home. If that is what you want.”
Her mouth crumpled on the verge of sobbing.
“I need access to your cache, to find out who hurt you.”
“You can’t,” she cried. “They’ll kill me. They’ll kill you.”
Kariden went cold. He felt his face slacken. “I won’t let ‘em. I promise you that.” He dropped his hand from her jaw.
Alys shook her head and cried. “No,” she pleaded. “Don’t. Just leave. Just leave me alone!”
“I’m sorry,” Kariden whispered. He wasted too much time as it was and moved in as if he were going to kiss her. Instead of physical contact, he fell right through her as if she were made of liquid, her body the portal into her hard cache.
Immediately he understood her warning. Perhaps this was the true weapon they had set for him. Rerouted into the wavecast node and defeating the cyberscape trap had done a great job of giving Kariden a false sense of security. He’d been completely lulled. He should have done a scan of her deep system first instead of waltzing right in. They had his damn protocols! He should have known better. The bastards used Alys as bait. . . .
He had no time to waste now and flung himself into the maze of her cache, his peripheral vision was a ring of red, like vision through blood, its boundary encroaching on the center of his sight. Offensive algorithms had seeped in undetected, breezing through his barriers as if they were a part of his weave’s logic system. He had seconds until crippling corruption impaired his weave. His augmentative network decided to save itself by initializing a total shutdown.
That left him with roughly a million microseconds to find out who tampered with Alys’s weave, and who cut her up. At least she helped in the only way she could, by remembering that painful night.
The scene she had relived with him was thrown out in front of him against the tangled maze of the world. The action jerked to and fro, time slipping forward and backward at various speeds and sometimes jumping. Kariden moved to his ersatz twin and acted in the only way he knew how; he threw his fist into that face.
Blow after blow the mask began to break apart like peeling paint as the microseconds funneled away. He poured all his effort into breaking the code. He felt the pain of it, spreading across his sore knuckles and shooting through his arm. Around him, the red warning of his vision shrank to a closing tunnel. Just a few more, he pleaded—to Iman, perhaps—and dug his fingers into the flaking false face. He scratched and clawed, pulling strips away as the man writhed over Alys.
The red shrank to a pinpoint, but not before Kariden had uncovered enough to recognize the abuser.
“You!” he breathed out as his fingers jerked open over Alys’s face. Disengaged from her, had a weird feeling of isolation, incompleteness . . . vulnerability. His weave had shut down. Kariden stumbled backwards. Back in the real world the red in his vision was naturally absent. In its place grew a numbing sparkling grayness.
He collapsed to the floor.
