Zosma Read online

  Allister’s subconscious beckoned. She reached her hand into negative Space, wrapped her fingers around the fabric of the macrocosm, and pulled it to her. Her astral form gained weight, depth and dimension, conjured as an energy representation of her physical attributes, and with it, she navigated to the heavy glob surrounding his mind. The atmospheric disturbance bearing down on its terrain blocked her ability to read it, to assess its viability.

  Concentrate on my voice, she insisted.

  Toes pointed, she plunged, racing a blackened sky to the parched grass spanning Allister’s psyche. Arms back. Elbows locked. Chin out. Her shimmering form torpedoed ahead, falling so fast the ground came to meet her. Speed had given her marginal advantage, positioned to touch down a fraction of a second before the murky mist threatening to swallow her whole. She performed a graceful airborne tumble and landed on one knee.

  Mist plowed the surface, lightning struck, and wind screeched, as if a dense cumulonimbus had descended and unleashed its power.

  “Dr. Belladonna,” Rabia said. His voice, deep and raspy, his body, a swarm of black bees fashioned to a man’s shape. “What an unpleasant surprise.”

  “I could say the same,” she said, hands up. “Get. Out.” Psionic energy lines retraced her astral body, fortifying its presence.

  “I wonder, can you fight on two planes at once?”

  The cloudy, swirling mass erupted. She ducked her head; arms crossed in front of her and conjured a psychic force field. Visibility a complete stranger, she shouted for Allister inside its protection, and like a beacon, blue light penetrated the murkiness. She sprinted in its direction, hoping it meant he was somehow okay.

  Stifling air’s immense pressure crushed her mental stamina. The force field, its sole purpose to deflect the mist’s brutality, flickered and cracked, striving to hold up its end of the bargain. The cloud’s thickness thinned as she battled through, and she burst free, panting and stumbling. Little Allister, valiant and irreproachable, held the madness at bay with his tiny arms pushed forward and Z-energy streaming forth.

  She’d planned on taking shelter behind the gravestones of Leesa, Dolores, and Patrick, and scoured the horizon. Gone. She did a second sweep, searching for another psionic landmark. Flat, dead terrain met her at each turn, until she found a blip bathed in the Transporter gem’s tapered light. A candidate for the safe-haven where his deepest thoughts could live.

  Energy sparked on her heels, flowed up her body and set alight her fingertip. She pointed to the spot below them and by rotating her wrist, drew a circular platform.

  “I... can’t fight,” he said, going from two raised hands to one. “The influence... too strong.” His legs gave way as blue light shorted out.

  She caught Allister on his way to slumping face first in the grass. “Rest for now. You’ll need it.”

  Rabia’s essence reared, billowing on itself like volcanic ash clouds. Her crafted transportation took off, whizzing them toward shelter faster than her own feet were allowed, even in the extended reality-warping of the subconscious.

  Florence wasn’t given the leeway to perfect the platform’s levitation and balance. The sustained roar in surround sound drove her free arm’s wild swings, as she repelled tentacle attacks from all angles with energy bursts.

  She checked on the eight-year-old lying unconscious at her feet, then she turned, violating the cardinal rule: don’t look back.

  A rule for good reason, as the abyss galloping after them had compounded. Darkness expanded to the left and right, above and below. And in her diversion from steering, it converged in the foreground to enclose them.

  She held her breath and a strained squint, crouching breast to knee. Psychic energy gripped and stretched a small opening’s edges, letting them squeeze through. Lifespan exhausted, the platform dissolved. Two astral bodies tossed onto the grass, rolled and stopped outside the house Allister had grown up in. A sanctuary reborn: two stories, brick, and a shining door sporting a new coat of red paint.

  The more unique the structure to his experiences, the better it’d protect his inner psyche. Good for him.

  A soft mold of Rabia’s chubby face formed inside the cloud and birthed a prideful and triumphant smile.

  “You came,” Allister whispered, awakened.

  “I did.”

  The boy’s voice spawned sensibility and checked her ego. Waging against the obscure influential presence required imagination and strategy, endurance as well, no question but, it was not a limit test of her telepathy’s brawn. Her priority was to keep Rabia from consuming Allister’s fragile mind, not to win. She gathered him, whisked them through the door and slammed it shut.

