Soul Forged: Chapter 3 

I woke in the family car, houses a blur through the windows. A pulsing white-yellow light fogged the night sky and cast a silvery sheen over Mom’s dark hair. Her fingers gripped the center console as she shot a frightened look at Dad in the driver’s seat. We were going too fast. A siren wailed—a frightening bellow very different from the fun wee-woo of a fire truck. Squealing tires and blaring horns hurt my ears. I tried to cover them, but my car seat was too tight, and I started to cry. 

Mom turned, dark eyes roving over me.

My heart panged. Mom?

The two moles beneath her left eye, a trait passed to both her children, scrunched with worry even as she smiled.

“It’s alright, honey.” She reached back and squeezed my knee. “Mommy promises.”

“Here, Torrin.” A stuffed lion hovered in front of my nose. I hugged it and looked over at Seth, his eyes too big in his face, all knobby knees and elbows. “It’s okay. Dad’s playing race car.”

“Turn, turn!” Mom slapped the passenger window in a panic. “Don’t get near it!”

As we swerved, I strained in my restrictive seat, craning my neck to look out the window at the hole in the sky. It burned too bright, a shimmering sun expanding over town. The military Humvees were dark blots behind the twisted chain-link fence that was supposed to keep people away. Something big and scaly perched on top of the bent metal. A dinosaur!

It shook a doll in its mouth—a toy soldier. 

“That way, that way!” Mom cried before I could tell her to look.

“It’s blocked!” The horn blared. “Shit!”

I flew forward in my seat, and when I looked out the window next, the dinosaur was gone. We were passing the school. My eardrums compressed as a heavy whump smothered every other sound, and a flash of light seared golden streaks across my eyes. The car rocked, and Seth’s hand flew out, bracing against my chest.

Blinking away tears, ears ringing, I gaped at the school. Rock and roots had punched through the roof, ripped away half the brick structure. A waterfall tumbled over the Go Bearcats! banner strung above the front doors, tearing it loose. Golden particles, like dandelion fluff, sparkled in the air.

The car labored, wheels kicking up dirt and clods of grass that splattered my window. Dad’s shouts were garbled. Someone was screaming.

Yellow eyes blinked at me through my window, a toothy muzzle rising over the lip of the door, dripping thick saliva. I clutched my lion, and the dinosaur vanished as Dad floored it, finally zipping forward. The world shook, the car creaking and swaying. The engine roared. Dad spun the wheel like a captain in a storm.

“Look out!” Seth yelled.

The headlights caught a falling tree, thick branches careening toward the hood. The car jerked. The back wheels left the ground, then smashed back down with a groan of tearing metal and shattering glass. Shards stung my cheeks. My harness cut my neck. The smell of copper pricked at my nose. 

The front seats were smashed, dark. Leaves fluttered inside the car, falling on crumpled forms I didn’t want to look at.

Gasping, unable to breathe, my hands fumbled with the buckle on my stomach. 

What the hell? 

The tiny child’s seat crushed my ribs and pelvis, my legs spilling over onto the floor. I wrestled myself loose and clambered my way out onto a jungle floor, high grass and plant fronds grabbing at my calves. Seth stood nearby, a backpack over one shoulder, eyes scouring the landscape. He nodded to himself and then set off with long, sure strides.

“Wait!” I called.  

He still looked like a gangly preteen, but when he peered at me, those large, boyish eyes had changed. That glare I’d come to know over the years skewered me, and when he spoke, he had the deep voice of a man. “No. You’ll slow me down.”

He turned his back and disappeared into the thick foliage, leaving me by the wreck, the stuffed lion still dangling from one hand. I looked down at the blood in its mane, and its mouth opened. 

“Mrow!”

My eyes snapped open on Milo’s judgmental gaze. He lay atop my chest, each pound of his overfed body crushing my lungs. 

“Milo…” I groaned over the shrill beeping of my alarm. “Do you mind? I need to breathe.”  

The tabby scrunched his face, forming yet another fold beneath his chin that conveyed his displeasure. 

