A place to wither away.
Exasperated and growing desperate, Rae clenches her fists and nudges forward. “Let the planet sort its shit out, right? Leave the ones above to suffer? Is that your grand plan?” Rae asks.
He slithers his tongue against blistered lips. His gaunt expression is almost too much for Rae to keep staring at, but she waits for his response intently. She needs to hear his response.
“Something was given to us. A gift from outside,” he says.
Rae crawls toward his elongated feet. “What were you gifted?”
Slowly, he kneels back down. He threads a key into the lock of her shackles. “I’ll show you.”
Together, they walk through a dark path. Minutes pass as they make turn after turn.
“I’ve made my own tunnels, here, above the city,” he says, grinning dumbly.
He has this place memorized. If she ran, he’d have her cornered in seconds. Still, she notes every step taken.
Finally, a sliver of light shines around the corner. Brighter and brighter, it glows. “Where are we?” Rae asks.
“We’re almost there,” he says.
They walk and turn a corner.
Rae freezes.
“Only I know of this place,” he whispers.
Kept in a round glass tank is a baby, submerged in the same liquid as she was. A bright artificial light shines above it.
“He instructed me to keep it safe,” he says.
Her heart suddenly feels empty. She falls to the earth and clutches her head in misery.
She stutters, “What… what… what is that...”
The devilish monster stands over her. “It’s you.”
“I… don’t understand,” Rae chokes.
“Kept in stasis. Fully alive,” he hisses. “There is an electromagnetic network that runs across this planet. The energy is stored here, underground, right within the planet’s core. It lives off this energy. Soon, it will live off yours.”
“Stasis…? Can someone tell me the fuck is going on?!”
That child can’t be me...
Balancing carefully on the rocks below, she walks toward the glass tank. Inside, the child floats, peacefully sucking her thumb.
Rae analyzes the nose. The small arch that leads to round nostrils. She focuses on the eyelashes. Her tiny toes. The shape of her lips. She places her ear against the glass and listens to her heartbeat.
It’s her. It’s Rae.
The fragile devil places his palms around the sphere and lifts it into his chest. “The child was delivered to us from above. From a soldier. She arrived dead and encased in this… tank. He told me about an energy source. He told me about you. Everything about you. He said you’d come here, that you’d be the one to make it end.”
“End?”
On the glass, she can see a white ouroboros imprint. A chill runs up her spine.
“The end. The final extinction. The end of the cycle,” he says.