Chương 48: Chapter 47: The Unstoppable Force and the Immovable Object

He wants to kill Sekar? Elma thought.

"Kill him?" Jorm's voice climbed a full register.

"No—no, we can't take you, then."

"She's right." Lucien had gone pale.

"Killing a commander of Veraxys? Are you out of your mind."

"Well." Vector pointed both thumbs at his own chest, entirely unbothered.

"You're getting a new one. I take him down, I become the new head of the Silver Bastion. Simple math." Lucien stared at him for a long moment, apprehension and exasperation fighting for control of his face. Rightly so, Elma thought.

"I don't think that's… how any of this works."

"That's exactly how it works." Vector spread his hands, like the concept should've been self-evident.

"I just need him to agree to the fight. If I attack him without a challenge, I'd have to fight the entire Bastion instead of one man, and that math gets a lot less fun." Not a pleasant experience, the Other agreed on the last part. Elma turned it over. Whoever Sekar was, the reason behind Nagin or merely the hand that had carried the order, he belonged on the same list either way. Motive had never changed the outcome for her.

But by the Other's own account, and Jorm's, the man wasn't someone who would go down easily, and a boy who could fold space and unweave a Stillstorm was indispensable if a fight broke out. He'd need managing. That was a separate problem from whether he was useful.

"We want answers first," Elma said.

"You can have your fight after we get them."

"Preferably," Lucien added, "somewhere we've vacated the premises for."

"Then we have a deal." Vector's hand came up, open, waiting for hers to close it. Something cold dropped straight through Elma's chest. She didn't move. It wasn't him. Wasn't even really the hand. It was the word, sitting there in the air between them, and she couldn't have said why it landed the way it did, only that some old, wordless part of her had gone rigid at the sound of it, the way a hand pulls back from a stove before the mind has finished deciding it's hot.

He held the offer a beat too long before lowering it, only a little awkward about it.

"Right. Well." He snapped his fingers instead. A broad pane unfolded between them, hovering inches off the ground, wide enough to hold all five of them, its surface reflecting the suns overhead. The girl jumped onto it without hesitation, settling cross-legged near the front like she'd done this every day of her life. The rest of them stayed where they were, staring at it the way people stare at a ledge. Elma touched the surface first. It wasn't cold. Wasn't even glass at all.

There was no surface beneath her fingers, only the illusion of one. Her fingertips met something warm, the familiar heat of her own skin answering hers through the impossible space. Her reflection pressed against her hand from the other side of a mirror that had no other side. It was the only purchase she found on the thing, the reflected part of herself that touched it. She pushed. It pushed back with precisely the same force, stopping exactly where her real fingers would have stopped against something solid.

What the—"How the hell does this even work," Lucien muttered, climbing on with the particular caution of a man who fully expected to fall through it.

"Amazing, right?" Vector said, already settling at the front.

"Creepy, mostly." Lucien stared down at his own reflected face rippling faintly beneath his boots. Elma stepped up last, testing her weight against the impossible surface before trusting it fully. Beneath her feet, she could feel her reflection's feet meeting hers from the other side, warm pressure answering each shift of her weight. The sensation was deeply strange, but the thing held.

"Let's go." The others found their footing beside her. As the pane lifted, smooth and silent, doors cracked open and figures cautiously emerged from the places they'd been hiding. Faces appeared beneath awnings and from narrow doorways, following them with wary eyes as the street dropped away below.

"Where to?" Vector called back. Elma glanced at Jorm. Jorm nodded once and moved up beside him, pointing down deeper in the older, darker sprawl of the lower city. The space phenomenon that looked like a mirror held steady beneath them at a fixed, unhurried altitude, the dark wood of the lower part of the city stretching beneath them as they flew deeper into it. The wind clawed at Elma's hood hard enough that she had to keep both hands knotted in the fabric to hold it in place.

Beneath her mask, her own breath kept bouncing back against her face in a fine, warm mist, building into a tingling itch across her nose. In front of her, Jorm was fighting the exact same battle, tugging the snake mask side to side in short, irritated jerks, trying to shake the feeling loose without taking the thing off entirely.

Lucien had given up on dignity somewhere around the second minute and was now sitting, one eye squeezed shut as he tried to catch his reflection off guard, darting a finger toward its face to see if he could slip it through before it mirrored the movement. It wouldn't go.

