I Am Titanium (Pax Black Book 1) Read online

  I look dead, she thought.

  You are dead, said Akllana’chikni’pai. And you should stay that way.

  The elevator dinged. Julie shoved between the slowly opening elevator doors and jogged down the hallway toward Pax’s room. The hall was full of people who seemed to be gathering around Pax’s door in slow motion.

  It was like the dreams she’d had as a kid, where a monster would be chasing her and she could never run fast enough to escape it.

  She’d known this day would come. All the specialists who’d seen Pax—the good ones—had always taken her aside to patiently explain to her that Pax was a very precious little boy and that she should appreciate him while there was still time. Some of the experts had pretended there was some hope for Pax. Those were the ones she sent away. Politely. But she never consulted them again, and she never recommended them to anyone else. Because if they couldn’t be trusted to tell her the truth about Pax, they shouldn’t be trusted with any of her other patients either.

  She was a mother, but she was also a doctor and a scientist. She’d been expecting this day for a long time now.

  The machines in Pax’s room were going haywire. She’d expected a long, continuous beep, the sound of Pax’s heart monitor flat-lining. But instead it was whooping, fluttering with what sounded like hundreds of heartbeats, flat-lining, returning to normal, and then fluttering again.

  Her footsteps carried her to the door of the room.

  She could feel her heart crashing into her throat and lungs, making it hard to breathe or think rationally.

  Slow. Everything was too slow.

  Someone was blocking her. She grabbed the back of his lab coat and yanked him out of her way. As he moved out of view, the head of Pax’s bed appeared. She had a glimpse of his face before someone else moved in her way again. The people were all dressed in white coats but she felt like they were in black robes, carrying scythes.

  “Pax!” she screamed.

  Don’t leave without saying good-bye.

  It was strange, how terrified she felt. She’d prepared for this. She’d gone over and over how his last days and hours would go, what would happen in his body, what would happen after he died. She’d walked that path, acknowledged the grief, the unfairness. She shouldn’t have felt anything at all. And yet her heart beat harder and harder—pain stabbing at her from the inside.

  Then.

  Something appeared on the floor, out of nowhere.

  The people in lab coats around Pax all took a step back and bent down to deal with whatever was on the floor. She got another glimpse of Pax in bed.

  The lights drained the color from his face, made him as pale as a piece of marble. His mouth gaped open. His eyes were half-closed.

  Two thick, clear tears ran down his cheeks. His head sank forward slightly as his chest fell.

  And fell farther. He was empty.

  Dead.

  Pax’s body was nothing but an empty shell.

  Her heart was climbing up her throat, trying to kill her. Tears were gushing out of her like blood from a cut artery. A line of fire ran along the back of her throat.

  “Get out of my way!” It came out in a gargle. She couldn’t feel her fingers.

  Oh God, Pax. Oh God. I was lying when I thought I was ready for this.

  Someone moved in front of her again, and she screamed. This time there were no words, only rage. She had to be there. She had to—

  The men in front of her lifted something off the floor.

  Another body. Despite herself, she had to look. Scarlett. She was just as limp, just as empty as her son.

  What was going on here? Some kind of suicide pact?

  Suddenly everything seemed to happen at once. She was jostled backward as the doctors and nurses lifted Scarlett out of the way and laid her on the floor on the other side of the room. One woman bent over her mouth, and a solid-looking man ripped open her shirt and started performing compressions on her flat chest, chanting out the rhythm.

  It seemed as though the man, who was at least six feet tall, was having trouble compressing her chest fully. Her ribs were barely moving.

  Julie steadied herself against the wall. The stabbing pain moved into her arms.

  She glanced over at the bed. The rails were down and orderlies were working on Pax with the paddles. But it didn’t seem like their efforts were as dedicated as the ones working on Scarlett.

  She had a life ahead of her.

  Julie pushed off from the wall and staggered toward the bed. Someday. Someday she’d forgive that girl for being alive—for daring to have a life—when her son never could.

  But not today.

  Her lips crushed against themselves. She felt every wrinkle, every sign of age in her body. She stepped around a nurse and looked down at her son.

  Pax was a statue, shining under the lights. His skin was made out of white stone. His hoodie had been zipped open, the gown slit down the center. He wasn’t breathing.

  His lips were the same color as his skin.

  His eyes.

  His eyes, dear God, were white all the way across. He really was like stone… am I crazy?

  The machines were still going haywire.

  Pax’s hands were by his sides. One of them lifted, gestured at the machines.

  And the irregular shrieking stopped. Cut off. Like magic.

  The noise was replaced with a ringing in her ears. The edges of her vision grayed, leaving her with a quickly shrinking circle of clear vision. The pressure in her head told her she was going to faint.

  If she were smart, she’d lower herself to the floor. But she wasn’t smart. She was, in the end, and against all her expectations, a mother. Pax turned his head toward her.

  She fell.

