Monster of the Dark Read online

  Carmen looked at the floor. Her task was sobering. Making her dolls dance, while fun, wasn’t exactly easy, and this would be like making all the aerocars on her block dance. She wasn’t sure if it was possible…except, perhaps it was. Janus wouldn’t give her something she was utterly incapable of doing. She didn’t think he would, at least. What would be the point?

  Janus walked a little ways from her, and Carmen took a deep breath. She figured there was no method to this, so she focused on a small clump of sand and lifted it into the air. The effort was almost unnoticeable; the concentration, however, was quite high. At home, she had at most a dozen individual dolls. Currently, she was supporting several thousand individual grains of sand, if not more. The effort to add a few hundred more made her gasp. It also made her once again doubt that this was actually possible. Maybe it was meant to test her sanity. She wasn’t sure she’d pass.

  She was tempted to add another small clump to her pile but stopped short. There was no point—she was dropping the sand she was already suspending faster than she could possibly add more. Her grasp on each particle waned as her concentration slipped. Every attempt to catch the falling sand only made Carmen drop more. Eventually, the very last particle fell back to the floor, and she was holding nothing.

  She breathed hard, and looked over at Janus in her brief moment of rest. The Clairvoyant stared back at her like a statue. What was she doing wrong? He said this would be difficult, but she thought she should still be able to do it. Carmen looked away from Janus and surveyed her sandbox once more. The only conclusion she could make was that she wasn’t focusing hard enough, so she took a deep breath again then gritted her teeth. Once more, a clump of sand rose into the air. She levitated another before the effort began taking its toll. She added a third clump and had thus far managed to clear a nearly unnoticeable spot in the room. It was about this moment that her plan went awry. Janus coughed softly, and that was enough of a break in her concentration to lose all the gains she had made. The sand fell to the ground; seconds later, so did Carmen, in a mixture of frustration and pure mental exhaustion.

  She looked at her handler again and wondered if he had coughed on purpose. He had to know it took almost all of her focus to maintain the pathetically small pile, let alone the entire room. She wouldn’t put it past him—even if that would make it the gentlest thing he had done to her since she stepped into that car. He wasn’t doing anything now, though. He simply watched her. Carmen turned back to the sand.

  I want to go home, she thought yet again as she rested on her knees. The desire was just as true now as any other moment she’d been here. Sand—she was trapped in a room with sand. First guns, monsters, and now sand. She grabbed a big clump of the stuff and let the sand slowly seep between her fingers. It was hard to think she’d used to like this stuff at the playground. Life was so much simpler when you were just running through it or building stuff with it.

  Carmen ran her hands through the sand again. Then, slowly but surely, an idea came to her. She had to be going about this the wrong way.

  She got to her feet. The answer was obvious. She just needed something to focus on—that was her problem. She was concentrating harder than she ever had in her life, but she had nothing to aim at. Carmen looked at the sand and raised her arm. A large clump levitated into the air at the same time, like the mass was in the palm of her hand. It was still arduous but manageable. In fact, it was considerably easier than before. After moving her arm to the right, an even larger clump of sand joined the first. Carmen gasped from the strain, but she wasn’t close to giving up. She could do this—she knew she could do this. All she needed to do was focus, be tough, and be strong.

  I can do this, she thought after a groan. Just then, she heard laughing. All the sand dropped in a flash and Carmen looked at Janus. He chuckled while slowly shaking his head.

  “Why do you toy with yourself, 111724?” he asked. “We are not wizards. We are not mystics. We do not wave our hands and expect magic to happen. I will never tell you that you need to keep the world in balance. I will never tell you what herbs, sacrificial babies, or words you need to use to manipulate your power. You are a Clairvoyant—such nonsense is beneath you. You will simply walk into a room and bend it to your will. Heat, light, minds, sand…it makes no difference. It will happen simply because you exist.”

  She didn’t really care about anything he was saying. “It’s too hard,” she whined.

  “It’s hard because you want it to be hard,” Janus said. “I do not know why. That’s a question you have to ask yourself. But if you want to levitate the sand, just do it.”

  “It’s too hard,” Carmen whined again. “I can’t do it. It’s impossible.”

  “Why is it impossible?”

  “I can’t concentrate hard enough,” she said, now on the verge of crying. “And…and you keep distracting me.”

  Her handler was silent for a minute or two. “Concentrate?” he finally asked. “Why would you need to concentrate?”

  It was now Carmen’s turn to be silent. The answer was obvious to her. “How else am I supposed to do it?”

  “Do you concentrate when you walk down the street?” Janus asked after a brief pause. “How much conscious thought do you use to control your thousands of nerves and muscles to simply stand still?”

  “But…but this is different,” Carmen whimpered.

  “How?” he asked, letting the question hang before he spoke again. “What you are has very little to do with what you see when you look in a mirror. You’re a Clairvoyant, a monster of the Dark. You take in the energies around you, harness them, and change your environment based on what you desire. You do the same thing with your physical shell, your body. So, once again, how is this different from anything else you have done in your life?”

