Screams! So many screams!
Red stains on the stone walls.
Cracks in the surfaces.
Every time a body hit the ground, clouds of dust rose, clawing at his face like sharp talons. He turned his gaze away—not to avoid witnessing the violent massacre, but to keep the dust from getting into his eyes; it was such a hassle to clean it out afterward.
Once the frenzy of screams and shrieks finally stopped, he found himself facing a mysterious scene.
As strange as it seemed, the curtains of dust and dirt that lingered in the air had grown so thick that not even the sunset—its crimson glow streaming in from who knew where—could pierce through. The dust had created a brownish haze, shielding the carnage from view as if trying to hide the horror within the cave.
Then, the stone walls began to fade into the darkness.
The scene of the tragedy dissolved into a pitch-black void, devoured by what looked like a lagoon of tar.
The cave—if that’s what it was—had transformed into a vast emptiness reminiscent of outer space. Those uneven, stretching clouds of dust pulsed like a beating heart, and with every throb, they released a faint luminescence that tinted the ground with shades of red, blue, and a touch of green.
It was a cold nebula, sending a jarring sense of déjà vu to the depths of his mind. He’d seen it not long ago, just a few years back, though the feeling it stirred harked to an earlier time—one that stretched beyond years, centuries, or even millennia, reaching perhaps to the very origin of the universe. The sensation was chilling, and the nebula itself, terrifying.
He took a step forward, and his foot struck something. He didn’t need to look down to know it was a corpse—the body of one of the students.
He avoided stepping on it; he hated the crunching sound ribs made when they broke. He’d hated it ever since his days of performing daily autopsies, but he loathed even more stepping on anything that wasn’t solid ground. Skirting around it, he made his way toward the exit.
But what exit? The light of the sunset, which had shown the way moments ago, was now lost in that brilliant stellar tapestry. There was no exit anymore.
It doesn’t matter, he thought. He knew there had to be a way out, and it had to be just a few feet ahead. Pressing a hand against the cave’s rough wall, he kept walking in the direction marked by the signs that read 47-G.
Suddenly, his hand sank into the surface as if the rocks themselves wanted to swallow it. He stumbled, nearly slamming his face against the wall. When he looked at the spot where his hand had lost its grip, he saw that someone had chipped a hole into the wall—right at the ‘G’ of 47-G.
I knew that damn code would bring me bad luck, he muttered to himself.
Hee hee hee hee hee, Children’s laughter. Hee hee hee hee hee…
“Annoying brats!” he growled, swatting at the air as though the laughter were flies buzzing around him. “Just wait until I catch you.”
Yes, he knew those kids. He’d never seen them, but he’d heard them.
He came across another corpse, and this time, he stepped on it. His foot sank into the torso of one of the murdered boys. He heard the damn crunch of ribs and felt something wet against his foot—blood and entrails.
To keep his weight from driving him further into the body and making the mess worse, he jumped, but he landed on another corpse—this one face-up, its torso completely split open.
The dead guy’s chin rested against his chest, arms spread wide, as if showing his tragedy to anyone passing by, saying, ‘Just look at what they’ve done to me!’ He stumbled away as best he could, only to trip over another body in his path. This one had its head smashed and parts of its arms and legs blown apart. Judging by the chest, it was a girl.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Five young people, dead. No, six. There had been one killed outside the cave, in the woods.
Why did you do it, Brun? he wondered. Even though he hadn’t spoken aloud, the name echoed through the rocky tunnel, reverberating, Brun, Brun, Brun, Brun…
The crimson glow of that nebulous sea pulsed, matching the rhythm. Brun, Brun, Brun…
He had almost forgotten that he was both inside a cave and out in the vastness of space. The memory came rushing back when, standing on the rocky ledge, he saw hundreds of violent tornadoes swirling around him—whirlwinds of dust and stars rising from far below, from a dark ocean, ascending like columns twisting their way toward another vast ocean, one visible far, far above.
“Hey, Broga, mind giving me a hand?” a voice called out. His brother’s voice.
He turned to find Brun right next to him, trapped waist-deep in one of those whirlwinds. His brother had managed to free himself partially, but the force of that cosmic cyclone kept pushing, trying to pull him upward.
“Brun?!” Surprised, and even slightly amused, Broga grabbed his hand. Planting his feet against the ground to resist the pull, he tried to free his brother. “How the hell did you get in there?!”
