Chapter Eleven
Gemma wandered the temple’s inner maze, though the walls were too smooth, the light too still.
She glanced down. The ground beneath her boots wasn’t stone at all, but glass—no, a mirror.
Each step shimmered with fractured reflections of her face, staring up from beneath her feet.
Again and again, identical yet not—one bleeding, one screaming, one laughing with joy too wide to be sane.
Others wept; some whispered. One stared back with violet eyes that didn’t blink.
Gemma walked faster.
The corridor ahead split into three paths, all visible from where she stood.
Down the first, a version of herself knelt beside the orb like she was in prayer. Her hands glowed with violet light, her eyes closed in surrender. She looked almost too at peace, though, as if nothing human remained.
The second version wore armor laced in dried, violet blood like warpaint drawn across her cheek.
Her grin was unrepentant, and her dark braid swung behind her as she lifted a blade still dripping.
Bodies of Dissent, Systems, and civilians alike lay scattered at her feet.
The look on her face said she hadn’t cared; victory was all that mattered.
The third wandered alone through gray ash, hair singed and boots worn through. She called out names—Nadine, Christian, Imara, Hawk—over and over until her voice cracked. No one answered. Her eyes were hollow. Her hands trembled as if she had survived something but had forgotten what.
Gemma’s pulse was thunderous, and her throat was dry. Who were these versions of her?
All three turned to her at once. “You are who we become.”
Their mouths had not moved. The words had come from the walls, the air, beneath the mirrored floor.
Gemma stumbled back, and the mirror cracked beneath her. Webs of alien glyphs splintered out from her boots, their shimmering violet symbols pulsing in time with her heartbeat.
Above her, the galaxy twisted. Stars spiraled outward like water down a drain. The temple’s walls stretched higher, the carvings in them slithering like ink in water, reshaping themselves into new patterns—code she didn’t recognize but somehow understood.
The maze began to dissolve. And then came the heartbeat. It thudded beneath the floor, slow and seismic, like the temple itself was breathing.
Her own breath caught. Fog curled from her lips despite the heat.
“Gemma . . .”
She jolted at the sound of someone speaking her name. She turned.
And faced herself.
Except this version was taller, weightless, and radiant. Her skin was laced with faint lines of starlight. Her eyes burned with violet flame, and her hair floated like it had forgotten gravity. She didn’t walk but hovered. And around her, space distorted as if reality itself obeyed her presence.
Gemma’s own hands began to shimmer, and her pulse skipped a beat.
“Look at what you’re becoming,” Other-Gemma said, her voice echoing without sound. “You’ve been given a gift.”
Gemma stumbled backward, but the air trailed ribbons of light behind her arms, bleeding stardust.
“I didn’t ask for this,” she tried to say, but the words slipped from her mouth in the wrong language—the same one that haunted her dreams.
Her heart thrashed. Her mouth clamped shut.
Other-Gemma titled her head, eyes unreadable. She lifted a hand, and the temple responded.
Runes ignited across the walls. The glyphs at her feet lifted into the air, swirling around her like orbiting moons. One pressed to her sternum. Another to her eye. Gemma tried to swat them away, but her limbs felt heavy, distant.
The runes reshaped, and in them she saw herself walking through fire. Fighting, collapsing, kissing Christian, screaming, kneeling . . . transforming.
“Gemma?” Christian’s voice.
She spun and looked at him with wild hope, but he seemed afraid, stunned. He backed away.
She ran toward him, her hand outstretched, violet light flickering from her fingertips like sparks. But the more she moved, the farther away he became.
“Christian!” she called, in a voice that was both hers and not. It was ancient, alien, and terrifying.
His face crumpled. “I’m sorry I couldn’t save you.”
The chamber exploded into echo. A hundred voices, all his, repeating that sentence over and over.
Gemma screamed, clapping her hands over her ears. Even her scream was foreign. It shook the walls, split the floor, spun the glyphs faster.
Inside her skull, Other-Gemma whispered, “You were never meant to be saved.”
The heartbeat stopped.
And the light went out.
Gemma snapped awake with a strangled gasp, clothes sticking to her like another layer of skin. She flung her hands in front of her face. They were normal. Human. Not glowing.
She covered her sweaty face with her arms and tried to slow her heart rate. Her chest ached with the weight of the nightmare. She hadn’t died when the orb rewrote her, but something inside her had been replaced or . . . awakened. And that might be worse.