I gently shoved the cat away and, with my airway restored, pawed blindly at my phone until I hit the snooze.

I lay tangled in covers, my pillow somehow under my foot, and let my heart rate slow as the nightmare faded. I hadn't dreamt of the night we’d fled Lyman in years. Talking about the lake and the orphanage with Jace must have brought it back. 

Rubbing my aching eyes, I turned my head and checked my clock: nearly ten in the morning. 

I sat up in shock and grabbed a shirt I’d thrown over my chair. After slipping into my remaining clothes, I rushed to the kitchen in such a stupor that I smacked my shoulder against the doorway.

“Good morning,” Hanna said from the couch, her eyes absorbed in a heavily annotated book. “Seth told me you’d be tired, so I sent Milo after you. That alarm of yours just wouldn’t stop.”  

“Morning,” I muttered as I rushed through the room. “And sorry, I gotta run! I’m late for training.”

Hanna shook her head. “Not this time. The gym you’re using won’t be ready for a couple of hours. Noon, he said.”

I skidded to a stop and turned around. “Really?”

“Mmhmm.” She ran a highlighter across the page. “Sounds to me like you’ve got quite the day ahead of you.”

I took a deep breath and ran a palm down my face to hide my worry. “This wouldn’t have anything to do with what happened at the rift yesterday, would it?”

Hanna laughed. “Oh, don’t make a fuss! We both figured you'd need some extra sleep after your first fight with a parabeast.”

This time, I sighed with complete relief. “Thanks, Hanna. For not making a bigger deal out of it.”

“Oh, you’re still in trouble, mister, just not with me. I suggest you make yourself a hearty breakfast. You’re going to need it.”

“Thanks for the warning.” I returned to the kitchen and took out a frying pan while filling my other hand with eggs. “Can I make you anything?”

“No thanks.” A hesitant note slipped into her voice, and I watched her eyes peek over the top of her book. “But I wouldn’t mind one of those fudge brownies you have hidden in the pantry.”  

I gave her a pointed look. “I hid those because Seth told me your doctor—" 

“That was last trimester,” she corrected. “I'm practically a different person now. Well… two people.” Hanna rubbed her pregnant belly and gave me puppy dog eyes. “Isla is saying, ‘Please, Uncle Torrin? Just one.’”  

I rolled my eyes. “Just don’t tell Seth, or I won’t live to meet Isla.” I tossed the final packaged brownie across the room before returning to prepare my eggs.

Hanna’s foot shot up with the speed of a shrike and caught the corner of the plastic between her toes. 

“Was that the move that won Seth over?” I teased, watching her deftly peel the brownie open with her fingers.

“I didn’t need any moves. Your brother fell head over heels at first sight,” she said with a grin. 

I raised a brow. “Did you have brownie chunks stuck on your teeth then too?” 

A fluffy slipper hurdled past my ear. Snorting, I mixed myself a protein shake from a plastic jug. I finished frying my eggs and then hauled my meal over to the couch.

I sat next to my sister-in-law and placed the slipper beside its sibling before reaching for the remote. “What do you think of that book?”

“Not bad. It’s pretty informative, but the writing is hard to sit through. If you want to watch something on the television, go right ahead. It won’t distract me.”

I turned on the TV and was greeted by a talk show host seated at a half-circle table with three guests: a scientist, a comedian, and a retired ardent with a book coming out next month.

“If you want to save some time,” I offered, glancing at the back of Hanna’s book, “just read the chapters on parabeast physiology. All the author's theories on behavior were debunked by a researcher in Canada.”

“Really?” she asked. “Which researcher?”

“Him.” I pointed my remote toward the ardent on the screen. “That book you’re reading clumped all parabeasts into categories by rift, like the different types of ants in an ant colony: workers, soldiers, queens, etcetera.”

“I already read that,” said Hanna as she finished her brownie. “I thought it was crude but persuasive.”

“And that’s the problem,” I said between forkfuls of eggs. “A bad idea that’s persuasive sells books, which spreads misinformation.”

Hanna smiled. “And what’s so wrong with this author’s argument?” she asked, clearly testing me for her own enjoyment.