"It's not letting me," he muttered, pressing harder, his knuckle whitening. Elma watched. It made a strange kind of sense once she thought about it properly. Lucien wasn't being blocked by a mirror. His finger was meeting its own reflected motion, the force pushing forward answered by the exact same force pushing back. Nothing could push through itself. Not deflection. Cancellation. She wondered if that was also why it reflected light. It was impassable.

Lucien had gathered an audience by then: Elma, watching with real curiosity; Silk, arms crossed, either bored or quietly running numbers on whether he'd manage it; and the girl perched cross-legged near Vector's shoulder, staring back at Lucien with an expression that mirrored his own concentration a little too well. Vector glanced back over his shoulder.

"Everyone comfortable?"

"Quite the opposite, actually." Lucien didn't even look up from his own reflection.

"I'm currently sitting on my own butt, and I can feel every bit of it. It's not exactly comfortable."

"Then maybe take that as a sign to put some meat on those bones," Vector said with a smile.

"Haha, sooo funny," Lucien said, his face stone-cold. Vector's eyes swept over the rest of them, hunting for agreement.

"The others are fine, right?" Nobody answered him. His smile flickered, just slightly, before he turned back ahead.

"How do you make it," Elma asked.

"The mirror. Your Ability inverts space—how does that become this." If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. He glanced at her over his shoulder, something pleased flickering across his face.

"You're sharp." A beat.

"I'm guessing yours kills other Innate Abilities?"

"Yes." Not just that, but Elma didn't offer the correction. Lucien narrowed his eyes at her.

"I thought it was teleportation." Elma said nothing to him. Vector lifted one palm, and a single shard formed above it, drifting lazily.

"When you invert two connected spaces in different directions, the space where they connect gets torn." He turned the shard slowly between two fingers.

"In that rupture, the notion of forward and backward doesn't exist. So nothing can pass through it, and…" He flicked two fingers to his left, sending the shard through the air and straight through a lamppost without any notion of deceleration whatsoever. The lamppost snapped in half.

"... when forward and backward don't exist, continuity is severed." Elma watched with fascination. It was incredibly versatile. Its surface was impassable, anything that touched it meeting its own reflection, while its edges severed continuity itself, making them capable of cutting through anything. Luckily, with her Mutual Negation, she didn't have to worry that much about it.

"It can't be stopped," Vector continued.

"It can virtually slice through anything, all while being capable of stopping everything. So, for all intents and purposes, I think it's the only thing known that could be called both the unstoppable force and the immovable object."

"That's extraordinary," Lucien said, in the tone of a man who had understood roughly the last sentence and none of the rest.

"Still open, if you change your mind." Vector didn't turn around this time.

"Better hurry, though. Before I get the entirety of the Silver Bastion instead."

"Why do you want the Silver Bastion?" Elma asked. Something in his shoulders tightened, faintly disappointed she hadn't taken the bait, before he pivoted it right back at her.

"What do you want with Sekar?" She didn't say anything.

"Thought so." He exhaled, mostly to himself.

"I used to think I was untouchable, if I'm honest. Before you. Still bugs me a little. But knowing that the only Resonant who can strip my trump card is another Remnant—makes it easier to sit with."

"Rem—" she started. Lucien's finger came down hard against her ankle, silencing her mid-word. She held still, turning it over. She was the Karnak. Apparently she was also whatever this was.

"You're a Remnant?" Lucien's voice had gone up half an octave.

"Both of us are." Vector reached to his side and patted the girl's dark hair.

"Me and my sister, Repera."

"A Remnant Resonant?" Lucien blinked.

"You've got two Karnak Resonants sitting right there and this is what surprises you?" Vector's eyes narrowed, suspicious now.

"No, it's—I thought they were the only ones." Lucien recovered, badly.

"So did I, for a long time." Something almost wistful crossed Vector's face.

"Meeting two Karnak Resonants gives me hope that I'll meet more Remnant Resonants in Xenotopia."

"Xenotopia." Lucien's whole posture changed.

"You're going there?"

"Damn it." Vector actually bit down on his own tongue.

"The land of the Remnants," Lucien said distantly.

"A city they built themselves. Yes," Vector said with pride in his voice.

"The Red Shore separated them from the rest of us years ago," Lucien said carefully.

"Do you know that?"

"I do." Vector went quiet for a beat.

"Or you could say that they sheltered themselves behind it. From you" Lucien didn't answer that. He looked back down at his own reflection instead, and neither of them seemed inclined to pick the thread back up.

