Touchstone 1 - Stray

and yet none for me.
    “Why not full squad?” I asked, since asking him if I’d been levitating would have been pointless.
    “Groups attract Ionoth. Fighting our way through would have been too great a delay.”
    So he’d come alone through thirteen spaces to find me. I’d seen enough of how First Squad behaved going to a space they’d considered safe to know how dangerous that had to be.
    “Thank you,” I said. “Save my life.”
    This he didn’t even respond to, which made me feel just wonderful. But of course he hadn’t come to save Cass, but to retrieve a potentially valuable weapon. He was taking me back to the place where I was ‘the amplifying stray’ and something they were willing to risk a squad captain’s life to retrieve. I hadn’t realised how valuable I was to them.
    The next gate opened out onto a city of skyscrapers covered in vines. I could tell by the way the Fourth Squad captain turned his head once he was through that there were Ionoth in there, and I wasn’t surprised when he went off to one side and didn’t immediately come back. It would be my fault if he was killed.
    The question of what would happen if I kept doing this occupied me for the incredibly long time it took my only protection to return, and I was just switching over to what I would do if he didn’t come back when he reappeared. He didn’t look injured though, or even out of breath when he signalled me to come through, but he said: “Move quickly through here,” and strode off at double pace.
    That place smelled of death. I don’t know how else to describe it. Old blood and rotting plants and the stink of decay and wrongness. Death. I couldn’t see what it was which had kept the Fourth Squad captain so long, but I didn’t particularly want to, and scurried after him. Whatever world that space belonged to must be a truly horrible place.
    There were at least a dozen visible gates there – every space we went into seemed to have more. Every time we came close to a gate, my heart lifted, then fell when we moved past. My need to get out of the smell of it was incredible. And when the Fourth Squad captain finally did stop, at a gate showing only some carved grey stone and a bit of stair, he turned and looked carefully around us and I realised I was going to have stay there alone while he cleared the next space. I had to bite my lip not to say pointless things, and when he stepped into the next world, looked around, then moved away, I nearly ignored what he’d said and went after him.
    I think it was the idea of the Fourth Squad captain giving me a lecture on doing what I was told which kept me there. But I felt really sick about it, and stared in every direction, convinced that things were moving toward me. The gate was in the middle of a street, and the leaves overhanging the windows above fluttered and shifted all the time. And I could hear a noise, a scratching, coming closer. I was trying to decide what constituted ‘immediate danger of attack’ when the Fourth Squad captain reappeared and came back through to my side of the gate.
    “We’re going to run,” he said. “Straight up the stair to the apex and straight through the gate. Go.”
    Devil and Deep Blue Sea time. I was so freaked out by the smell and sounds of the skyscraper place that I didn’t hesitate. The next space was cold and full of a stifled echo, a distant roar. I looked down, and the angle of the stairs was way too sharp to make that a good idea, though what was at the bottom of it certainly helped in getting me moving in the other direction. The grey stone was a stepped pyramid, huge, rising out of an ocean of black…something. It reminded me horribly of the nanoliquid our suits were made of, writhing tendrils of it reaching upward. And all over the sides of the pyramid were shadows of people on spikes, speared through their backs like butterflies, and with tendrils of black reaching toward us from out of their chests.
    I am not good at running up flights of stairs. Especially not crumbling stone steps with chunks of recently severed black stuff on them. I can replay the eternal frantic minute it took us to get out of that space, can see the Fourth Squad captain overtake me and cut clear a path, but I don’t actually remember too much of it, just this white panic. If the gates didn’t have that soap-bubble resistance, I think I would have kept on running, though my chest felt like it was going to explode. As it was, it was enough