  Chapter 4

  One minute Pax was in Terry’s Japanese pacha—

  And the next he was back in his body. Each and every machine in his hospital room was making some variation of an earsplitting shriek. The room was crowded with doctors and nurses bustling around the bed and around Scarlett’s body on the floor at the foot of the bed.

  He didn’t feel as though he were looking through his own eyes so much as observing the room from a viewpoint somewhere above the bed. While he could feel the shock of the paddles on his chest, it was a distant sensation that might mean anything: he couldn’t be sure it meant Terry’s plan had worked. He attempted to cough.

  Nothing happened.

  Time for a status report from the expert in astral material.

  Terry?

  Terry didn’t answer, although Pax could distantly feel his presence. It was as though Terry were stuck halfway between the astral plane and Earth.

  Terry?

  Nothing.

  Pax was on his own.

  Julie arrived. Tears ran down her face. Her nose was red, and her mouth was open in an awful grimace. It’s just my deathday, Mom. Not any more surprising or unexpected than my birthday. He tried to open his mouth to tell her that—he didn’t expect her to laugh so much as roll her eyes—but his mouth wouldn’t move either. Inasmuch as he could feel his body, it felt as though it were made out of a piece of wood or stone with features carved in. His flesh was a pale, nearly uniform, white.

  The doctors yelled, “Clear!” and tried again with the heart paddles.

  It was probably useless to try to shock Pax’s new body into life using electricity; given the clues of his uniform coloration and carved appearance, there probably wasn’t anything differentiated inside the body—no heart, lungs, or other organs, just white astral material.

  This posed a problem.

  If Terry was unable to assist in reviving him, and so were the doctors, how was he supposed to bootstrap the body back into operation?

  After
all that, was he going to truly die—and take Scarlett with him?

  Pax examined himself. Several nurses rushed out of the room and returned with blankets, which they placed under Scarlett’s legs. The team attempting to resuscitate her wasn’t having any more luck than Pax’s team, although neither seemed willing to halt their efforts. White liquid oozed out of Scarlett’s eyes: her body had also been replaced. He wondered what the medical personnel were thinking.

  One of the machines went from merely shrieking into an agonized, steady screech. Several of the doctors winced; one of them pressed his shoulder up to his ear as he continued to perform chest compressions. The machine was worse than useless at this point: much like the human nervous system’s reaction to damage—pain—it was howling louder than necessary, preventing the rational behavior needed to stop additional damage from occurring.

  Pain. If Pax survived this, that was something else he would add to his research list: how to stop unnecessary, counterproductive pain.

  For now, though, he’d settle for shutting off that fucking heart-rate monitor.

  While the room ricocheted with frantic health care professionals, Pax focused on the machine. It seemed to radiate a kind of heat—no, not heat. Sound waves.

  Pax knew sound waves were generally thought to travel in, well, waves, but to his out-of-body vision, the noise seemed to travel more as a quavering line, creating a vibrating, buzzing sort of trail through the air. The sound trails seemed to whip at the heads of everyone in the room, lashing out at them. Attacking them.

  In turn, the various humans in the room seemed to be producing their own lines of energy. These new lines buzzed and vibrated almost as much as the sound waves, but, where the sound waves didn’t have a color so much as a pattern of vibration, the new lines were darker and seemed to roil with emotion. Pax couldn’t help but think of them as tentacles.

  They seethed with annoyance. Irrationality.

  Then there were the other tentacles. They didn’t seem to have a body, didn’t seem to come from the people. These tentacles were black and seethed with pure, unfettered, unreasoning hate. The dark tentacles swarmed over Pax’s body, trying to damage it, even as the people tried to save it. They swarmed over Scarlett’s body as well, seeking to thrust themselves into her skin, seeking entry through her eyes and nose and mouth.

  “Clear!”

  His body bucked on the bed.

  “I’m not getting anywhere with this,” one of the doctors on the floor shouted. “It’s like her lungs are filled with concrete and it’s setting fast.”

  “This one, too. What the hell is this stuff? You think it’s some kind of suicide pact?”

  “Shut up!” one of the nurses hissed. “Dr. Black’s got to be standing outside the room by now.”

  “She’s right behind you, you fucking moron.”

  Pax almost smiled. It was funny, in a morbid way. How would his and Scarlett’s cases be written up, if they truly died? Suicide by concrete: one for The Journal of the American Medical Association.

  But now was not the time to savor the ironies of the situation.

  While Pax didn’t understand the multiple energy patterns around the room, it was obvious the thick strands that led from Pax’s perspective near the ceiling, and from his new body, were of some importance. The two ends waved loosely around, refusing to become a single strand. Pax’s spirit, energy, soul, or whatever, was flopping around at one end and the body’s astral material at the other, as though they were blindly trying to clasp hands and failing.

  Pax focused on the two strands of energy. It was more difficult than he expected. He didn’t have a hand to touch them with; he didn’t even have eyelids so he could squint at them to bring them into focus. How much of his cognition was tied to his physical form surprised him. Go… together, he thought at the tangled energy. Just… go.