  She thought about his words and didn’t have an answer. Part of that was because she didn’t really understand anything he said, as usual, but his logic seemed to make some sort of sense. Just thinking about thinking how to walk made her head hurt. It was nice how it always just happened.

  “Try again, and don’t concentrate this time.”

  Carmen nodded and turned back to the sand. She didn’t bother getting up, though. She’d just collapse again after another bout of frustration. Surely Janus would clap his hands or shoot her or something if she actually started making headway. She wished they would have given her a nicer handler.

  She lifted a small clump of sand into the air for a moment and held it there. Nothing was different; she had to concentrate just as hard as ever. Carmen dropped the sand without trying to add any more. She was right—this was pointless. When she looked at Janus, though, he merely looked back at her. She turned away and took a deep breath. This test really was meant to drive her mad. No one could lift all this sand. She wanted to see Janus do it, if it was so easy. She glanced at him again, opened her mouth, and then looked away just as quickly. The man was entirely too scary an individual to seriously ask that question. Carmen instead closed her eyes and sat there. He couldn’t punish her for just sitting.

  It was then that she thought about a similar problem from not all that long ago. When she had to use telepathy, she just did it. She didn’t think the two skills were related—they probably weren’t. Her brain felt like it was about to melt. Perhaps she was just thinking too hard?

  She kept her eyes closed and focused on the room for a moment. There was Janus. As always, it was hard not to notice him. He just, well…was. She guessed all Clairvoyants were like that, but she didn’t know for certain. There was also the sand, all that wretched sand. There was nothing really to it; it was just there, albeit in a completely different way than Janus. It wasn’t alive and it wasn’t dead. The grains were just objects—trillions upon trillions of objects—and she had to move every last one.

  She thought about what Janus said about how she didn’t think about walking while she was walking. That was true. She couldn’t remember the last time she had consciously though
t about it. The question was how would she think about moving sand without thinking about moving sand? She wasn’t exactly sure. At first, she simply imagined the sand levitating—not each and every grain, but a large clump. At the same time, Carmen felt a very odd type of strain. It wasn’t exactly uncomfortable, but it reminded her of standing up from a chair really fast. There was resistance. In fact, there was considerable resistance, but it passed quickly. Now there was just a very small but noticeable weight. She took a deep breath. She could live with it.

  Let’s try some more, Carmen thought.

  This time, she didn’t imagine the sand rising. Instead, she simply wished for the sand to rise, allowing it to happen. She felt that odd discomfort from before, though it was even more insignificant in intensity and passed even more quickly. Carmen was encouraged. She had already cleared more than she ever hoped to and had yet to even break a sweat. Maybe her efforts would even be noticeable? She couldn’t help her curiosity, and after opening first one eye and then the other, she studied her new surroundings.

  Her mouth fell open. At best, she’d hoped to see a hole maybe the same size as herself in the sand, but half of it levitated above her. The sight was so unbelievable that the floating material bobbled and then fell. Carmen caught it just before it hit the ground, but still this was ridiculous. Before, she’d struggled to support a few hundred grains of sand, maybe even a few thousand if she was being generous. How many were in the air now? A bazillion gazillion? And she wasn’t even that tired! Eventually, Carmen smiled as she stared at the spectacle.

  I can do this.

  She stood then and looked at the remaining pile of sand, her smile unabashed. The test was almost trivial now. She raised one insignificant speck of sand without thinking about it. Then she added another and another. The rate increased from single grains, to dozens, hundreds, thousands, till at last, trillions of grains of sand flowed into the air like a river until there was nothing left on the ground. Carmen held the sand over their heads, as Janus had told her to do, and looked at him. There was some effort involved in just holding the sand in place, but she could manage it.

  Her handler, however, remained unmoved. “For however powerful you may be, 111724, it seems you still have to learn attention to detail,” he finally said.

  Carmen was dumbfounded. What was wrong now? What did she possibly miss? Janus took a few steps forward before she could ask, revealing the sand under his feet.

  “Oh yeah,” she muttered.

  Then, without pause, she lifted that sand into the air. She looked down to find sand underneath herself as well. When she levitated that, her task was complete. Janus didn’t say anything as he watched the sand above them. After a few seconds, he turned his attention to Carmen. She smiled nervously.

  “Good,” he said. “Are you tired?”

  She smiled outright. “No.” It was somewhat of a lie. She was a little tired, but no more exhausted than if she had climbed a flight of stairs.

  Janus nodded. “Always remember that the use of your abilities will be tiring. Channeling the energies around you will never be completely efficient. The resistance of the world before it submits to your power is fatiguing, but it is nothing that could kill you. At most, a Clairvoyant will pass out after overexerting themselves.”

  Carmen already knew this. Her parents had remarked more than once on how much she could sleep. In turn, she often wondered how anyone could not sleep as much as she did.

  “There isn’t much you can do about this,” Janus continued, “but always know that your mind and body are a team. You must feed your mind and discipline your body to ever reach your full potential. A disciplined body can reduce the need for you to rely on your other abilities, even if the effect is ultimately minor.”

