The Revenants Read online

  “So, Tanik,” Darius began as the man selected level 18 from the control panel. “What makes you think we want to become Revenants?”

  Tanik arched an eyebrow at him. “Does a blind man want to see?”

  Darius frowned. “I don’t think—”

  “No, you’re right,” Tanik cut him off. “How can you want something that you can’t even imagine? You’ll just have to trust me—this is not a gift you should refuse.”

  “Some gifts can be curses,” Dyara pointed out.

  “This is not one of them,” Tanik replied.

  The elevator arrived on level 18 and the doors parted into a broad corridor with bold white letters that read: COMMAND DECK (18).

  They followed Tanik out and down the corridor, joining a trickling stream of other officers in matching black, form-hugging uniforms.

  “You said that I’m the key to everything,” Darius said in a hushed voice. “You want to explain what that means?”

  “It means that without you, the cause is lost. You are key to defeating the USO and the Cygnians.”

  “How can you possibly know that?” Dyara asked.

  “Because I have foreseen it,” Tanik replied.

  They reached a door with a golden plate on it and glowing white letters that read: Captain’s Quarters.

  Tanik waved his hand in front of the door, and it swished open. The room was dark, but the lights swelled to a dim setting as they walked in. Tanik waved the door shut behind them, and then walked over to a locker along the side of the room. Darius followed him there, peering over his shoulder as he opened the locker.

  Tanik withdrew a silver flask as well as a large metal and glass tank. Through the glass, Darius saw what Cassandra had described—water with luminous sparkles inside. Those sparkles appeared to be the source of the radiance, and they were flitting about inside the container, bouncing from one side to another, as if trying to get out.

  “What are those things?” Darius whispered.

  “Sprites,” Tanik replied.

  “They’re alive?” Dyara asked.

  “They’re symbionts with a natural affinity for the divine light. These are anaerobic, so they can live inside of us, but the aerobic version is more common.”

  “Anaerobic? You mean like bacteria?” Darius asked.

  “More like fungi,” Tanik replied. “Who’s going first?”

  Darius regarded the sparkling water in the cylinder warily. “How do we know you’re not trying to poison us?”

  “To what end?” Tanik asked.

  “To get rid of us? You said we’re immune to your abilities. That means we’re the only ones whose minds you can’t control.”

  Tanik smiled thinly. “There are other ways of controlling people, Darius, but perhaps this will help settle your doubts.”

  Tanik screwed the flask into an attachment at the top of the tank and then depressed a button. The living water surged up as a metal pusher plate rose from the bottom of the tank. Unscrewing the flask, Tanik depressed a button in the top of it, and radiant water came streaming out in a snaking line. He held out a hand to that stream of water, and it coalesced into a perfectly round jewel, about the size of a golf ball. With that perfectly smooth marble of water gleaming before him, Tanik crooked his finger toward it and opened his mouth. The shining ball of water floated past his lips. He clamped his mouth shut and swallowed.

  “There, you see? Perfectly safe,” Tanik said.

  Darius still didn’t like it. He felt like he was about to join a cult and this was his initiation ceremony. Suppressing a shiver, he shook his head and asked, “What if we don’t want to become Revenants?”

  “It is your birthright. Besides, your daughter has already been activated. Don’t you want to know what she is experiencing so that you can help her through it?”

  “What’s in it for you?” Dyara asked. “Why are you so interested in us becoming like you?”

  “Because I can’t fight a war on my own. And as I said, Darius is integral to our victory.”

  “Assuming your visions of the future are accurate,” Darius said.

  “They are,” Tanik replied. He held out the flask to Darius. “This is your destiny. I suggest you embrace it.”

  Darius hesitated, but Cassandra gave his hand a reassuring squeeze. “They don’t mean you any harm.”

  Darius blinked at her. “They?”

  “The sparklers.”

  “Sprites,” Tanik corrected.

  “How do you know that?” Dyara asked, a frown dimpling her cheeks.

  “I...” Cassandra trailed off, shaking her head. “I just know.”