  Nothing happened.

  He imagined crushing the energy together and tying it together.

  Nothing.

  Terry? he called again. Can you hear me?

  A distinct lack of response was his only answer; on the whole, he interpreted that as a no. Nervousness washed over him. Without a limbic system to capture and help regulate his emotions, the anxious energy seemed an overwhelming tidal wave.

  A rush of sparks cascaded down the thread toward his body but failed to make the jump to the other strand.

  Julie covered her eyes with her hand.

  “Get her out of here,” shouted one doctor.

  She swayed. Her face was bright red and covered with sweat. Her gray-streaked, dark blond hair was stuck to the texturing on the wall and spreading out in a halo above her: she was sinking, her knees bending slowly as she slid down the wall.

  Suddenly she dropped like a doll.

  Terry must have come through at that instant: Pax’s mouth opened, and his awareness jumped down into his body. He sat up, shoved a doctor out of his way, and jumped out of bed toward her.

  “Mom!” He tried to pick her up off the floor, but someone was grabbing his arms.

  He swung his arm to push the young doctor away.

  The doctor flew across the room and slammed into the far wall, crying out in pain.

  Not what Pax had meant to do. But he’d have to take care of it later. Julie’s skin had gone from tomato red to pale, like wax.

  The energy radiating out of her body spiked, shoving out in all directions at once. Then it cut off, like a hand turning off the lights.

  Pax pushed aside a couple of nurses and laid Julie on the bed.

  He cleared his throat. This time it worked. “She seems to be having a cardiac arrest,” he said as calmly as he could. His entire body seemed to be vibrating with an overabundance of nervous energy. “Please begin CPR.”

  He was shoved backward. They had no more idea than he did what was going on with him, but they knew what to do about an ordinary heart attack.

  “Clear!”

  Julie’s heart wasn’t starting the way it was supposed to. The energy it was producing seemed hesitant, giving a few pulses and then dying out again.

  “Clear!”

  Her chest arced upward.

  Mom. She’d always seemed too unemotional and rational. Cold. After his father had died, even cruel. He’d told himself a thousand times she wouldn’t truly miss him when he was gone. He’d never stopped to consider the reverse. He was meant to die before her.

  He circled the crowd around the bed to stand at the foot of it, looking at her. Her feet splayed outward limply in her shoes.

  Her heartbeat stuttered to life and then stopped again.

  She was so small. When had she become so tiny?

  Someone grabbed his arm to pull him away from the bed.

  “Clear!”

  He wasn’t touching the bed. He wasn’t in any danger. He wasn’t causing any problems.

  “You need to leave the room, Pax,” the woman said. She didn’t look familiar.

  None of these people looked familiar. Their faces seemed distorted and ugly, as if they were made of slightly melted plastic. Was this how all humans would look now? She grabbed his elbow. Her fingernails pressed into his skin. He didn’t register it as pain. But it was still annoying.

  “I’m fine,” he said.

  “You need to leave the room now.” She dug her fingernails in harder. She was trying to hurt him.

  “Get away from me!” he shouted. Flinging her away. Across the room. To smash up against one of the chairs.

  Akllana’chikni’pai returned to Earth’s physical plane for the first time in millennia. It was harder than she remembered. Pushing through the layers of the aether seemed to tear at her soul, scouring it of social niceties, ethics, sanity. Leaving her a vengeful spirit: an ugliness in the world. An infection of hate.
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  She tried to conceal her emotions as much as possible from Terkun’shuks’pai. He knew she hadn’t forgiven humanity for what had happened to her; he had no hope of swaying her opinion politically. But that wouldn’t matter. She, like he, was sworn to be objective in her reports. If the humans were not at risk, those reports would show it.

  She didn’t intend that they would. Humans were dangerous and vile and violent. They would destroy everything, given a chance.

  And Terkun’shuks’pai had just turned two of them into astral beings.

  The girl lay on the floor, bucking under the electrical machine the humans were vainly using to make her heart beat again. Meanwhile, her spirit fought desperately to get back into the body Terkun’shuks’pai had created for her.

  It wasn’t supposed to happen like this.

  Terkun’shuks’pai had assured the Council it would be easy enough. The two of them would retain a link to the astral plane, use it to build a physical body for the boy, and move the boy’s spirit into it. He’d demonstrated the process a dozen times; they had practiced together. Once the boy was steady in his body, Terkun’shuks’pai would release him. Then they could remain near and observe how such power affected humans.

  The boy was easy enough to find. On his own, Pax threw off more energy than any other being on the planet. He was in his death throes—that was clear from the jagged spikes in his energy—but even so, he lit up his world.

  No wonder Terkun’shuks’pai had chosen the boy.

  Such flames as this didn’t burn for long. It was a miracle—probably of Terkun’shuks’pai’s doing—that the boy had survived as long as he had.