Page 27 of Alien Prince's Fake Bride
“Secret areas are what we want,” I tell her. “That’s where we can find out how it all works. Can you get the door open?”
The door slides up, and then another metal barrier behind that one opens, too.
“That was close,” Vera says. “I almost tripped an alarm.”
Outside the elevator is a dark space, dimly lit in red. A deep hum fills the room and vibrates through my boots. Towering machinery looms above me. There’s bare metal, long conduits, and slowly pulsating lights on objects that I can’t even begin to identify. Except that some of them are metal spheres as big as houses, balancing on copper coils. The ceiling is shaped like a dome, a hundred feet over my head.
Warning signs in Khavgrese glow around me, confirming that this is exactly the kind of place I’m looking for.
“Can you make any sense of this?” I ask, having to raise my voice because the hum is so loud.
“Something to do with extremely high energy!”Vera yells so she vibrates on my wrist. “I don’t feel good about being in here. The electric fields are off the charts. This is dangerous!”
“Could it be the engine?” I shout.
“With this kind of energy around, it could! But I lack data. Hold me up with my camera facing to the front!”
I walk further into the dome, holding up my wrist with Vera on it. “Record as much as you can—shit!”
A bolt of blue lightning shoots down from the dome and strikes one of the huge metal spheres with a sharpcrack.
I crouch down reflexively. Immediately there’s another one, further away, then one much closer. The lighting strikes all over the room, and it’s getting really intense. It’s as if a ferocious thunderstorm has started all around me, except without the rain. “What’s happening?”
“We disturbed something!”Very yells. “I don’t think anyone is supposed to be in here!”
The energy discharges are extremely violent, and they light up the whole giant hall almost continuously. The noise is deafening, one hard bang after the other. The spot where I’m crouched seems to be the only place where those bolts haven’t struck yet. But they’re definitely coming closer, from both sides.
The air is thick with electricity and is heating up fast. It smells sharply of chemicals and of burning. If the lighting doesn’t get me, the toxic fumes will. But in that race, the extremely high voltage bolts are in the lead. A single hit will fry me on the spot.
I curl up more, starting to panic. The elevator door is far away, and it’s closed. Running over there would expose me to the lightning. I would get maybe a second to sprint before one hit me.
The intensity is picking up with no pause between each hard bolt of lightning, with its bang to accompany it.
I’m trapped in this infernal alien machine, its raw power gone crazy. And it’s trying its best to kill me. I can even swear the hard thunderclaps are saying my name.Umbra! Umbra!
Vera is saying something, but even when I press her to my ear, all I hear is high-pitched pieces of words.
There’s another noise now, thin and piercing.
It’s me, I realize. I’m screaming my head off in terror, clenching my hands to my ears and squeezing my eyes shut.
Tears burn in my eyes.Damn it. Nobody will ever know what happened to me?—
Umbra!
My eyes snap open. That sound came from inside my own head. But it wasn’t my voice.
Mareliux strides towards me, a dark shape surrounded by ferocious lightning. But none of them hit him. He’s holding a metal contraption with long, bare spikes standing up and out from the central pole, like a blown-out umbrella without the fabric. A thick copper wire hangs down from the pole, sweeping along the metal floor.
The umbrella is sucking up some of the lightning, sending it into the floor, and the whole thing is red hot from the energy that goes through it.
How can he hold it?
He can’t. It’s hovering above his hand.
Syntrix.The word runs through my mind. He’s wielding magic to hold that thing.
He comes in close and takes my hand, the constant bolts of lighting making his tendrils look like they’re sparkling.