  “Yes,” Tanik replied with a knowing grin.

  Darius accepted the flask and studied it, turning it over and over in his hands.

  “Your daughter will need your help, Darius,” Tanik urged. “It will be very hard for her to go through this on her own.”

  “Stop manipulating me,” Darius snapped.

  Tanik scowled. “Then stop wasting my time. You and I both know you’re going to drink it anyway.”

  Darius was about to object, but he realized Tanik was right. He needed to understand what Cassandra was going through.

  Darius raised the flask to his lips and pressed the button at the top. Cold water automatically streamed into his mouth. His tongue tingled, and then his throat, as he gulped down two mouthfuls of the so-called living water. Releasing the button, he lowered the flask and nodded to Tanik. “How much do I need to have?” His whole body was tingling now, and his head felt strange—like the seat of his consciousness, the thinking part of him, was everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

  “Empty it. There’s enough to go around, and we can cultivate more later.”

  Dyara gave him a dubious look, but Darius was already in too deep to worry about consequences. He raised the flask to his lips and depressed the button once more. This time he held the button and gulped until the flask was empty.

  Every nerve in his body was singing by the time he lowered the flask once more. Unintelligible whispers crowded in at the edges of his hearing, their number and volume increased with every passing second. His head was spinning, and his eyes were blurry and unfocused. He blinked to focus them, but it didn’t work.

  “Wha...” He shook his head in an effort to clear it, but that just made everything worse.

  “Dad?”

  The whispering voices grew even louder, but they remained unintelligible. They weren’t speaking Primary or Cygnian. His vision narrowed to a dark, blurry tunnel, and then he felt himself racing down that tunnel toward a bright, blinding light.

  Chapter 2

  The light was so intense that it washed out every trace of detail as Darius drew near, leaving him adrift in a sheer, depthless white sea.

  “Where am I?” he asked, but his voice echoed strangely in his ears as if he’d thought the words rather than spoken them. Details began to emerge: the thundering roar of rushing water; a dazzling streak of fiery red clouds; a twisted, beleaguered black tree bowing in the wind at the edge of a cliff.

  He turned aside and looked down. A familiar person lay on a bed of crimson flower petals, her face relaxed in sleep. It was Cassandra. She lay in a metal box, her skin as pale as a freshly-fallen snow. She looked no older than her twelve years—still just a child, and now she was dead.

  Horror stabbed through Darius. This had to be a dream. He saw himself reach out to touch Cassandra’s cheek, and felt her icy skin brush the back of his hand.

  He flinched, but his hand stayed where it was, pressed to Cassandra’s cheek and trembling visibly. This was too real to be a dream, but it had to be a dream! Just a second ago he’d been standing on the Deliverance, and now... here he was standing on a cliff beside a thundering waterfall, with a fiery red sky overhead, and a bright, blazing sun glaring at him over the rim of his daughter’s casket.

  “They killed her,” a gruff voice said.

  Darius followed the voice to see Tanik standing beside
him. He wore a thick black cloak with the hood drawn up over his head to ward off the frigid wind gusting over the cliff. His yellow-green eyes were sharp and bright, almost glowing in the fading light.

  Darius’s whole body trembled with rage. His throat was so tight he couldn’t speak. Hot tears slid down his cheeks. He shook his head and bit his tongue until he tasted blood.

  “She tried to negotiate with them, and they killed her,” Tanik went on. “This just proves that there can be no negotiating with the Cygnians. The only way we’ll ever have peace is to kill them all, or subjugate them as they subjugated us.”

  “This isn’t real!” Darius screamed, but again his voice echoed strangely in his ears.

  He shook his head, and this time he was aware that he wasn’t the one moving his body; then he heard himself speak in a hoarse whisper of a voice, and he realized that he wasn’t the one speaking either. “First we’re going to slaughter them. Then when there’s only a few of them left, and they’re on their knees begging for their lives, we’ll show them mercy, but only to prolong their suffering. We’ll enslave them just as they enslaved us.”