I washed a mouthful of eggs down with the chalky, protein-enhanced milk. “For starters, neither ants nor parabeasts behave identically, even in the same environment. You could cut down a tree in the Amazon and find like a dozen different types of ants crawling in it. Parabeasts are the same way. I’ve studied the scales and teeth of venators from the same rift that looked nothing alike. Shoehorning them into scientifically dubious groups only corrupts what understanding we do have.”

“And what would you write instead?” 

I shrugged. “Nothing. I’m not a scientist.”

“Come on,” she said plaintively. “Imagine you were my boss.”

“Like that would ever happen!” I laughed.

“Humor me.” 

I scraped my plate clean. “Well, I’d say no matter how similar some rifts look, they can contain completely different ecosystems. Deserts, forests, caverns, frozen wastelands…” Waterfalls. “Sure, maybe some parabeasts in these different environments have common ancestors, but the gaps between them are as huge as those between dragons and dragonflies.”

“We already know that,” she countered. “The author specified that all he did was classify them.”

“And I’m saying he shouldn’t have. Some of these rifts are so dissimilar that it wouldn’t surprise me if they come from completely different planets.”

This made my sister-in-law pause a moment. “So, you’re a proponent of the ‘otherworlds’ theory?”

“Not really.” I shrugged. “I’m just saying it’s too soon to be publishing half-baked theories as facts. We’re still at the flat-Earth stage of understanding the parabeasts, and that goes double for the rifts themselves. Even if they lead to a different world—or two, or trillions—there’s no way of knowing whether they exist in different dimensions or just some other corner of our galaxy.”

Hanna glanced at the author's picture on her book’s dust jacket. “You know, Torrin, I read these for research, but that’s where I stop. It’s just a desk job. You read even more books than I do, and you actually pass through the rifts every chance you get.”

“That’s one of the few advantages of missing out on raden. More free time to use our oldest superpower: reading. Do you mind if I change the channel?”

“Go right ahead.”

I started flipping through the news.

“The problem with fallout shelters in China—”

“—growing danger in Korea and—”

“—report that raden levels are spiking exponentially throughout the Northern tropics, impacting the populations of Southern Asia, Central Africa, South and Central America, the Caribbean, and Hawaii. Government leaders are optimistic that the influx of tourists to these parts will only bolster their economies, but they warn that illegal entry from Europe, Russia, China, and the United States will be met with full military—”

I changed the channel again, hoping to find a cheerier subject to start the day.

“—continual new development. Invention often moves faster than implementation. The public only hears a fraction of what comes out of the Global Defense Council, and they shouldn’t expect to know anything more about our methods than the law allows. Whoever leaked this information is trying to cause panic, just like the propaganda used back when we still had election years.”

Ugh. Click.

“The Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons treaty does not apply to the beyond. They were agreements meant for this world! We cannot—”

I pressed the mute button, and the oily voice of the military spokesperson cut off.

Hanna swallowed before she spoke. “I hate it when they talk about using nukes inside the rifts. I know we have every right to defend ourselves, but when has nuclear warfare ever worked out for the human race?”

“I used to think that,” I started, “but honestly, raden has changed the world so much that the things we used to fight over, and fight with, are small potatoes now. I mean, nearly twenty years of total world peace? An unheard-of record. The rifts united the globe, and the radiation they released made most people stronger than the gods we used to worship. Sure, we’re still disagreeing over some political crap, but the more time we spend fighting parabeasts inside the rifts, the fewer lives we lose to war and genocide here at home.”

“I still don’t like it.” Hanna rubbed her belly like a totem. “I just want one generation of humanity to grow up without ever going to war with itself. We are so close to doing that, and I don’t think we’ll get another chance.”

“Agreed across the board.” I turned off the TV during a commercial for a sale on fallout shelters. “Sorry for all the bad news.”

“Don’t apologize!” she laughed. “You don’t rule the world.”

“Thank God,” I said as I pushed off the sofa and walked over to the duffle bag I’d left beside the door.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

“To the Towers.”