"How do you even plan on reaching it," Lucien said instead.

"It's unreachable now."

"Alone? Sure." Vector shrugged.

"With a team of people as strong as I am, though. Since that isn't panning out yet, I'll just take the Bastion and order them to get me there instead."

"That is—" Lucien pinched the bridge of his nose, visibly remembering he was arguing logistics with a child.

"That's not how any of that works."

"I'd be their leader. Why wouldn't it work."

"Because leading a guild doesn't mean you can point at a map and march people across it. There are people above Sekar. They can't even leave Kandal without approval, half of them, there are—" He grabbed at his own hair.

"This is so much more complicated than you're making it sound."

"You're the one making it complicated." The mirror-like pane shivered faintly beneath them.

"It's the truth," Lucien pressed.

"You don't know what you're talking about. You're literally a peasant."

"What—" Vector didn't answer. His jaw worked as he stared past Lucien, silent for several seconds. Lucien had clearly made him second-guess his plan B, and he wasn't taking it well. When Vector finally turned, his eyes settled on Elma.

"I didn't want to say this yet, but... do you actually think any of these people care about you? Any of you?" His gaze shifted to Jorm.

"Look, I know we might not be from the same world, but we're both Remnants now. They're using you because you're strong. That's it. They don't care about you. To them, you'll always be the monsters that brought the destruction of their world. Demons." His voice cracked slightly at the last part.

"We could go together. Just us."

"What is wrong with you?" Lucien asked. Vector turned back to Jorm, undeterred.

"You could come too. Carry the bags, that sort of thing."

"... What?" Jorm blinked at him.

"You two are Remnants too, aren't you?" He looked between her and Elma, genuinely confused by their silence.

"Do you have any idea how these 'Veraxians' treated our people?" Jorm's mouth opened and produced nothing at all. Elma said nothing either. Maybe she should just reveal that she wasn't Karnak at this point, if he couldn't figure that out yet. He sighed, defeated.

"Yea, well, forget it. Karnaks are way too small to be cool anyway." A tiny bead of moisture caught the light at the corner of his eye. Elma wasn't sure if it was a tear. He turned back ahead.

"Are we even getting closer?" he asked Jorm, flat.

"We're close," said Jorm, like she'd finally found something to say. Elma watched the disappointment settle into the line of his shoulders, watched the mirror's pace bleed out with it, slower now, less certain of itself than it had been a minute ago. Lucien just had to talk, she thought, glancing at him. But maybe that had been the right call.

He was lost—genuinely, badly lost, the kind of lost that made a person say cruel, ugly things to strangers in the sky—and it occurred to her, watching him sag, that she might have something he actually needed. The Shepherd's Veins had carried her a thousand miles once already, further than she'd ever thought to test. Whether they could reach somewhere the Tide itself had sealed off, she didn't know. The thought hadn't finished before the response came.

Static and immediate, as though it had been listening the entire time: I̴ ̴c̴a̴n̴. Elma lurched to her feet and nearly went straight off the edge, but Lucien's grip on one arm and Jorm's on the other kept her from falling. Her heart hammered against her ribs. She'd forgotten, somehow, in all of it, that the Shepherd could simply speak inside her skull whenever it wanted to.

"What the hell is wrong with you?" Lucien's voice cracked with alarm. She looked at the three faces turned toward her, then lowered herself back down, slow and deliberate.

"It's nothing." That was strange, the Other said. You heard it? Distantly. But yes. So she wasn't imagining it. She breathed out, long and even, and tried to remember if it had ever answered anything before. Not when she'd wondered whether it could take Silk to Hephryx's new facility. That one she still didn't know. Why now, when she'd wondered the same thing? It was strange, the Other said again, like repeating it might make it less so. If the Shepherd hadn't lied, then she had something.

An unreachable place, and a way to reach it anyway. Leverage.

"Down there!" Jorm called, pointing. Elma peered down to see it. A grand building of white and silver stone stood among the surrounding structures, its smooth walls and ornate details making it look almost out of place. Its gray roof rose in a broad, rounded dome, sweeping upward from the edges before narrowing into a smaller crown at the top. It looked less like a roof and more like a single piece of stone placed over the entire building. The pane accelerated toward it.

Wind rushed harder against Elma as the building swelled rapidly in her view, its silver walls catching the light while the streets and rooftops below blurred beneath them. They'd arrived.