  “Yesss,” Tanik rasped in an euphoric whisper. “That would be justice.”

  Darius pressed a button on the side of the casket and the lid swung shut. As it did so, he realized that this was an improvised casket, a cryo-pod, just like the one they’d used for the funeral on the Deliverance.

  Darius saw himself extend a hand to it, and the cryo-pod floated up, hovering out over the racing rapids above the waterfall. He hesitated, blinking tears from his eyes, and then his hand fell back to his side. The pod fell, too. With a loud splash, it ducked briefly under the water. It bobbed back up a split second later, only to be whisked over the cliff amidst sparkling curtains of spray.

  A heavy hand fell on Darius’s shoulder. “Come,” Tanik said. “Night is falling. The Cygnians will be out to hunt soon.”

  “Let them come,” Darius replied, his voice strangled with grief and barely audible over the rushing roar of the river. “The negotiations are over. It’s time we showed the Phantoms what they’re up against.”

  Darius woke up screaming.

  “Dad!” Darius blinked wide eyes at his daughter. She was shaking him violently, her cheeks streaked with tears. “Dad?” She stopped shaking him and crushed him into a rib-cracking hug.

  “It’s okay,” he whispered into her hair, but he was frowning heavily. His head pounded like it was going to explode, and he felt like he was falling, even though there was no gravity whatsoever on board the Deliverance. The only thing keeping them rooted to the deck was their mag boots.

  “What did you see?” Tanik growled, his green eyes bright and sharp with interest.

  Dyara’s gaze skipped between him and Darius and she slowly shook her head. “You said this was safe.”

  “It is. He’s alive, isn’t he?” Tanik replied.

  “What happened to him?” Dyara demanded.

  “I...” Darius trailed off as his daughter withdrew from the hug. He saw Dyara’s concern mirrored on Cassandra’s face, and his mind flashed back to her lying inside a cryo-pod on a bed of crimson flower petals, pale and frozen in death. His throat closed off, and suddenly he couldn’t speak.

  “What is it?” Cassandra asked.

  “He had a vision,” Tanik explained, and Darius nodded. “What did you see?”

  Darius hesitated. He had the presence of mind not to say anything in front of Cassandra, but he needed to know more about what he’d seen. Turning to Tanik, he nodded and said, “I saw you. Dead in a casket. The Cygnians killed you.”

  Tanik’s eyes glittered and a slight smile curved his lips. “Did you now?”

  Darius nodded shakily, trying not to let his terror show. “What did I see?”

  “A vision of the future.”

  “A possible future?” Darius pressed.

  Tanik’s expression remained frozen as it was, but his eyes drifted out of focus. “There are two kinds of visions: one is a certainty that you cannot escape. It is self-fulfilling, and the very act of seeing the vision sets in motion a chain of events that will bring it about.”

  A fresh stab of horror sliced through Darius. “What? That makes no sense.”

  “It makes perfect sense. In order to actually see the future, a real future, one’s vision of that future must be a part of its causal chain.”

  Darius’s mind flashed back to the casket and Cassandra’s corpse-white skin. His mind railed against her death being some kind of inescapable fate. “Wait, you said there are two kinds of visions.”

  “Yes,” Tanik nodded and his eyes snapped back into focus. “The second kind is a warning showing a possible future. It is a kind of divine intervention that alters your choices sufficiently as to prevent the foreseen outcome.”

  Hope swelled inside of Darius. “So which kind of vision was mine?”

  “It’s almost impossible to know. Only the most powerful Revenants can discern the difference between destiny and foresight. The ones who can have the power to mold the future and change their fate. But the ones who can’t tell the difference, mistake destiny for foresight and end up inadvertently causing their own fates.”

  “What’s the point of a vision that shows you something bad and also causes it to happen? That implies some kind of malignant force at work, producing those visions.”

  Tanik nodded soberly. “And foresight implies a benevolent force. That is why it is dangerous to look into the future. There are unseen forces at work guiding those fates, some for good, and others for evil, but it is hard to tell the difference.”

