Shadows Collide
by Dan Levinson
Sci-Fi / Fantasy
Date Published: September 15, 2015
New
Axom City—that’s where Nyne Allen has taken refuge in the wake of his desertion
from Orion. Soon it will become a battlefield, as familiar faces from both
sides barrel toward a collision that will forever alter the course of history.
Meanwhile,
in the Far East, Aaron Waverly learns the truth behind the red-robed man, and
discovers a destiny that might one day spell the end of the world itself.
1.
JANE
DOE
Date
Unknown
Location
Unknown
The air was on fire.
As the blaze embraced
her, she raised her hands, shielded her eyes; the billows of flame engulfed her
as she screamed her defiance. The world blinked shut, like an eye closing, and
when it opened once more, she saw faces, murmuring alarm. She tried to tell
them they should leave her be, let her die in peace, her body still ablaze as
if subsumed in the inferno. Yet before she could speak, wings of darkness
enveloped her, carried her into oblivion.
When she surfaced again,
she saw glaring lights.
She lay upon a gurney,
moving swiftly through florescent-lit halls, the acrid stench of burned hair
like a halo around her. Again, faces peered at her, their voices a low babble,
distorted, as if through a tunnel. When a sudden movement jarred her, she
howled, her vocal cords raw, like pulverized meat. Even the air rushing by
tormented her.
What had happened?
She glanced about, eyes
rolling, unable to move her head. A sign loomed above: Burn Ward. Another jolt
shook her, and an animal sound escaped her throat as she lapsed again into
unconsciousness.
She awoke in a white, sterile room, and for a moment thought she
was somewhere familiar. But the hospital room was only an echo of a place she
couldn’t quite recall, the memory slipping from her like sand through a sieve.
She shifted in her bed, gasped, and only then looked down at her arms and
hands, covered in bandages, the rest of her hidden beneath a thin, tan wool
blanket. She could feel where those bandages compressed her flesh, chafed her
raw throat, her belly, breasts, legs, and feet.
To her left, she saw a
morphine drip, but could not reach it, the effort of moving her arm more than
she could bear. She tried to cry for help, but now her voice came only in
croaks and whimpers. She was trapped in her scorched body, no one to help her,
while machines and monitors mocked her with ceaseless beeping.
A male nurse walked by
the room, peered through the door’s glass pane, and she met his eyes, silently begging
him for aid. He ran off, and for those next interminable minutes, each second
seemed to her a test of will simply to exist. An inner voice told her to be
strong, that she could make it through this, and she clung to it, the vague
notion that she could endure all that she had. Mentally, she counted, One,
two, three, four, five, those numbers like a life raft, though she did not
know why.
At last, the doctor
arrived—an austere, dark-haired man in a white coat, his eyes gauging her
behind silver-framed glasses. She could read the pity on his face. “My name is
Dr. Shipley,” he said. “You’ve been involved in a very bad accident. I don’t
mean to alarm you, but you’ve suffered third degree burns over sixty percent of
your body. Do you understand?”
She tried to nod while
her mind processed. An accident? Of course. How else could she have ended up
like this?
“How’s the pain?” Shipley
asked. “I can increase the painkillers if you—”
“Hurts,” she rasped, her
voice like sandpaper.
Shipley adjusted the
morphine. “Your esophagus is damaged, from inhaling superheated air. I’ll ask a
couple more questions, but keep your answers to one or two words. After that,
no talking. Okay?”
She nodded again as the
painkillers entered her system, making her woozy.
“What’s your name?” he
asked.
She opened her mouth to
reply, then closed it, the answer elusive. The pain had so consumed her that,
until now, she hadn’t realized the details of her life were whispers
and shadows lurking in unseen corners of her mind. She couldn’t remember
her name, nor the accident, nor anything else. She choked back a sob, the force
of it stabbing at her injured body.
“You don’t know?” Shipley
asked.
Feebly, she shook her
head.
“Well,” Shipley said,
“given the trauma you’ve been through, it’s not unheard of. Unfortunately, when
you were found, you had no identification, and your hands are too badly burned
for us to take fingerprints. But don’t worry. When you’ve had the chance to
recover, I’m sure it’ll come back to you.” He offered her a reassuring smile.
She knew he was trying to
comfort her, and so restrained the urge to tell him to go fuck himself. Don’t
worry too much? What kind of advice was that?
“Is the pain still
bad?” he asked her. He fiddled with the drip again, and the room grew hazy,
indistinct, before she could manage a word.
When she opened her eyes, the room was dark, all shapes
indistinct save the colors on the monitor feeds. Burning, throbbing blanketed
her. She rolled her head to the side, saw that the window shade lay slightly open,
revealing the lights of an unfamiliar city—the greens and reds of traffic
signals, the whites of far-off windows, the myriad colors of illuminated
billboards. She had no idea where she was.
Despairing, she wept, and
as the grief shuddered through her, it ignited her body anew, though she could
do nothing to stem her tears. “Why?” she murmured. What sin had she committed
that she was being punished so? “Why did this happen?” She didn’t care that she
was not supposed to speak, for hearing her own voice reassured her; it was an
anchor, even if it was a whisper.
And that was what she had
become, she realized. A shadow of her former self.
A whisper.
Dan
Levinson is a NY-based writer of speculative fiction. Trained as an actor at
NYU's Tisch School of Arts, he also writes for the stage and screen. He grew up
immersing himself in fantastical worlds, and now creates them. In addition to
the Psionic Earth series, he is also the author of the upcoming YA fantasy
novel The Ace of Kings, first book of The Conjurer's Cycle.
