The Gilded Meridian

Chapter 14

The Insurance Adjuster didn't blink. His eyes, void of any white sclera, remained fixed on Maya like cameras recording evidence.

"You don't have it?" The Adjuster smoothed the lapel of his shimmering suit. "That presents a compliance issue, Ms. Lin. The contract clearly states that upon termination of the local reality simulation, all Core Data Assets revert to the parent company."

"We aren't a simulation," Maya spat, her hand tightening on the hilt of her knife.

"Of course you are," the Adjuster said, his tone bored. "You are a biological processing unit generating emotional energy for the Grid. Or you were. Now, you are merely a glitched file."

He raised a gloved hand. He didn't point at Maya. He pointed at the floating monk.

"Example: Redundant NPC code."

The Adjuster pinched his fingers together.

There was no sound. No beam of light.

The monk simply... folded. Spatially. His body imploded into a two-dimensional line, then a dot, and then pop. He was gone. Deleted.

The villagers screamed.

"Run!" Sae shouted.

She didn't wait for permission. She grabbed a handful of loose gravel and threw it, not at the Adjuster, but at the ground in front of him. With a mental shove, she turned the gravel into shrapnel.

The Adjuster didn't move. The soldiers behind him, the Nulls, stepped forward. They moved with perfect unison, creating a phalanx. They raised their gauntlets. A wall of static distortion appeared, absorbing the shrapnel.

"Liquidate the sector," the Adjuster ordered. "Leave the girl. We need to scan her memory before deletion."

The Nulls opened fire. They didn't fire bullets; they fired beams of grey energy that turned whatever they hit into dust.

"Go! Go!" Elias shoved Maya toward the tree line.

They sprinted. Behind them, the stone wall of the village dissolved into grey sand. The screams of the villagers were cut short.

They hit the edge of the Crystal Forest. Maya’s lungs burned. The air here was thin, and the adrenaline was draining her new reserves of psychic energy.

"They’re faster than us!" Elias yelled, looking back. The Nulls were running through the crystal trees, vaulting over roots with inhuman agility. They didn't slow down; they flowed like water.

"We need cover!" Maya gasped.

She looked at the towering crystal trees. They were vibrating, humming in the strange auroral wind.

"Elias!" Maya shouted. "The resonance! Break the glass!"

Elias understood. He skidded to a halt behind a massive quartz trunk. He turned to face the pursuing Nulls.

He took a deep breath. He didn't whistle this time. He screamed.

He pitched his voice to the resonant frequency of the quartz. He visualized the sound as a hammer.

SHATTER.

The forest exploded.

Fifty-foot trees detonated into millions of razor-sharp shards. The air filled with a deadly cloud of diamond dust and falling jagged spears.

The lead Nulls were shredded. Their sleek armor couldn't handle the sheer volume of high-velocity glass. They fell, twitching, bleeding a silver fluid.

"Keep moving!" Maya grabbed Elias’s arm, hauling him up. He was pale, his nose bleeding profusely. Using the Voice took a toll.

They scrambled up the slope, away from the cloud of glass.

"Where are we going?" Sae panted. "We’re trapped on the mountain!"

Maya scanned the chaotic landscape.

Above them, the sky was a mess of floating islands and shifting gravity wells. To their left, a massive chunk of rock, the size of a stadium, floated mid-air, connected to the mountain by a thick vine of twisted gravity.

And on that floating rock sat a structure. A temple.

"There!" Maya pointed. "The gravity is inverted on that island. If we can get there, they can't track us on foot."

"How do we cross?" Elias wheezed. "It’s a thousand-foot drop!"

"We jump," Maya said. "And we believe we can fly."

They reached the edge of the precipice.

The gap between the mountain and the floating island was fifty feet. Between them lay an abyss that fell into the violet clouds below.

The Nulls were closing in. The glass cloud was settling, and the second wave of soldiers was advancing, stepping over the bodies of their comrades without a glance.

The Adjuster was walking casually behind them, checking a holographic clipboard.

"You have ten seconds," the Adjuster’s voice projected clearly across the distance. "Surrender, and I will make the deletion painless. Resistance will result in data corruption. That is... unpleasant."

Maya looked at Sae and Elias.

"Link up," Maya said. "Hold hands."

They gripped each other's hands. Maya felt Sae’s terror and Elias’s exhaustion flow into her.

"Listen to me," Maya said, staring into their eyes. "Gravity is a suggestion. The Adjuster said we're a simulation. Fine. If this is a simulation, then we can hack the physics engine."

She looked at the floating island. She visualized a bridge. Not a physical bridge, but a vector. A line of force pulling them across.

"On three," Maya said. "One. Two. THREE!"

They ran.

They launched themselves off the edge of the cliff.

For a second, panic took over. Biology screamed you are falling. They dipped, plunging toward the clouds.

"No!" Maya screamed mentally. UP!

She pushed with her mind. Sae pushed. Elias pushed.

The fall arrested. They didn't fly, it wasn't graceful. They swung, as if caught in a gust of wind. The gravity of the floating island caught them, pulling them sideways.

They slammed onto the underside of the floating rock, which was now the "top" for them.

Maya groaned, rolling onto a patch of blue moss.

"We made it," Sae gasped.

Maya crawled to the edge and looked back.

The Nulls had reached the cliff edge. They stopped.

The Adjuster walked to the rim. He looked across the gap at Maya. He adjusted his sunglasses.

He didn't jump. He tapped his earpiece.

"Target has entered Zone B," the Adjuster said. "Deploy the Erasers."

He turned and walked away.

THE FLOATING TEMPLE

They lay in the blue moss for a long time, catching their breath.