  Darius’s brow furrowed. “Can you tell?”

  “Sometimes,” Tanik replied.

  Dyara looked dubious. “How do you know you’re not just imagining things? If something you see never happens, then how do you know you really foresaw anything? I can imagine lots of possible futures and use that insight to avoid those things happening.”

  “Ah, but the difference is that you are guessing, whereas a vision that comes to you from the light is based on all of the available data in the entire universe, and it is not a guess.”

  “Right,” Dyara drawled.

  Darius ignored her skepticism. His eyes were locked on Tanik’s, his brain burning with just one desire: to prevent what he’d seen from happening. He was tempted to believe that what he’d seen had been part of a dream and not a vision, but somehow, he knew better.

  “If I train with you, will I be able to discern the difference between destiny and a foresight? Will I be able to prevent what I saw?”

  Tanik smile broadened into a scar-twisted grin. “I’m touched that you care so much for me, Darius.”

  He blinked, confused by the comment, but then he remembered his lie about who he’d seen in the casket. “Yeah, well, maybe I want to prevent other outcomes, too? Besides, we kind of need you alive right now.”

  “Yes, you do. As to your question, I have never seen someone so recently-activated by the sprites receive a vision before. It usually takes years of training to begin to see such visions. The fact that you required no such training only confirms what I have foreseen: you are no ordinary Revenant.”

  “I thought you said we have to train to become Revenants,” Dyara said.

  “In some sense you become Revenants the moment you are activated, but it is more accurate to call you acolytes—Revenants in training.”

  Tanik snatched the empty flask out of the air, where it was floating beside Darius, and he screwed it into the top of the tank of luminous, living water. Water swirled up into the flask once more and then he unscrewed it and held it out to Dyara. “Are you ready for your activation?”

  She eyed the flask dubiously. “Am I going to have any visions if I do?”

  “It is extremely unlikely. With training, eventually you will.”

  “Have you foreseen anything in my future?” Dyara asked, her eyes wary.

  “No. Why?”

  “Because I want to
know if drinking that stuff will lead to my death.”

  Tanik grinned. “If there is any evil lurking in your future, the only hope you have of escaping it is to become a Revenant.”

  “So you say.”

  “After all these years together, you still don’t trust me, Dyara?”

  “Not even a little,” she said, but she took the flask and pressed it to her lips. Throwing her head back, she chugged the contents of the flask for several seconds straight. When she was done, she wiped a glittering bead of luminous water from the corner of her mouth, and it went spinning away.

  Darius watched it go—a tiny world with dozens of glowing sprites trapped inside. The droplet collided with the wall of Tanik’s quarters and exploded in a glittering spray.

  “Good. Now you’re all ready to begin your training on Ouroboros.”

  “Ouro-what?” Cassandra asked.

  Tanik turned and gestured to the viewport in his room, and Darius noticed for the first time a green-white planet the size of the tip of his thumb shining amidst the stars.

  “Ouroboros?” Dyara asked. “You know this place?”

  “From my time fighting the Keth, yes.”

  “The Keth?” Cassandra asked.

  “The race of aliens that the Revenants are fighting,” Darius explained. “It’s the reason for the Crucible, the seals of life and death, and the designated hunting grounds in the USO. It’s all part of a eugenics program designed to breed more Revenants for the war.”

  “So the Phantoms aren’t the real enemy?” Cassandra asked.

  Tanik shook his head. “They’re the scapegoat the Revenants use to draft their army and control breeding in order to favor source-sensitive lineages.”

  “So this planet—” Darius began, jerking his chin to the green-white orb. “—it used to belong to the Keth?”

  Tanik regarded him steadily. “Oh, more than that. It used to be the homeworld of the Keth.”

  Chapter 3

  “It used to be their homeworld?” Darius burst out. “And you brought us here?”

  “Used to be,” Tanik emphasized. “It’s been abandoned for centuries, which makes it perfect for our purposes.”