Was she still Gemma Proctor? Or was she just a shell now, built around potent power and rewritten code?
Fear slithered deeper. What if, one day, she looked in the mirror and didn’t recognize herself? What if she opened her mouth and spoke in a language she couldn’t control? What if she reached for Christian and hurt him without meaning to?
She gritted her teeth, blinking hard against the burn in her eyes. Why did the orb call to her, of all people? Why did it have to destroy her life?
“Hey, kiddo,” Gunner said from outside her shelter. “Whenever you’re up, we have breakfast ready.”
She took a deep breath. If she could live through her sister’s “death,” she could live through this. She’d just take it one step at a time.
Breakfast ended up being some sort of powdered egg and animal jerky, and an hour later, she still had a horrid taste in her mouth. So disgusting. How long could humans go without food? She might try to find out.
At last, Doctor Manae called for Gemma.
She took a deep breath. This is what she wanted, wasn’t it? She was about to get answers. So then why was this moment so terrifying?
“Hi, Gemma,” Doctor Manae said when Gemma had reached her. The older woman’s voice was calm, even kind, but Gemma didn’t miss the way the doctor’s eyes flicked across Gemma’s face, searching and assessing. Looking for change.
Gemma resisted the urge to look away. “Morning.”
The doctor motioned for Gemma to walk beside her, leading her deep into one of the temple’s far corridors, where a portable lab had been set up.
“Did you sleep?” Doctor Manae asked.
Gemma gave a noncommittal shrug. “Enough.”
The doctor offered a tight smile but didn’t press, for which Gemma was beyond grateful. The less she thought about that nightmare, the better.
Doctor Manae opened a sliding partition that led into a diagnostic room, where a low platform bed, an arch scanner, and a medical station waited, the devices humming faintly with power. The air smelled like antiseptic and scorched metal.
“I want to run another series of scans today,” the doctor said, gesturing toward the bed.
“In the event we are able to find a cure, we need to better understand what the orb did to you and your body. Since the last time I ran these tests, I was able to isolate several strands of foreign RNA. Those purple cells in your blood? Those are new proteins mankind has never cataloged. It’s like your blood is . . . changing its components.”
Gemma frowned. “You mean mutating.”
Doctor Manae looked at her evenly. “Adapting. Climb onto the bed for me.”
Gemma lay back and stared at the ceiling, her hands trembling. Doctor Manae positioned the arch station over her. Gemma’s reflection stared back from the metal hovering over her head.
“I want you to tell me if something changes,” Doctor Manae said. “Sensation, memory, hunger, language comprehension, vision—anything.”
Gemma closed her eyes, a lump forming in her throat. “Can I ask you something?” she said quietly.
Doctor Manae looked up from her electropad. “Of course.”
“Do you think it chose me? The orb?”
The doctor’s expression softened. “I think the orb did respond to something in you. It’s possible your biology acted as a kind of . . . beacon.”
Gemma scoffed under her breath. “Great.”
“Don’t jump to conclusions yet. It’s just a possibility. We’ll know more after we run a few tests.”
Gemma took several deep breaths in through her nose, out through her mouth. No conclusions. One step at a time. She could do this.
Doctor Manae tapped a series of commands into her electropad.
The arch scanner hummed as it turned on and slowly moved up and down Gemma’s body.
Cerulean light radiated from the machine, covering her in an oddly beautiful glow.
A tickling sensation arose on every inch of her skin, as if the light itself was touching her.
Was that normal? Or was that something she should report to Doctor Manae?
When Gemma caught her reflection in the arch, she appeared completely herself. Maybe the machine was just reading her biology and DNA.
Minutes passed before the arch shut down. Doctor Manae’s brows furrowed as she read the results.
“Tell me,” Gemma said, sitting up slowly. “I can handle it.”
The doctor frowned. “The mutation is advancing.”
Gemma’s chest pinched. “Faster than it was?”
“Yes. I suspect being in this place has accelerated the timeline.”
Gemma gripped the edge of the cot, tears pooling in the bottoms of her eyes. “So, I am going to die before we leave here, then.”
Doctor Manae’s lips pressed into a thin line. “No, I don’t believe that’s the direction this is heading.”
“That’s not exactly reassuring.”
“Would you prefer the truth?”
“Always.”
The doctor hesitated. “Like I said, the orb didn’t infect you the way we understand viruses. It didn’t replicate. It rewrote. Like it was installing a new language into your cells, one your body doesn’t quite know how to speak yet. It even learned how to reconfigure itself around the implant.”