"He stopped," Elias said, staring at the sky where the Adjuster had been. "Why didn't they follow?"

"Zone B," Maya muttered. "He called this Zone B. He treats the world like a corrupted hard drive. He’s partitioning us."

She sat up. "We need to move. He said 'Erasers.' That doesn't sound good."

They walked toward the temple in the center of the floating island.

It was an ancient structure, built of white marble, but it was overgrown with the same glowing fungal vines they had seen in the hollow earth. This island must have been pulled from a different timeline during the Bleed.

They entered the main courtyard. It was empty, save for a large, circular pool of water in the center.

The water was black. Still.

"It’s a scrying pool," Sae said, walking toward it. "My mother used to tell stories about these. You can see distant places."

Maya looked at her reflection. It was distorted, rippling.

"We need a radio," Maya said. "Or a way to signal the Resistance. If the General survived... if anyone survived..."

"Hello?" a small voice echoed.

They spun around.

Hiding behind a pillar was a child. Maybe seven years old. He was wearing a t-shirt with a cartoon rocket on it and jeans. He looked painfully normal.

"Who are you?" Maya asked gently, lowering her knife.

"I'm Leo," the boy said. He stepped out. He was holding a Rubik's Cube. "Are you guys the glitch?"

"The glitch?" Elias asked.

"The Bad Men said a glitch came out of the mountain," Leo said. He twisted the cube. Click. Click. "They said the glitch broke the sky."

"Where are your parents, Leo?" Sae asked, stepping forward.

Leo pointed at the sky. "They got deleted. The Bad Man in the suit pointed at them."

Maya’s heart broke. "I'm so sorry, Leo."

"It’s okay," Leo said. He looked at the cube. "I'm fixing it."

He twisted the cube again.

Suddenly, the space around them warped. The pillar Leo was standing next to rotated ninety degrees. The floor shifted.

Maya staggered. "Leo... what are you doing?"

"I'm a Vector," Leo said matter-of-factly. "That’s why they didn't delete me. I can change the math."

He looked at Maya with eyes that were suddenly very old.

"You have the light on you," Leo said. "The white light. You touched the Key."

"Yes," Maya said.

"The Adjuster wants to format the drive," Leo said. "But if you get to the Archive, you can install the backup."

"The Archive?" Maya asked. "Where is that?"

Leo pointed to the Rubik's Cube. He spun the red face.

The air above the pool shimmered. A holographic map appeared. It showed the globe, but it was marked with glowing nodes.

"The Midnight City," Leo said. "It’s in the Atlantic. That’s where the Server is. That’s where the Resistance went."

"The Resistance is alive?" Maya felt a surge of hope.

"Some of them," Leo said. "But the Erasers are coming."

A screeching sound tore through the air. Like metal tearing.

Maya looked up.

Descending from the clouds were three shapes. They looked like pterodactyls, but they were made of static. They flickered in and out of existence, leaving trails of pixelated noise behind them.

Erasers.

"They eat space!" Leo shouted. "Run!"

One of the Erasers swooped down. Its beak, a jagged void, snapped at a marble column. The column didn't break; it vanished. The air where it had been turned into a black vacuum.

"Into the pool!" Leo yelled.

"What?" Elias shouted.

"The pool is a portal!" Leo said. "I linked it to the Atlantic node! Jump!"

The Erasers shrieked, diving toward them.

"Trust the kid!" Maya yelled.

She grabbed Leo’s hand. She grabbed Sae. Elias grabbed her belt.

They ran for the black water.

An Eraser swooped low, its wing clipping Elias’s shoulder.

"Ah!" Elias screamed as a chunk of his jacket—and the flesh beneath it—simply ceased to exist.

They hit the water.

It wasn't cold. It wasn't wet.

It felt like falling through a television screen.

Static. Noise. White light.

THE MIDNIGHT CITY

Maya hit solid ground. Hard.

She gasped, rolling over. She was coughing up... data? Her spit looked like binary code for a second before turning back into liquid.

"Elias! Sae!"

They were beside her. Elias was clutching his shoulder. It wasn't bleeding; the wound looked pixelated, like a low-resolution image.

Leo landed on his feet, holding his cube.

Maya looked around.

They were on a rooftop. It was raining, a heavy, warm rain that smelled of copper.

The skyline around them was breathtaking.

It was night. The city was built on the ocean, rising out of the black waves on massive stilts. The buildings were neon-lit noir skyscrapers, a mix of 1940s New York and Cyberpunk Tokyo.

Airships drifted between the towers, beaming searchlights down into the smog.

"Where are we?" Sae whispered.

"New Atlantis," Leo said. "The Midnight City. This is where the refugees hide."

A searchlight swept over them.

A loudspeaker boomed from a hovering airship.

"UNIDENTIFIED ENTITIES ON ROOF SECTOR 7. STAY WHERE YOU ARE. PREPARE FOR SCAN."

"Resistance?" Elias asked hopefully.

"Or Company," Maya said, tensing.

The airship descended. The side door slid open.

A figure stood there. He wore a long trench coat and a fedora. He held a tommy gun that glowed with blue plasma.

He leaned out.

"Well, ain't you a sight for sore eyes," the man shouted over the rain.

He tipped his fedora.

"Get in. The Adjuster has a bounty on your heads, and I ain't keen on sharing."

Maya squinted. The face was familiar. Rugged. Charming.

It was Julian.

But not the monster. And not the professor.

This was a different Julian. A rougher, rogue Julian.

"Julian?" Maya gasped.

"Name's Vane," the man said. "Johnny Vane. Private Eye. Now get in the car, dollface, before the Erasers chew up the scenery."