CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Lem
The field wouldn’t stop spreading, and nothing Lem did mattered. So it couldn’t be hers, then, if she couldn’t affect it? She didn’t have that kind of juice?
But if she moved, it moved with her, and it pulsed with every beat of her heart, and every increasing breath. An unpleasant freedom held her captive, as if an uncontrollable current had swirled her into an ocean so vast she couldn’t see the surface, or the sea floor, no limits, no boundaries. She didn’t feel her dislocated shoulder, or the burn on her ankle. She wanted to. She wanted to stop this. She wanted to feel what she was supposed to feel.
Lem gripped her head with her fists. She was going to kill everyone. She’d done everything possible to become a hero, but like an asteroid sucked into a planet’s gravitational field, she was damage incoming.
“Hey, soldier, where’s your mace?”
It was Jei’s tenor timbre, cool and even, but gentler than she’d heard before. Lem didn’t know if she should tell him to go away or not. She couldn’t see him. There was only this empty room of sleeping enemies in the light of her spreading field.…
Footsteps creeping to her left sent painful prickles down her arm—she wanted to lash out, but she didn’t want to wake up to find out she’d killed someone she shouldn’t, right? She trembled, belly churning, and swallowed, crouching with both hands outspread—
“Lem, you can’t see me, can you?”
She shook her head, afraid her voice might betray her.
“I’m going to put a hand on your wrist so you know where I am. I’m going to pick up your mace—”
No, it’ll burn you—
“—it’s not on, so I’m going to open the core and take out the neodymium crystal.”
That didn’t make any sense. She’d left it on, and didn’t have a chance to turn it off when the liquid hit her ankle. Invisible fingers did encircle her wrist, and even though he’d warned her Lem almost screamed. Nothing made sense.
“I was thinking about your theory, earlier, with Bricandor and neodymium crystals? I’m going to put your crystal in your hand.”
Lem looked down in expectation, and saw nothing. A warmth passed over like an invisible shadow, and then something cold, and roughly cylindrical, like a hard uneven icicle, lay in her palm—the Neodymium-YAG crystal from the core of her mace. She closed her eyes and gripped it, recalling its reddish-purple form.
“I’m going to put this one in your other hand, too, okay?”
That had to be the one from his mace. Laser crystals were pretty standardized, but this one was smoother around the edges than hers, with a more uniform girth. She still couldn’t see it. This was too trippy, too weird, standing here alone in this dark room with the artificial rain on her atmosphere hood, lit only by the expanding dome swallowing the city while she heard and felt things she couldn’t see. Maybe the whole thing was a dream, still. Maybe Jei was talking to her on her wristband, or maybe this was her mind’s way of trying to calm itself down.
“So I don’t know how it’s possible for the magnitude of power either you or I generate to exist in one organism,” Jei said. “The theory Mera came up with about me is that I’m somehow drawing on the combined electrochemistry of everyone attacking me. If it’s true that you have something to do with the thermodynamics of entropy—heat death—then maybe anisotropy matters to you like EEG signals matter to me. After all, heat death is essentially just the perfectly isotropic arrangement of all matter in the universe.”
Lem never thought about entropy that way—people always talked like the force of decay was chaos—but Jei was technically correct: chemically, the drive for lowest energy ultimately created the most homogeneity. A universe in one uniform whole, all molecules evenly spaced, all matter the same, all movement stilled, was the lowest energy state, in which no more chemical reactions could take place. Heterogeneity—diversity—required energy, unequal spaces, cell membranes, boundaries between this identity and that identity—like life.
She just didn’t know what this had to do with anything in the middle of a crisis.
“Nd:YAG crystals are isotropic, and maybe neodymium’s magnetic potential can play into that, too. I don’t know exactly how it all ties in to the electric eel capacitors in your nerve endings, but—ah—look, we’ll—later with that. Focus your electric field into these two crystals.”
Lem would’ve given him an incredulous eye if she could see him. I can’t do that! Rough hands gripped her knuckles, moving her fists parallel out in front of her.
“Aim up toward the ceiling, think of the color green, and fire into these crystals like you’re simulating an em-push.”
But those were all his things. Green was his meditation. She didn’t even actually em-push. She didn’t modulate electromagnetic polarities in the cations and anions of her neurons like he did—she just turned static shocks on and off. She had capacitors along her nervous system like an electric eel to create voltage differences and discharge that energy into shocks, and she’d learned to control those voltage differences to create like a static cling or repulsion. That was all she did. She didn’t even know how she was doing this whole thing. She just wanted to turn it off.
It didn’t make sense.
“Lem, can you hear me? I know maybe you don’t want to push your powers right now—you just want them off, repressed. But I think you can redirect the energy. Sublimate it. Fighting it hasn’t been working, has it?”
It was like she’d told Laaru back on Beryllia, maybe. Wear it out. But it was spreading like crazy across the city—this wasn’t just some kid blowing up rocks in a tunnel, this was—hell, if it was this bad when she wasn’t trying, how horrible would it be if she actually tried?
“I don’t know if you can hear me. But when electricity or light energy is pumped into a solid-state neodymium crystal, the neodymium cation enters excitation—it collects electrons on its outer orbitals. But it doesn’t want to stay there; it wants to lose electrons, drop back to the lowest energy state, an Nd 3+ ion. So it releases that energy again as light, but because of the shape of the crystal, the mirroring, when the energy’s released this time, it’s focused, all together. That’s all a laser is—an energy converter, from electricity into light. And that’s what I’m asking you to do. Take all your power, and use the solid-state matrix to focus it. Just like a laser.”
Was this even real, or was she going to kill someone, though?
In the pause the grip on her knuckles tightened, and gravel rolled under Jei’s voice. “Hey Lem? You’ve got two minutes to make it happen before I knock you out.”
Oh, yeah, that was Jei. This wasn’t just her brain.
Lem mustered herself and clenched her fists, firing a shock as hard as she could into the two crystals in her sweating palms. Two blinding red beams shot through the spaceport roof and straight into the night sky. A painful spasm shot through her spine, and she ground her teeth—
And then it was over. Just like that, that simple. Pain flashed back into her shoulder; one hand clutched it and the other hand dropped. The crystals clattered to the floor. Emergency lights flickered on. I’ve made a huge mess, Lem suddenly thought in the harsh yellow light: disheveled bodies scattered everywhere, bulbous melted polymerwall deformed around the fractured hole in the floor … It wasn’t raining in here anymore. Maybe that had stopped a while ago already, and she just didn’t know it. She could see now.
A black glove reached down to pick up the crystals; Jei looked more gaunt than usual, with a tightness at the back of his jaw Lem recognized from bad days at the interrogation center. He wiped off the crystals with a clean cloth from his pocket, and clicked them back into the short bamboo-like staffs he had tucked under his arm. He handed Lem hers.
“I’m so sorry,” she said.
“We stopped it before you reached the civilian sector. Just scarred a bunch of blitzers for life, which isn’t undeserved.”
Lem looked outside at the Frelsi air-riders now circling the bottom of the spaceport. Night had fallen full force, but the lights across the city blanked out the stars.
“It’s not about what happened. It’s what could’ve happened,” she said.
“They don’t need to know that. They know very little anyway.”
Her wavering gaze fell now over the hole they’d both come in through—where she could just catch a glimpse of a Frelsi uniform waiting down on what looked like the emergency crank-lift. She sighed. She thought she might just pass out if she had to talk to anyone.
Jei followed her eyes and shook his head. “No. We’re done. If they can’t take it from here there really is no helping them.” He nodded toward a different automated lift in the far corner of the control room. “Let’s go.”