  The door disappeared, shutting them in. Tears brimmed wide eyes looking up at her.

  “Will he get in?” Allister asked.

  A funnel cloud’s enraged winds rattled the foundation and walls in response.

  “Not if you don’t let him.” Her rose-colored psychic power sidled up the structure, sealing rifts formed by the storm’s savagery. In their undeniable vulnerability, she stroked his cheek and hugged him like the child she’d never have. Nevertheless, she felt distracted. Energy lines giving her figure proportion dimmed.

  “You have to focus. If-if Dr. Giro gets hold of you, none of us stand a chance.” Arms wrapping her torso, she stepped away. Pieces of her astral form detached and burned up, like embers flitting from a fire. An occurrence too real to be explained by a weakened telepathic connection. In the absence of atmosphere and of elements, it’d be impossible for fire to burn inside the sacred place she’d gone, for heat to rise into the thousands of degrees. Inconceivable incidents, even in the extended reality-warping of the subconscious.

  Physical trauma slammed Florence into reality head first. The plane’s pitching and rocking, loud sirens and brisk beeping, Giovanni’s uniform voice warning about their low altitude. She dashed to the cockpit and heard plasma bolts zooming by outside the window.

  “Giovanni, why didn’t you wake me up!”

  “Apologies, Dr. Belladonna, I had to engage shield systems and extinguish fires in the main cabin,” it answered, “and I found it difficult to manage multiple tasks.”

  Strapping herself in the pilot’s seat, she pulled up on the controls, but it was too late.

  Allister Adams

  Scathing Hot plasma shot through the air. Captain Brandt, a jittery puppet, succeeded in blowing the jet to scraps. The tingle in his mind was gone. Florence’s psychic presence was gone. Allister’s chest tightened.

  “Do not fight me,” Dr. Giro coaxed, “You seek Zosma? I take you to her.”

  Mist power claimed Allister’s hair and seeped down his creased forehead. Not if you don’t let him. The statement repeated in his ears, louder and louder, eventually absorbed in the kaboom that destroyed the house. A tsunami of flames rushed outward. Dr. Giro’s neck rotated the advancing fire’s direction.

  There came weakness in the doctor’s mental blockage. No longer afflicted by the sinking in quicksand sensation, Allister explored commands for motion. He found the response positive, arched his back, flexed his hands. Radiant blue energy corkscrewed around his balled fist, breaking up the tentacles swimming on his skin. They unwound, slinking down his body, retreating over dirt and pebbles, and assimilated into the doctor’s lurking shadow.

  “Tell me where you’re hiding her!” Allister yelled.

  Kicking. Banging. Choking noises. Even with a glance, his vision pinpointed Florence’s location, confined in a burning cockpit, her psiborg leg snared by the crushed dashboard.

  Dr. Giro had reached Brandt, whose hands were clasped at his neck’s nape, nose touching his knees. “If you let her die, saves me trouble.”

  Allister hesitated.

  “You always do right thing, Mr. Adams,” the doctor taunted and grabbed the captain by the collar, “is why you lose.”

  Allister knew better than to make the same mistake he did with his mother. Blood pumping through his veins, he ran to
the house. The fire had closed in, but neither singed fingertips and forearms, nor air polluted by carbon monoxide and particle matter, dissuaded him from tearing brick slabs and metal sheets away. He found Florence, unconscious by that point, and used her bodysuit’s puffy sleeve to drag her closer.

  He hoisted her over his shoulder to return to the blazing street. The stars had arrived to offer their condolences, while flames hunted for more brush to burn but experienced no luck. Anything susceptible to combustion had done so on impact. Beyond the heat and hazard of incineration, he laid her down and she awakened.

  “You alright?” he asked, staying stooped.

  “My sword,” she said first, gasping. In a hoarse whisper she finished, “I need to get my sword.”

  He settled a hand on her back. “Hey, hey, take it easy.”

  A crescent moon suffused Florence in resurrection’s godly glow. She managed to stand, still coughing, and snapped, “I’m fine.” She limped to comb the wreckage for her kindred weapon, not slowed down by first-degree burns on her arms or smeared soot and bleeding micro-cuts on her face.