“Not without me, you aren’t.”

I smiled. “Hanna, didn’t Seth take the car?” I waggled our one unbroken umbrella at her. “You really want to walk all the way to the station in the rain?”

“What’s a little rain?” Hanna heaved herself to her feet and made a beeline for the bathroom.

This time, I laughed out loud. “You’re already on leave.”

“I know!” she shouted behind her door. “But you raised a few good points about the rifts that I want my colleagues to hear from you.”

I nearly choked. “You can’t be serious.”

Hanna emerged from the bathroom with her hair up. “Come on. It’ll be fun! Besides, it’s good to keep my research team on their toes. They’re probably slacking off without me!” She shot me a wink before disappearing into the bedroom she shared with Seth.

I shifted uneasily. “You know that, to them, I’m just a grunt from the armory.” I pinched the bridge of my nose and tried to suppress my rising anxiety. “Besides… I have training.”

I also didn’t exactly have a stellar reputation around the research wing of Lightbridge Towers. 

“Oh, don’t let them bother you.” The bedroom door muffled Hanna’s voice. “Researchers are all competitive. And they probably already disliked you for your good looks.” 

Hanna opened the door and came out looking surprisingly business formal for someone wearing little more than a black yoga outfit and a cream cardigan. Maybe it was the high-level ID card hanging from a lanyard around her neck.

“Ready?” she asked, like I hadn’t been the one waiting on her.

Huddled under one umbrella, we walked the block and a half to the nearest subway stop. My left sleeve and pant leg were dripping by the time we hurried down the stairs into the tunnel and tapped our cards at the turnstile. On the platform, business types in long raincoats vied for space with ardents in their Conglomerate leathers, helmets under their arms and sheathed weapons further bulking out their frames. I even spotted a few in finely made boneplate armor, and one guy in a rich blue robe made of raden-channeling fibers with pauldrons shaped like drake heads. It probably cost three years’ worth of our rent money. 

When the train glided to a stop and the doors opened, I made sure to put myself between the push of traffic and Hanna’s belly as best I could so Isla didn’t get bonked by a briefcase or a bonesword hilt. Using my umbrella like an angry old man’s cane to help make space, I got us inside, and a woman in a pencil skirt gave up her seat for the pregnant lady.

After a twenty-minute ride, we arrived at Lumen Central Station and queued up for the escalators. We hurried across the polished floor, past information desks and brightly lit storefronts lined in accents of gleaming chrome. The station gleamed in the natural light spilling through the domed glass ceiling above. Hanna steered me clear of a restaurant wafting the heavy scent of curry, one hand on her baby bump and the other over her mouth to stifle a gag. “Ugh, God I miss curry, but Isla thinks it smells worse than the BO on the train.” 

She breathed a sigh of relief when we reached the fresh air of the sidewalk, the rain pattering atop our umbrella once again. Across the street and two blocks over stood the enormous Lightbridge Towers: two thousand feet tall, two hundred floors in total, and two magnificent, illuminated buildings as ornate as cathedrals rising above the lowest rain clouds.

They were the first buildings in the world to harness radiation energy, which they harvested from an open rift that glowed like the setting sun between the topmost floors of the two connected towers. Raden alone powered dozens of laboratories and server rooms, two separate long-term cryogenic facilities, the armory where I worked, an advanced broadcasting system, and hundreds of individual offices. Not to mention it kept the lights on and the AC running.

It wasn’t a long walk, but I still shot a questioning side-eye at Hanna’s belly. She clucked her tongue dismissively and waddled out into the rain. Her brisk pace was a swift reminder she had no lack of raden, and we reached the building in minutes.

“Identification,” a doorman asked once we approached the entrance of Tower One.

“Pregnant woman,” she replied. 

The doorman paused, blinked in surprise, and then finally rushed to help Hanna out of the rain and inside the building. He looked at me expectantly for a title or badge I didn’t have, but Hanna clarified, “He’s with me,” which got me in as well.

A larger, more imposing security guard stopped us as we approached the lobby’s many elevators. “Name, position, department.”

