Book 2 The Gods of Light and Liars

Chapter 32: Duality

"What?" Hawk whispered.

"I suspect you wouldn't notice, seeing as how you say there is no magic in your world..." and then he trailed off, seeing the color drain from Hawk's face.

Because she was thinking about a field of beige grass. She turned to Kaiser. "You were at the briefings with the general, right?"

"Well, yes..."

"Did the Bittermoss and Bronx Events move faster than the others?" She seemed to remember some pretty horrific doomsday numbers coming out of the television set, but that might have just been the usual hyperbole. Kaiser would have access to the real numbers.

"What do you mean?"

"The two events that we know had Archetypes in the Prisms. Did their Glass Lines advance faster than the line in Arizona?"

"And the other Events we know of. But those events were exponentially larger." Kaiser said. Then paused.

"What. That look. What is it?" She said.

"...There were a few whispers about the events not quite scaling up correctly. Some of my numbers people chattering. I didn't pay too much attention. They know when to show me their work and when to leave it alone."

"So the numbers didn't scale right. It's higher. Way higher than it ought to have been, isn't it?"

"I know exactly Jack and Shit about the Bittermoss Line," Kaiser said. "Largely because we're fucking inside it, Doc." And he pumped the mockery into that Doc.

"But the Bronx Zoo line?" She said. She wasn't going to back down from this.

"Would you mind very much explaining?" Came the smooth and dangerous voice of the Shadowmaster.

She glanced from face to face. Most of them looked at her expectantly. The nominal God with her husband's face looked bored. Henry Dyson suddenly looked like he'd eaten sour meat.

"This world should not be here. There isn't enough energy in the system for it to be a viable ecosystem on its own. We've got sunlight, we've got some nutrition, but it's not nearly enough to support an entire forest." She pointed up. "Up there, back home, this universe formed as a sort of pocket, a universe inside our larger one. Life requires energy. I think that the event fractures or stresses the laws of physics to the point that you can leach the energy you need to sustain organic life in here from the organic life out there." Pause. "Back home. The Glass isn't a side effect of the energy signature. It's the direct cause. Life going from out there to in here."

Silence as each of the earth-siders remembered the spreading fields of beige colored grasses, life leaching out of soil and flesh cell by cell. And now they had the other side of it.

"So the Rifts aren't emitting Glass energy." Dyson said.

"They're absorbing it. It's coming from organic life. We're detecting life itself coming out of the ground, and we thought it came from the Rift. It didn't. It's our energy. Our life. And it's going down the Event holes to sustain whatever is in the pocket universe. In this case—"

"The descendants of the Bittermoss students, the plants, the bunny rabbits, and whatever else they had at the Bittermoss 4H club." Em said.

"Which is why the Boston event is so huge." Hawk said. "It has to support basically an entire population. Plus however much energy the Archetypes' little display burned through."

"Archetype?" the Archon said.

She actively felt the circuits blow as she explained herself. "I am not calling them Gods. I refuse. Point blank refuse. Do what you want. Inflate their egos all you want, but they don't deserve that kind of honor. Not after what I saw in that pavilion."