  “I can’t tell if Brandt was lying or not,” Allister mumbled. His face relaxed in a vacuous expression. “It was like we were both ambushed. I don’t know. He sounded sincere.”

  Florence threw her arms up. “Are you not disturbed by what’s happened inside your head?” Her chest rose and fell, rose and fell, lungs catching whatever oxygen the inferno had left behind. “I haven’t felt mental power like that.”

  “It’s okay. You did what you had to do.”

  “And you as well. Thank you for saving me.”

  Efforts worth their weight in gold. His warmed gut was a comforting exception to the tension.

  Foot tapping, she wiped her running nose, then a dripping cut on her cheek. “I don’t have much luck with planes, do I?”

  His mouth curled. “Seriously though, you’re pretty banged up. Don’t you think you should chill for a second?”

  “Chill for a second? Allister, we need to find Dr. Giro.” She shoved her hand into her jumpsuit’s pocket and presented a tarnished Cynque in her upright palm. “This is our lead, it belonged to my father. I was reluctant to read through and relive the horrible things he did.”

  “But?”

  “I forced myself to. It’s been, eye-opening.” Florence massaged her head, testing each kinky lock of hair to make sure none had been burned off and finished her trek to the smoking wreckage. “Bazzo Sparks sent it via private messenger. He’s a young finance guy who has been managing Belladonna Corp for the last four months.”

  “Oh God.” Allister pivoted each direction she went as she searched. “Sparks? As in...”

  “There you are,” she said, flipping the sword around and holding it out. The dragon handle gleamed gold, out-shining the steel, aluminum, and brick pile she’d retrieved it from. “Yes, as in closely related to Bridget Sparks.”

  “Do you think he knows something?” he asked.

  She slid the coat’s lapel aside to reveal a leather embossed sheath around her waist and tucked the weapon away. “I think he knows a lot more than we do.”

  Bridget Sparks

  Campbell Recovery Center, Ft. Miami, Florida

  The ocean’s salty smell breezed through the 102-degree air temperature, to the balcony where Bridget Sparks observed the testy Atlantic waters. She stared out at what used to be sand, and was now stacked boulders to combat any incoming storm’s surge.

  Florida’s bottom half had been submerged by consecutive Category 6 hurricanes, which drowned majority of the state population in an unforgiving barrage of hundred-foot tsunamis and flash floods. Beachfront properties were a thing of the past. Buildings on steel risers and elevated highways prepped for the predicted rise in sea level, unless something worse happened first.

  The state’s southernmost tip was dubbed Fort Miami for its heavy occupation by the U.S. Coast Guard, and was established in what had been Orlando.

  Campbell Recovery Center was the kind of rehabilitation facility you’d find by a body of water. It encouraged indoor meditation in the mornings. The rooms and halls were decorated in tropical pinks, teals, and whites. Dried Conch shells lined toilet tops and were affixed to walls. Moody nurses changed embroidered towels daily. The center served as a government-assisted hospital extension for patients who didn’t have any place to go, and Bridget Sparks didn’t have any place to go.

  She’d been in the hospital for six weeks, recovering from multiple facial lacerations, brain damage, and internal bleeding. Her waking hours had progressed to four to five per day, and contrary to her nature, she’d weened herself off pain medication.

  Bridget’s nose wrinkled at her frost white hair. She supposed that’s what undergoing stressful cosmetic and medical surgeries would do. Shaving the right side bald in drunken rejection of traditional female beauty had resulted in uneven growth, however, the color was an ash blonde pre-surgeries. She picked at a scar next to her ear, found another on her forehead, and sucked her teeth.

  “How do you feel, Ms. Sparks?”

  Numb. Besides, the surroundings were too sterile for her to feel anything. Bored of scenery, Bridget diverted her attention to the handsome middle-aged doctor straddling the balcony doorway, pouted and pointed out her discovery. “Be peachy if it weren’t for this bloody scar.”

  “It’ll heal.” Dr. Gerald Campbell yawned, and wiped away the tears. “Give it a few months.”

  “I don’t got a few months,” she scoffed, elbowing him aside to stomp into the room. “You never told me who dropped me?”