Hanna hooked the lanyard hanging around her neck with a thumb and lifted the security card.“Hanna Gray-Choi, Senior Researcher, Division III.” 

The guard approved her before turning to me with sharper scrutiny. “Name, position, department.” 

“Torrin Gray, boneforger, the armory.” Meaning no clearance for Tower One. But I held up my card anyway.

The sentinel snorted as he leaned in to inspect it. “What are you doing here?”

I shrugged.

“It’s classified,” Hanna answered flatly.

That was enough to get me past the guard, but not without a large, embarrassing “VISITOR” sticker pasted to my jacket. “Make sure that’s always visible,” the guard insisted. 

I applied the label, and Hanna and I took an elevator to the tower’s science center. 

“Dr. Choi?” an intern exclaimed as we entered Hanna’s research lab.

More than a dozen heads popped up from the cubicles around us. “Hanna!” 

Within seconds, an entourage of colleagues swarmed my sister-in-law. “Good morning, everyone!” Hanna chirped.

“Dr. Choi!” they prattled. “How are you?” “What are you doing here?” “You look fantastic!” “How far along are you?” “When will you be back?” “You won’t believe how badly corporate is breathing down our—” 

“Thank you!” Hanna said, laughing. “I’m doing well. Thank you! Just a few weeks left. We won’t be here long. I just wanted to… Dr. Long!”

A tall guy in a lab coat approached Hanna and happily shook her hand. The doctor’s dark hair had started graying at the temples, but there was no other sign of his age.

“Good afternoon, my dear,” he grinned. “What brings you here?”

“Torrin had a run-in with a parabeast yesterday, and—”

“A parabeast?! Is he all right?”

“Yes,” I answered through a tight jaw. I was raden-deficient, not invisible. Although I sometimes wished the two were paired together.

Hanna smiled politely, glossing over my frustration as she placed a light hand on my shoulder. “Oh yes. He’s quite all right, thankfully. Anyway, he made some interesting observations that I’d like to share with you. Do we still have those weaver wasps in the labs?”

“Of course! Right over here.”

Dr. Long took us past the cubicles and through a password-protected door into an enormous room that resembled an exotic pet shop. The dim lab contained no windows, and bulbs only shone overtop a handful of active workstations. This was where Hanna and her colleagues studied lower-order parabeasts, the kind that were small and docile enough to be contained safely. They couldn’t survive beyond the rift for long, even in an artificial environment, but they’d proven useful enough to warrant a continual harvest from the rifts. 

The weaver wasps, which went by a variety of scientific names specific to the subspecies, were wrapped in green, glowing, raden-rich cocoons. Inside each of these silky sheathes writhed an ugly, lamprey-like insectoid that could grow into long-limbed parabeasts as large as my forearm. The pupae housed within these protective glass enclosures, though, were the size of my pinky.

They were fascinating creatures on their own, but I had always wanted to see one of the enormous weaver wasp colonies that resembled weeping willows. The trailing cocoons of silk apparently refracted light like prisms. 

Someday, I thought.

“The Hokkaido Treaty bars us from breeding parabeasts in captivity,” the doctor told me, as if I were a total layman, “but we have successfully recreated the weaver wasp’s habitat, allowing these specimens to survive from egg to larva, pupa, and even adulthood. Long enough for us to conduct almost any test we wish.”

“Have you ever found a queen?” Hanna asked.

“Yes, but none of them are reproductive beyond the rifts. Whatever eggs they lay are empty, and all our attempts to clone a native or even hybrid weaver wasp within unfertilized eggs were unsuccessful. There’s just something to their recipe that we’re missing.”

I approached the incandescent creatures sealed in glass, and Hanna’s next question faded as my mind flipped like a catalog through the countless applications of their silk: sterile bandages that repelled moisture, scabbard linings that protected all known metals from oxidation, threading with greater tensile strength than carbon nanotubing, fiber optic cables, microprocessors…

It was remarkable that so much power could be contained and harnessed within a single creature.

“Torrin?”

I snapped back to reality. “Yeah?”