Doctor Manae turned the electropad to show her.
“We’ve never seen an organic molecule hold structure like this.
I firmly believe that if it was going to kill you, it would have done so already.
This ability to learn and adapt is not random.
It’s deliberate. In essence, that implant never would’ve been effective at thwarting its progress. ”
Gemma stared at the screen, barely breathing. “So, it did choose me.”
The doctor didn’t answer right away. She set the electropad aside and leaned forward slightly, her tone quieter now, more intimate. “When you found the orb, what did you feel?”
Gemma swallowed. “Um, I don’t know. There was this sense, I guess, that it wanted me to touch it.”
Doctor Manae nodded. “We’ve only begun to decode the architectural patterns in this temple. But according to Gunner, there’s a theory among xenolinguists that objects like the orb aren’t energy sources. They are conduits. Gateways, maybe. Or . . . seeds.”
He’d said as much when he’d spoken with Gemma. Well, at least the conduit part.
“What do you mean by ‘seeds?’” Gemma asked.
“Not in the plant sense, but in the evolutionary sense. Designed to be sown and cultivated. To adapt. For lack of a better analogy, it saw you as the soil in which to plant itself.”
“So, if I’m not going to die, what am I becoming? Can we cure it or reverse it?”
Her pulse raced. She should be happy that Doctor Manae didn’t think she was dying anymore, but to think she was becoming something else, with the powers she already contained . . .
Something needed to stop this evolution from taking place.
“That,” Doctor Manae answered Gemma’s question, “is what I want to find out.”
The door to the diagnostic room hissed open.
“Knock, knock,” came a too-cheerful voice. “Figured the lab was due for a little charm.”
Gunner stepped in, his blond-red hair mussed and his shirt slightly askew, as if he’d dressed in a hurry or gotten distracted halfway through. He had a half-eaten protein bar in one hand and an electropad in the other.
Doctor Manae arched a brow. “Gunner, we’re in the middle of something.”
“Yeah, I know. That’s why I waited ten whole minutes to barge in.” He winked at Gemma.
She managed a thin smile.
“What do you want?” Doctor Manae asked.
“Just an update. A little scientific gossip between friends.”
The doctor sighed and passed him her electropad. “We’re seeing rapid replacement of red cells with the modified strain. Structure’s crystalline. Likely a new protein chain forming.”
Gunner’s brows shot up. “Wicked.” He turned to Gemma, his grin softening into something more sincere. “You okay?”
She snorted. “Define okay.”
“Fair.” He tucked the protein bar into a pocket and offered back Doctor Manae’s electropad.
“Listen, I’ve been poking around the central chamber again, checking resonance patterns.
I noticed something weird. Well, extra weird.
Some symbols popped up near the base of the statue’s platform. I think it’s reactive.”
Doctor Manae frowned. “Reactive how?”
“To her, I think.” Gunner gestured to Gemma. “It didn’t do anything when I approached, but then I thought: What would happen if I brought in one of her blood samples? And bingo—they appeared. Faintly.”
Gemma’s stomach tightened. “And you want me to do what? Go touch it?”
“More like stand near it and see if it does anything. We don’t have to do anything risky. Just test a theory.”
Doctor Manae looked skeptical. “She just finished her scan.”
“I’ll keep her safe,” Gunner promised. “We’ll be back before your caff gets cold.”
Gemma stood before she could overthink it. “Let’s just get it over with.”
They walked in silence through the stone maze to the grand hall.
When they entered, Gunner led her to the central dais on which the alien statue loomed.
At first glance, it looked exactly the same.
But then Gemma spied a ring of glyphs near its stone base, one of which shimmered when she approached.
These definitely weren’t here the last time.
“That one’s new,” Gunner murmured, pointing to the one that had glinted. “It wasn’t there an hour ago.”
She stepped closer. The air around the carvings buzzed like static. She held out her hand instinctively, and the glyphs pulsed. She jumped.
Gunner inhaled sharply. “Whoa. That’s confirmation if I’ve ever seen it.”
She was about to agree when a soft tingle pricked her fingertips. She turned her hand palm-up—and froze. Her fingertips glimmered faintly, like starlight was trapped beneath her skin.
Just like in her nightmare.
“I didn’t do anything,” she whispered, her heart in her throat.
“You didn’t have to,” Gunner said, his voice quiet now. “I think it already knows you.”