White Space

The room lit with a sudden, brilliant flash. The air exploded with a huge roar. The concussive burst, hot and heavy with burning gasoline, blasted through the mouth of the tunnel, followed a second later by a boiling pillar of oily smoke. She felt her throat closing, the muscles knotting against the acrid sting.

“Em-Emma,” Eric choked, and then he was pulling her down. Hacking, Casey had already dropped and lay gasping like a dying fish as tears streamed down his cheeks. The air near the floor was a little better, although she could barely see through the chug of thick black smog. Emma’s head swirled, her shrieking lungs laboring to pull in breath enough to stay conscious.

“H-hurry,” Eric grunted. “Do it, Emma. Get us out!”

“C-Casey, take Eric’s hand,” she wheezed, and then she slammed her free hand against this strange black-mirror rock and thought, Push.

2

IT WAS DIFFERENT this time, and much, much more difficult.

Her head ballooned; the galaxy pendant, Lizzie’s cynosure, heated against her chest. Their chain of colors spun itself to being, and then the familiar tingle of a blink began as the earth seemed to shift and yawn. Beneath her fingers, she felt not rock but that thin rime of ice frosting her window, the liquid swirl of the bathroom mirror, that featureless black membrane in Jasper’s basement, the thick clot of that murderous fog.

Push. She narrowed her focus. At the same instant, she felt the heat from the galaxy pendant gather, build, surge, and then rocket from her mind, as bright and sizzling as a laser beam shot from the throat of an immense generator. Push, damn it, push, push.

They passed into the wall: not a plunge but a slow and torturous ooze, the bonds tethering the molecules of this strange, alien glass teasing and ripping. The black mirror—no, this Peculiar, thinned, as if the touch of her mind was a warm finger to frosted glass. Yet the way was not clear; the glass did not melt so much as give and grudgingly deform, the way a too-wet sponge dimpled.

With a stab of horror, she also realized they were slowing down. She was still pushing as hard as she could, but it was as if she were bogged down in something viscous and gluey, like a woolly mammoth caught in an infinitely deep tar pit. The energy sink was sapping them all. The chains of light linking her to Eric and Casey were beginning to fade, the colors bleaching away.

Emma! It was Casey, his thoughts stinging with red panic. Emma, I’m slipping, I can’t hold on, I can’t—

God, no! But she was tiring, fast, and the harder she fought, the less energy she had. Her mind skidded, her concentration faltering as her hold on the others slipped. The sensation was bizarre, as if her thoughts were clumsy feet trying to stay upright on glare ice.

Emma. Eric, steady and sure. Look at me. Feel me. Let me help.

Help? How? She saw the cobalt shimmer that was Eric, but that was all, and Casey had his hand so she couldn’t really feel Eric either. Casey was still there, but his touch was like smoke against her fingers. Her whole body was going numb, draining to an outline, a silhouette, as the energy sink bled her of color and life.

Eric, again: Feel me, Emma. Look for me. I’m right here.

Then she remembered. She thought of their kiss on the snow: Eric’s mouth searching hers, his hands framing her face, his body fitting to hers. Give him color; use the cynosure to fill him in. In another moment, she saw his face shimmering in the dark of her mind’s eye.

That’s it. Stay with me, Emma, Eric said, as their chain of three and many colors brightened. Hold on to me, look at me, use me, and keep going; get us through.

She didn’t know why this helped, and how any of this worked. She was only a junior in some yuppie private school, for God’s sake. There was no science she knew to explain this, but it was as if she believed Eric into being. Maybe it was his faith in her, or only the electricity between two people, the way the air thickens and crackles when they look at each other. The connection is there, and you know it.

But she hung on, and she pushed. Her ears filled with a rushing, a whirring, and then they were passing through much faster, the stubborn glue of the energy sink weakening, the bright beacon of Lizzie’s Sign of Sure as solid as any path. She felt the space of this bizarre Peculiar dilate like an immense pupil …

From beyond its margins, swelling from the dark and whatever waited, she heard a loud, long, bloody scream.

And she heard something clamor in a raucous, cawing chorus. She knew what that was, too.

Birds. Not a few. Not a couple dozen. But hundreds and hundreds of birds.

Dead ahead.

RIMA Blood Binds

1