“The Seeker. He did this,” Brun replied with complete calm, as if he weren’t in the middle of a crisis.
“The Seeker?” Broga said, baffled, while still pulling. “I thought that monster overdosed and died.”
“No, no. Everyone thinks that because no one’s seen him in years, but he’s still alive. They’ve been keeping him locked up, in rehab. That’s all.”
“Ah, I see.”
“Yeah, poor thing’s changed owners. It’s someone else holding his leash now, you know? He came back looking for more meds, we fought, and… well…” Brun gestured as if to say, ‘Here I am.’ “My foot got tangled with his tail, and now he’s dragging me along with him.
“Right. Like space debris caught in a rogue comet’s pull,” Broga commented.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“Comet? What are you talking about, brother?”
“Forget it. So, where’s the Seeker now?”
Still holding on to his brother’s hands, Brun nodded upward toward the ocean that loomed above them. “He’s gone back to the world,” he said. “He’s up there.”
“Alright, then let go, Brun. Stop fighting the whirlwind.”
“No, brother! If I let go, it’ll pull us both in!”
“Let go, Brun!” Broga repeated, straining every muscle to keep his grip on his twin. “It’s the only way for both of us to get out of here.”
Trusting his brother, Brun stopped resisting, and the galactic tornado pulled them both upward, carrying them into that other ocean, where they disappeared into clouds of dust and stars.
And so, Broga opened his eyes. He was awake.
As the weight of sleep drained from his mind like water down a sink, Broga felt the cold floor pressing against his cheek, brushing against his beard. Instantly, he knew something was wrong.
A faint smell of coffee mixed with floor cleaner.
His eyes adjusted to the dim light, recognizing the floor of his lab-office and spotting his porcelain mug shattered beside him.
He stood up. Sure enough, he was in his lab.
His face and beard felt stiff, crusted with… dried coffee? And on the floor where he had been lying face down was a brown stain: more dried coffee.
He had just come from the kitchen with that coffee. How had he ended up on the floor? And why had the coffee dried so quickly? Had he fainted without realizing it? Had he suffered a stroke? How long had he been out?
He looked at the clock embedded in his cybernetic wrist, and a wave of dread clenched his stomach.
Day: Friday. Time: 1502.
Friday? Impossible! It was still supposed to be Tuesday. It had been dusk when he—
“Date!” he barked. “Tell me the date and time!”
“Friday, Maiden’s month 21st, year 590, Markabian calendar. 1502 hours,” replied the synthesized voice of the computer from the control panel.
“What?!”
“Friday, September 21st, Year 2110, Hypercontinental calendar. 3:02 PM,” the machine clarified.
“Yeah, yeah,” he said, waving his hand dismissively, as if to say, I didn’t ask for a breakdown, stupid machine.
Impossible. How…?
‘Like space debris caught in the gravity of a rogue comet.’
The memory of his brother’s desperate plea for help flashed in his mind, along with the unsettling sensation of being sucked into a violent spatial vortex.
“Computer…” he began, carefully choosing his words. “Where… have I been for the last seventy-two hours?”
“The requested record is incomplete,” the computer responded.
“Elaborate,” he ordered.
“There are no records of your existence for the past sixty-eight hours, two minutes, and twenty-five seconds.”
Broga swallowed hard.
“Security camera twelve,” he said. “Play the footage from my last recorded presence.”
A holographic projection appeared before him, showing the same room he was in now, viewed from above. There he was, entering the frame from the left, walking toward the computer console with a coffee mug in hand. A sudden interference blurred the footage, and in an instant, he disappeared, his mug crashing to the floor, shattering and spilling the coffee.
The video sped up, showing time passing in fast-forward mode. Hours turned into days as the coffee evaporated from the floor, leaving behind the brown stain now at his feet. Then, another burst of interference in the footage, and he reappeared, standing in the exact same spot he had vanished from, only to collapse onto the floor, unconscious, before finally waking up.
“Computer,” he said, his voice tight. “Activate the spectrometer to search for quantum radiation. Use… my body as the search perimeter.”
A few seconds later—long, drawn-out seconds—the answer came.
“Spacetime continuum disruptions: affirmative. Quantum radiation activity: affirmative. Radiation type: Kappa. Radioactive Displacement: confirmed.”
Broga’s breath quickened.
“Brun…” he whispered.
