Total pages in book: 146
Estimated words: 144277 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 721(@200wpm)___ 577(@250wpm)___ 481(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 144277 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 721(@200wpm)___ 577(@250wpm)___ 481(@300wpm)
He brought us here to use us.
Xi opens his arms, wide smile on his face. “Every spark has its purpose.”
38 - CLARA
It is the day everything changed. Before Finn’s father, Aldo, died and the bells rang for Haryet. It is warm, and sunny, and perfect.
I had everything that day. A man who loved me, and who I loved back. Two best friends to share my Spark Maiden life with. An entire suite of rooms on the ninth floor of the Maiden Tower. Floor-to-ceiling windows with a view of the canal and the Extraction Tower across it. More coin in my accounts than I could ever hope to spend. A social order that catered to my every whim.
It was all a lie.
Not a single thing about that life was real.
I’m floating above my Tau City, but it’s just an outline of cyan-blue spark against a black background. Appropriate, I think. Because it was hollow. But there’s a current of spark up here in the wind. Flowing. Taking me past the city now and into the desert where everything turns into the night sky.
The stars are made of spark. They glow, twinkling in the dark.
But beyond all that emptiness, there are the women and girls. The ones I named. The ones that live inside me now. They make a long chain, connected to each other by holding hands, that leads back to the Source. The spark flows through them the same way it came out of my fingertips when I was a girl. A mini arc of lightning.
Haryet is the woman closest to me. Reaching for me. Please, she mouths. Please!
I don’t take her hand because it feels like the end. “I can’t,” I tell her. “I can’t join you, Haryet. I’m not done here.”
She’s begging now. Please, please, please…
I shake my head. “Not yet,” I explain, more forcefully. “Tyse. I can’t just leave him. We’re partners now, Haryet. He’s depending on me.”
“Clara.”
My name comes out of Haryet’s mouth, but it’s not her voice.
“You can wake up now.”
The god’s voice is low, and calm, and steady. And I suddenly have the urge to cry because it reminds me of that first time I woke up in Delta City and the god was trying to have a conversation.
I would go back to that moment. Not any moment in Tau City, but that one I would. Because Tyse and I were safe. Life was getting better.
But all these memories are nothing but a stupid fantasy. You can’t go back in time. The real world doesn’t have do-overs.
You get one shot. One chance. And that’s it.
“Come now, Clara. I’m bored. I would like for us to have a conversation.”
My eyes open. I’m strapped to a wall plate made of cold, hard metal. My eyes have rolled up into my head, so I find myself staring at a cement ceiling that has been sloppily painted white. For a moment, I mix up the timeline and I see the tower, and the banner, and the words, ‘Sparktopia Was Here’ splashed across it.
But I sigh. That’s not where I am. I’m not in Tyse’s room in the God’s Tower.
I’m in some factory lab where a psychopathic machine, passing itself off as a living creature, is making mutant augments and using the man I love to test them in fights.
I lower my gaze and find myself staring straight at a harvesting cage on the opposite wall. “What is going on?” I whisper.
“Ahhhh, good. There you are.”
I turn my head and find the melted-faced god staring back at me. He’s so many kinds of wrong, I don’t even know where to begin. “What do you want? What the hell do you want from us?”
The god laughs, his eyes shining red.
It’s so wrong.
“I want to push the limits, obviously. It’s not every day an authentic Sweep Augment gets dropped into my lap with his very own rechargeable power source.”
So he knows.
“Oh, yes, Clara. I know. I caught him, you know. I caught him in between worlds. Right after he spooled you back up.”
I barely understand what that means, but an image of Haryet making dresses out of spark comes to mind.
“That’s why you’re fine and he’s dying.” He juts his chin to the other side of the room, and when I turn my head, I see Tyse, also lying on a medical bed, wires coming out of him, a cage of needle-thread wires hanging from the ceiling above him. But he’s naked—creepy, sculpted armor gone—and his skin, once golden and inked with tattoos, now pulses in strange places. Thin lines of orange and green leave glowing trails across his chest and arms, like veins of light under the surface.
He doesn’t look broken.
He looks rebuilt.
On top of his chest is his weapon. The VersiStrike.
“Isn’t it poetic?” Epsilon asks. “What a picture this paints. The great Tyse Saarinen. You know they get buried with those weapons, right? They’re biological. I thought it be fitting to place it there. Since… he’s dying.”