  “Some young kid. Wasn’t in much better shape than you, truth be told. He vanished before I could take a look at him.” He tapped his Cynque, sending her hospital admission report onto the animated screen spanning the room. “He didn’t know much about you.”

  Allister Adams, the undercover troublemaker. She spruced her angled bob to give it more volume, wondering what ingenious cover story he’d dreamt up to get them to take her. The grin faded. Her Cynque displayed the time, location, temperature, and the message she’d received from Dorian Xander telling her to “be careful” because “they were coming.” They, she assumed, meant the U.S. Government. Because, they, the Andromeda Project recruits, were under contract. The agreements were lopsided for all of the superhumans, even Allister, but Bridget in particular had lost her Australian citizenship and become property of the United States. They’d be along to collect her soon enough.

  “I gotta check out early, Doc.” She dragged her fingertips across the itchy polyester blanket. No sparks. She turned her trembling hands to inspect her palms. No electric currents ran through her veins.

  “What’d ya do to me?” she asked. “Sabotage? Experiments?” She thrashed the hard mattress, kicking her legs. “Show me my diagnosis!”

  The doctor’s chin wrenched back. “Ms. Sparks calm down or I’ll have you sedated.”

  “Show me!” she shrieked, grabbing his Cynqued wrist to scroll for details. In the diagnosis they theorized by the plaster in her lungs, concrete dust on her skin and glass in her face, she’d been buried in a building demolition. “Bugger,” she moaned and plopped on the bed like a punished teenager. She may or may not have overdone it with her powers and caused one. Unnecessary roughness on her part.

  “We started having unusual blackouts hours after you were admitted. I went digging for info.” He paused, gawking at her short shorts and mid-riff shirt, then shot his eyes to the ceiling. Fifty-two pages into Cynque’s search engine, he’d found backlinks to the dark web. URLs swept away in the internet cleanse of 2048 talking about the Andromeda Project, their alien studies, their shady dealings, and their superhuman recruits. Based on what he found, he brought in power suppressors.

  She delivered an icy scowl. “The fuck were you thinking bringing dampeners?”

  “You were tampering with electromagnetic fields. I weighed serious options, including turning you in. My center lost three patients when the, when
the life support machines went off.” He rubbed his chest. “But, you weren’t recuperating as I expected, so... so I blamed the thunderstorms.”

  Clever scapegoat. There’d been a severe storm daily for two months. In any case, his power suppressor idea hadn’t worked. The blackouts stopped on their own.

  “How bloody kind.” She pulled her hair outward and twirled it. “Sorry mate, I’m not interested in some bored ER doc’s sympathy.”

  He opened the door to exit the room. “I’m a neurologist,” he said back. “I’ll be happy to get you reassigned.”

  She crawled to the bed’s corner and tucked her legs under her thighs, bosom pushed toward him. “Wait, wait, wait. I didn’t mean... It’s, it’s loads to process. You could’ve gotten in trouble and you still didn’t turn me in. What gives?”

  “I knew it wouldn’t end well,” he replied, back to her, one foot out the door. “They gave you a tough time over there, sorry for your hardship.”

  “Spare me. Did you find out why it stopped?”

  “There’s a slightly plausible explanation.”

  Bridget bounced her bottom on the bed to bring her curvy frame upright. “Go on, don’t be shy. Won’t hurt my feelings.”

  Dr. Campbell’s eyebrows damn near touched his hairline when he turned around. “We have more appropriate clothing options, Ms. Sparks.”

  “Oh, I’m golden.” Standing on her tippy toes, she pressed against him. “Spill.”

  “You’ve been turned off.”

  “I’ve never been turned off before.”

  Inhaling, the doctor shifted focus to and from the framed Chicago and San Francisco skyline pictures on opposite walls. Bait on the hook, fishing line out and he didn’t bite.

  Bridget fell on her heels. “You mean, like a light switch?”

  “Sort of. I detected a distinct change in the neural pathway you used to exercise your power.”

  In layman’s terms: the road to electricity had been blocked and thus curved elsewhere. A reroute begged a new destination and therein lied the inexplicable. Her hands went numb on their way to clamp over her mouth. Blood left her cheeks colorless, rushing from her head to generate feeling in her arms.