“Would you please tell Dr. Long and my team what you told me about the rifts?”

“Uh…” I shifted my eyes anxiously to the scientists wearing white coats and wielding clipboards. “It’s nothing they don’t already know.” My shoulders hunched, sheepish, as I told the doctor, “I’m a great admirer of your writing, Dr. Long.” 

“Oh? That’s nice,” the doctor said as though praising a small child. An uncomfortable silence passed between us until he looked back at Hanna and asked, “Will that be everything?”

“Actually,” I answered, taking out my smartphone, “could I take a picture?”

The doctor cast me a curious look beneath knit brows. After a brief hesitation, he gestured toward the weaver wasp tank. “Of course.”

“What subspecies is this?” I asked as my phone camera clicked.

A researcher replied, “Parabombyx vespa.”

“That's what I thought. I use their silk in all my polishes. Are they all from the same rift?” I asked while toying with the contrast of my image.

“No.”

“But you’re absolutely certain they’re all Parabombyx vespa?”

“Of course,” Dr. Long stressed. “They’re identical at both the genetic and molecular levels.”

“I’m afraid they beg to differ, doctor.” I showed the image on my cellphone to the researchers around me. 

Only half the weaver wasps inside the cases appeared in my photograph. The rest were completely absent—cocoons, glowing threads, and all.

“These parabeasts are dissimilar at the quantum level,” I explained. “That’s why only some of them can be photographed under ultraviolet light. I’m guessing you don’t take pictures of these bugs in the sun that often.”

Some of the newer researchers looked around the windowless room in shock while Hanna beamed.

I gestured at my screen. “The weaver wasps visible in this photo won’t appear to the naked eye under infrared lights because of how electrons function in Rift 431 and 443. We encountered the same problem when trying to harvest insectoid parabeasts in those regions.”

Dr. Long took my smartphone and studied the picture in disbelief. “That’s impossible,” he said. “This image is doctored.”

“You could take another photo yourself,” I offered. “Just make sure you set your flash to its highest UV settings. Or Infrared.” I took my phone back, tapped it, and waved a dark red light across the weaver wasps. As in my picture, half of the parabeasts vanished beneath the light and just as quickly reappeared before our eyes.

Hanna watched this display from over my shoulder. “Amazing!” 

“Why weren't we told about this?” one of the researchers asked. 

I passed the light back over the tank idly. “Lots of ardents and carvers know that there’s something erratic about the parabeasts’ existence and development inside the… the rifts,” I stuttered, my eye catching a strange movement at the far end of the tank. I took a step closer but continued to explain. “We just don’t know what exactly, and the people with the best understanding of them have no patience for scientific discovery.” I squinted at the wriggling form I’d found. “Hanna? What’s that?”

Hanna hadn’t even taken a step when Dr. Long nudged me aside, swiveling the light so the weaver wasp pupa reappeared, obscuring the odd wriggling creature I’d spotted beneath. “Gregory, get the forceps,” he barked as he lifted the tank lid and plunged in a hand. He flipped the pupa upside down to reveal a white worm the length of a fingernail and thinner than a shoestring. It undulated like a sucking leech, and Dr. Long’s lip curled in disgust. “I’m not raising a parasite in this lab.”

Gregory jostled me as he tried to hand over the forceps, and I backed out of the way, joining Hanna out the outskirts of the researchers’ tight ring. 

“A raden-sucker,” Hanna muttered. 

I’d read about them but never seen one. They were as diverse as any other parabeast, but from what little I’d studied, they were either useless or bad news. No in-between.

I saw the time as I turned off my infrared light and startled. “Hey, I’ve gotta go,” I told Hanna. “I’m gonna be late.”

“Oh, okay,” Hanna murmured, but Dr. Long had heard me and tilted his profile in our direction.

Pinching the parasite’s head with the forceps he said, “I hope you’ll come back another time, Torrin. I’d like to pick your brain.” 

“I hope you mean that figuratively.” When he chuckled, I added, “Thanks for the tour.”

As Hanna and I turned for the door, she gave me a quick side hug and whispered, “Nailed it.”

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