  “Okay,” Carmen said simply.

  Her handler nodded again. “All right, you can put the sand down.”

  She nodded as well and then did exactly as he asked—sort of. She more dropped the sand than put it down. The error was obvious just as soon as she let it go, but she made no attempt to catch anything; she just covered her head and hoped for the best. Carmen never noticed any of the sand actually hitting her, though. It had covered the entire room like a cloud, but she was certain it never touched her. She looked up at Janus when the deluge was over, hands still over her head and smiling warily. It was kind of funny. Janus only shook his head. Then he walked toward the door after a soft sigh. Carmen followed in his wake.

  After they left the room, not a word passed between them. She no longer really noticed that she was more or less forgotten between her episodes of torture. It just seemed…well, normal at this point. They didn’t talk as they walked down the hall, nor as they entered an elevator, exited a floor below, and continued on. This floor looked just like every other. It was long and there were no decorations, just doors on either side of the hall. There were more people here too, and they were more beat up than those on the other floor, as hard as that was to believe. Carmen didn’t really notice it anymore, though, either. There was no question whatsoever that she had gotten off lightly with the sand. It was unlikely that her next test would involve something as gentle as bubbles. She was on borrowed time, and there was nothing she could do about it.

  They entered a room with nothing inside—no sand, windows, furniture, nothing. It was just like every other room, and Carmen couldn’t say that surprised her. There was a door on the opposite side of the room, however, the same size as the one she and Janus had entered through. Carmen looked at it cautiously. She didn’t have the best luck with doors.

  She looked at her handler. “What am I going to do here?”

  The effort just to utter those words more than matched her trial with the sand. Fear had choked her voice to almost nothing.

  “This,” Janus said as he pointed toward the door.

  A man walked into the room. It wasn’t some terrible monster she had never seen before, and he didn’t have a bomb, a gun, or even a knife. It was just a man. His clothes were simple, and he himself looked simple with hair trimmed short and no distinguishing facial features. There was nothing distinguishing about his appearance. Despite this, he was different from every other man Carmen had ever seen. There was just nothing about him, almost like he was…empty. Every other living being she had ever sampled had been dynamic and ever changing—in short, full of life. In that measure, this man would be dwarfed by a house fly. How that was possible, she didn’t understand. He may as well have been the sand she had lifted earlier; there was no difference. Carmen couldn’t look at him anymore. It was too sickening.

  Janus walked toward him. “This is a Construct,” he said. “Every aspect of him has been carefully genetically engineered as needed for their specific purpose. They are not clones,” he said firmly. “Fundamentally, they are a robot made of flesh.”

  As she watched the man, it was hard to disagree with that assessment. Janus circled him, and the Construct simply stared straight ahead. The only time he moved was to blink every now and then. He was a rather impressive robot, at least—more muscled than any man she had ever seen, including the heroes on the holo programs her father watched.

  “They feel no pain,” Janus continued, “have no hopes, and have no dreams. They will be your principal opponents for most of your stay here.”

  Carmen looked at the man, unsure of whether she should be happy that Janus indirectly indicated her stay would one day end or worried that this thing would be her opponent in something she probably wouldn’t like.

  “A Construct will never be your equal. They can press you—they can even kill you, if you get careless—but a Clairvoyant drowns them in every measure. As I said, in your case, of all the beings that have ever lived in the galaxy, only about one percent of them can ever be your match,” Janus said. Carmen couldn’t say she was comforted by her handler’s words as she studied the Construct. “This is why you must always fight to the death.”

  She shuddered when she heard that.

 
; “When you kill your opponent, you give them your highest respect. Anyone challenging you is either a fool or seeking death. Why they would want this shouldn’t be any of your concern. These people, animals, whatever they’ll be, will know what you are just by looking at you. If they choose”—Janus emphasized the word—“to stand in front of you, it is only fitting that you honor their choice with their ultimate and inevitable end. This is why every death you deal must be both clean and complete. Never let there be a person maimed by a Clairvoyant; let there only be the dead remains of those who have fought you and the lives of the people smart enough to never try.”

  As she looked at her handler, tears began to fill her eyes. “I don’t want to fight him,” she whimpered.

  “You will,” he said simply as he stared down at the little girl.

  “I don’t want to,” she muttered again. “I…I want to go home.”

  Janus sighed at her usual request. “Does your constant bellyaching over going home give you comfort?” he asked.

  Carmen didn’t say anything. She doubted he even wanted an answer.

  “Know this, 111724,” he continued. “There is no home for Clairvoyants. We are consciously aware of more than most. Some would say we are aware of everything. In either case, and as a consequence, we are part of nothing. That is the great gift and burden of our perspective. You know this as well as I do. I tire of entertaining your self-delusion. Do not ever say it again in my presence,” he finished casually.

  She swallowed hard, but there was still a lump in her throat. “I don’t want to fight,” she said meekly.

  “Yes, you do.”

  Carmen paused for a moment, wondering how that logic worked. Of all the things in the world, she was certain she didn’t want to fight this person or anyone else.