The fusion prompt had never received its answer.
[WARNING: Bio-Energy Reserve Threshold Reached.]
[Emergency Dimensional Bridge Activating – All Fantasy Vessels Entering Forced Stasis.]
As the two shimmering options – venom, stealth, the choice he almost never had time to consider – vanished beneath the newly emerging priority, a much larger, more pressing option had replaced it.
Wait-
“The accumulated energy channel has reached critical mass,” Nix said, the first hint of emotion since the beginning of the operation seeping into his voice.
“You don’t have time to choose.
Brace.”
There was no time for Kaelen to brace.
There was no time for anything, because Corin’s body, which was no longer his own, went rigid in the middle of the alley where it had fallen just before the battle, one hand hovering over the charred husks at his feet in an unbroken stance.
A puppet whose strings had finally gone slack.
Kaelen did not watch it happen.
He was no longer in the body that he had stolen.
He was elsewhere.
There was too much light here, artificial and sterile, the harsh buzz of an overhead light bulb reminding him of nothing more than exhaustion, the weight and pressure of his own lungs as he pulled another strained breath into his starving lungs.
Kaelen opened his eyes.
Real eyes, human eyes.
They focused with a painful slowness on the cracked piece of reinforced glass that was now six inches from his face, the spiderweb-like fracture marring it’s otherwise unblemished surface.
This is me.
This is my actual body.
A strange sensation washed over him, not exactly dread or disappointment, but more akin to the feeling one receives upon finding a favorite jacket to have been shrunk in the laundry.
He flexed his fingers against the thin mattress and gasped, the familiar sensation of fresh air filling his lungs sending shivers of pleasure down his spine.
[Ding!
Bio-Energy Channel Successful.]
[Host Organic Vessel – Critical Systems Stabilizing: 34% -> 61%…]
Sixty-one percent was not a satisfactory number, far from it, but it was considerably better than the alternative, and after bleeding the last of his energy out in the cave and the alley of another world, Kaelen welcomed it.
He turned his head, and as his neck creaked in protest, peered through the glass at the familiar sight of his apartment, or at least the part of his apartment that had not been flooded, the wires snaking across the floor in random directions taped down to a jury rig battery pack that fed power to the waiting pod.
Lyra was not here.
Lyra?
The tell-tale sound of boots on pavement outside the stairwell, a steady pace, iron-capped and more than one set, approached the hidden door to his apartment.
Kaelen could guess who they belonged to, even without opening the door.
“Sector sweep, unit four,” A voice, filtered through the helmet of the approaching soldier, echoed through the walls.
“Cronus Dynamics bio-scan flagged unregistered life support signature this floor.
Standard seizure protocol.”
No.
Kaelen’s body, the actual one, the one made of real flesh and blood, tried in vain to rise up and meet the approaching soldiers, but his muscles, used to nothing more than twitching within the vessel of another man, refused to cooperate.
“Lyra-!” He rasped, the sound of his own voice a hoarse, unfamiliar croak lost within the padded walls of the pod.
No one could hear him if he screamed.
He wasn’t even sure that he could scream.
Something moved in the distance.
A shadow against the far wall of the room, and Kaelen’s breath caught in his throat.
Lyra, her face streaked with grime, brown hair bundled up into a tight knot at the back of her head, a small flame dancing from the welding torch in her hand, paused at the sound of the approaching soldiers, her gaze locking on the door as if trying to formulate an escape route.
“Not tonight,” she muttered under her breath, and Kaelen watched the practiced movements of his older sister as she pulled a tarp over the pod, fumbled with a switch on the wall to extinguish the remaining light in the room, and with a practiced motion, grabbed the bag she kept by the door for just this occasion.
The boots paused outside the door.
“This door is reinforced,” the same voice said, closer now.
“In fact, it was reinforced quite cheaply.
I give you thirty seconds before I break in.”
Three seconds.
Kaelen’s borrowed body screamed at his failing muscles to move, to do something, anything to escape capture before it was too late, but the muscles refused his commands, twitching and writhing as if in great pain.
Run.
Just run, Lyra-
The lock screeched as the soldier on the other side drove his boot into the door.
[WARNING: Bio-Energy Channel Destabilizing.] [Host Cognitive Bandwidth Exceeded – Emergency Reversion Imminent.]
No.
I don’t want to go.
I need to see-
“What that means,” Nix said, his voice as calm as if he were not about to be obliterated by another warlord’s rage, “is that you are not prepared to see.
That this channel is not prepared to allow you to see.”
I don’t care.
Let me know that she’s not-
The lock gave way with a final shuddering groan.
Kaelen’s vision, real and failing, began to blur at the edges as the familiar sensation of the channel cutting out invaded his senses.
The last thing he saw before his consciousness was ripped away was a dark figure entering through the newly formed gap in the door, and the silhouette of his sister retreating from where she had stood in the center of the room.
Gone where?
Gone how far?
Safe or captured, the fate of his precious, amazing sister-
[Ding!
Reversion Complete.
Vessel Anchor Restored: Fantasy Realm.]
The alley was the same as when he had left it, the smell of old fish boxes and blood mixing in the warm night air, the two charred and hollowed bodies lying against the far building as if they were just discarded.
Kaelen’s vessel stood in the exact position that it had been in when the channel had severed their connection, unmoving, save for the twitching of his borrowed body as it struggled to remember how to move on it’s own.
Lyra.
The word hovered in his mind like a bad dream I can’t wake from.
I don’t know if you made it- I don’t know anything.
He forced Corin’s fingers to twitch, then his wrist, then, with great effort, his elbow, muscles screaming in protest.
Finally, finally he managed to roll over onto his back, staring up at the night sky as it arched above him.
[Warning: Function of the Vessel Motor is currently at 12%.
Estimated full control in 40 seconds.]
Forty seconds.
A lifetime in the middle of an alley with two corpses and the scent of blood in the air.
That was when Kaelen heard the footsteps.
They were not the heavy, ponderous footfalls of soldier, but something lighter, quicker, and with the unmistakable swish and swish of fabric against stone.
Someone who had reason to avoid drawing attention to herself.
“Corin?” Talia’s voice, low and measured, stopped as she reached the end of the alley.
“You’ve been gone almost twenty minutes.
I don’t like this.”
She did not have to look to know what waited at the end of the alley, a frozen man, still and unblinking, standing over the two bodies that had just finished emptying out their contents into the dirt.