If both he and Brun had been sucked into that vortex, and he had woken up, then surely Brun had too. The bunker! His brother must have woken up in the bunker!
“Computer, patch me to Alfred.”
“Communication cannot be established. Android Alfred is currently out of service.”
Broga held his breath, a lump of anxiety tightening in his throat. He stripped off his lab coat, slipped into his black work jumpsuit in case he needed to blend in with other Cyclopes—though he hoped it wouldn’t come to that, even though he had a sinking feeling it would.
He washed his face, and without wasting another moment, activated the anti-gravity devices on his feet—covered by his black boots—and flew straight toward the Tropical Canyon of the Hundred Caves.
It was cold. The winds poured down from the towering canyon walls, sweeping freely across the wild terrain. The climate in this normally hot and humid region had taken a one-hundred-eighty-degree turn, as drastic as his own fate.
Under a sky torn between breaking its clouds open with rain or clearing them away, Broga descended from above, landing at the base of one of the many cliffs in the area.
Buffeted by the cold winds swirling around his legs, he moved across the clearing. His black suit melded with the gray surroundings, and the dim light glinted off his chromed helmet, highlighting the reddish glow of his single eye.
Ahead of him, the entrance to Cave 47-G gaped like the black maw of a stone monster, while behind him, the hillside shuddered under the force of the shifting air currents.
No. The murders of those young people and the marked signs with the cave’s code weren’t just a dream. If there had been any doubt, he now had proof before his very eyes: The perimeter in front of the cliff was fenced off with a green, fluorescent laser grid—the kind the Military used to preserve crime scenes. There was the awful crimson coat of arms bearing the image of the white Pegasus, flapping in the wind, announcing that the site was now under investigation by the Empire.
Ignoring the signs forbidding entry to unauthorized personnel, he vaulted over the electric barriers in a single leap. It wasn’t difficult with cybernetic legs.
Neutralizing the sentinels with ultrasonic beeps was easy too. Better to incapacitate them before they noticed him; no sense stirring up a fuss.
Now inside the area cordoned off by the grid, his footsteps crunched on the ground. The crag, crag, crag of gravel and dry leaves underfoot seemed to warn him that there was nothing left of value here. The Imperial investigators had already scoured the place and taken everything.
His pulse quickened; the small monitor tracking his heart rate, projected at the corner of his helmet’s inner display, confirmed it.
His throat felt dry. He was running out of breath.
He entered the cave, thick with the smell of damp earth.
Following the markings left by the forensics team at the crime scene, he reached a hole in the wall—the same gap that had appeared in his dream. Through it, he entered the bunker nestled within the canyon and walked its corridors.
Now, the wind howling through the abandoned nooks and crannies of the facility sounded like the mournful cry of a lone wolf.
He knew what had happened, but it was too late for regrets. He knew what he would find—or rather, what he wouldn’t find—but it was also too late to dwell on that.
What the hell had happened to Alfred? He had left the android here precisely to avoid situations like this, yet there was no trace of him. Most likely, the Military had deactivated him. Or worse, Brun himself might have done it.
His blood pressure spiked, and he didn’t even need to check the indicator on his helmet’s internal display—he could feel his heart pounding. He had to stay calm.
Everything in the building had been confiscated. Corridors, lab room, offices—all of them empty.
They had taken everything, from furniture to autopsy tables, from the smallest computers to the largest refrigeration units, even though some of those had long been broken and out of service.
The Markabian Army’s forensics unit must have orchestrated such a thorough raid; no other explanation made sense for such a large-scale and abrupt operation—especially since it had been less than a week since Alfred’s last report. In that report, the android had confirmed the usual: everything was as it had always been.
In the dust covering the floor, tracks revealed the dragging of equipment—trails leading through the galleries and into a desolate hangar. There, the drag marks transitioned into vehicle tracks, which vanished beneath a massive sliding door. If he passed through it, he would emerge on the northern face of Cliff E, between caves 31-E and 32-E. Long ago, he had used that same door to bring in equipment and other supplies—supplies the Military had now taken.
Amid the silence and darkness, Broga stared at the door, his mind wandering back to just a few years earlier—back to when that door opened regularly, back to when he had a team of professionals working in these facilities.
Scientists, neurosurgeons, and nurses—twelve minds devoted to a single goal: his brother, Brun.
And among them was Clemente.