The Illusory Prophet Read online

  Text copyright © 2016 Susan Kaye Quinn

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  October 2016 Edition

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  Edited by Bryon Quertermous

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  The Illusory Prophet

  (Singularity 3)

  young adult science fiction

  Summary

  What if you could paint with reality?

  Elijah Brighton can bring a girl back from the dead, travel outside his body, and absorb a lifetime of memories from anyone he touches in the fugue state. Everyone seems to think he’s the prophet they’re waiting for… including the girl he’s falling in love with. The truth is, the fugue is bleeding over into reality, bringing his sketches to life and haunting him with visions of a girl in metal armor. She stabs him with her blade and denounces him as any prophet worth the name—and it’s not like he disagrees.

  People who change the world generally aren’t losing their minds.

  He just wants to hide out in his tent and kiss Kamali, but a vision of his death and an attack on the Human Resistance Movement convince him something bigger is coming. Maybe Augustus—the power-mad ascender he barely defeated. Maybe the Makers, a tinkering cult with their own kind of ascendance. But when his best friend Cyrus disappears, questions of destiny and prophethood will have to wait—because the fugue is always showing a version of the truth, and Eli must discover that truth before his terrifying visions become reality.

  Susan Kaye Quinn's bestselling stories...

  Singularity Series

  The Legacy Human (Book 1)

  The Duality Bridge (Book 2)

  The Illusory Prophet (Book 3)

  The Stories of Singularity #1-4 (Novella Box Set)

  Mindjack Saga

  Open Minds (Book 1)

  Closed Hearts (Book 2)

  Free Souls (Book 3)

  Mindjack Short Story Collection (Novella Box Set)

  The Royals of Dharia

  Third Daughter (Book 1)

  Second Daughter (Book 2)

  First Daughter (Book 3)

  The Debt Collector

  dark, gritty, sexy... recommended for 17+

  Season One

  Season Two

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  to Adam H.

  for saying I could do this and make it work

  So this is what falling in love feels like.

  Weightless and heart-stopping, like tumbling through air after missing a step. I’m kissing Kamali LeClair, and her lips are soft and urgently alive. Her tongue flirts with mine, and we’re in a dance, a duet, with only our mouths and our hands. I’m tumbling down a gravity well—the one that surrounds the depth of her being—falling a thousand miles an hour, yet standing breathlessly still.

  It’s like nothing I’ve ever felt.

  She pulls back but not far. Her pupils dilate in the waning light, taking over the deep liquid brown of her eyes. The scent of the pines and prairie grass surrounding us have nothing on her soap-scrubbed skin, but it’s the look in her eyes that gives me that feeling of falling. Like she wants me with the same passion she has for her dance—the Olympic-level art she gave up for the Resistance—and everything else she believes in. Her ballet-dancer beauty steals my breath, but it’s that look that gets me every time.

  I just wish I knew for sure why she’s pointing it at me.

  “Elijah Brighton.” Her words are a soft breath on my face. “You’re getting pretty good at this.” It’s only our second time out here, but we’re not the only furtive couple tucked in The Caves—the assortment of nooks and crannies nestled into the mountainside near the new basecamp. There have to be a dozen people here already, hidden by the boulders and the shadows, and the night is still young. The Resistance is a mixture of human and human-like beings. I count myself as human-like, given the strangeness that I am, but Kamali is squarely in the all-human, delightfully-soft, no-cybernetic-enhancements category.

  “Definitely need more practice,” I whisper. We’ve only just kissed, but my seventeen-year-old male body is so ready for more. The other couples are all grappling with one another and putting their thoughts into action, just like us, but it feels like we’re the first to discover the art of loving through touch. At least, we might… as long as no one stumbles upon us and interrupts.

  My fingers skim the infinite softness of her cheek—the rich brown color of her skin has been darkened by the twilight—then I brush the dusky-pink of her lips. There’s an infinite palette of color in Kamali—lips and eyes and brilliantly white teeth. As always, I itch to paint her, but I’ve left my supplies back in camp. Instead, I lean in to kiss her again, rendering this sense of falling into brush-strokes of intention with my lips.

  The hyper-attention my body has for hers anchors me to this plane of reality like nothing else. When I’m with her, everything else fades—the fugue state, my visions, the way they’re bleeding over into reality now. Lately, I’ve been slipping between the real world and the fugue far too easily. Keeping on the right side of sanity has been a full-time occupation ever since I brought Kamali back from the dead two weeks ago. I’ve been ignoring the sideways looks in the Resistance camp—it’s like they expect me to work miracles outside my tent each morning at ten. Which is why I’ve been hiding out in my barracks, meditating, and trying to keep my grip on reality.

  Except when Kamali invites me to our own private corner of the mountain.

  But it makes me wonder—am I here, in her arms, because I saved her life? Or more accurately, forced her to return from the blissful afterlife she had already claimed... simply because I needed her. Only she doesn’t know that part, and I haven’t told her—I’m a horrible, selfish person that way. I want to think she loves Eli-the-boy, not Eli-the-miracle-worker, but I have no way to tell. And she doesn’t know I snatched her away from the brightness of that otherworldly studio where her soul—or whatever it is I see in the fugue state—was dancing, beautiful and free of the bounds of this reality. It was confirmation of everything she believes in, and she doesn’t remember it. I can’t help wondering if she would still be here, sitting in the grass kissing me, if she did.

  Kamali breaks the kiss suddenly, thrusting a spike of fear through my chest that somehow she read my mind. But she’s peering off into the darkness, listening. A rustle of grass says we’re not alone, but whoever’s tromping through doesn’t see us. The swish passes by as they find their own pocket of privacy. Kamali turns back with a grin.

  I allow an internal sigh of relief.

  Then she cuddles into me, and the sensation of falling is back. “Maybe it’s Cyrus and Basha,” she says. “They’ve been coming here since we arrived.”

  My best friend and hers have been going strong as a couple since they met at the Olympics, but it’s only been two weeks since the Human Resistance Movement decamped from their secret hideout near New Portland and retreated up to their stronghold here in the mountains of Seattle. Two weeks since Kamali broke up with Tristan and kissed me in a field outside the camp. Two weeks of tumbling down the well in love with her.

  “Cyrus hasn’t been this far gone about a girl since Stacey Glickman.” It gives me no guilt whatso
ever to spill my best friend’s secrets. He has a well-deserved rep for playing the field, but I know this thing with Basha is different. And if it’s anything like my world tilting sideways with Kamali, I don’t want him screwing it up. Not that it seems likely, at this point.

  She grins at this piece of Cyrus intel. “Unrequited love?”

  I smirk. “Sixth-year primary school crush. Broke his heart into tiny, pathetic, poetry-writing pieces.” I’m sure this will get back to Basha at record speed.

  Kamali’s smile lights up even more. “Poor Cyrus.”

  “Only if he decides to come over and interrupt us.” I run my fingers through the cloud of hair that halos her face—she’s let the million black curls run free. I wrap one gently around my finger, and it’s like playing with spun silk. I’m thinking it’s time for more kissing, but something flashes out in the murky darkness and catches my eye. I know even before I look, but I can’t help myself…

  It’s the girl in armor again.

  The vision plays out like a snippet of vid on a loop. A brown-haired girl raises her broad-bladed sword in the air with two hands, gives a wordless warrior cry that rattles her battered metal armor, then she stabs the earth with her fury. Next, she stares straight at me and mouths the words, You are not the truth! The words are silent because this vision apparently doesn’t come with sound—it just pops up randomly and overlays on the real world.

  Bleeding into it…

  I stare my anger and wish her away. She disappears before she can stab the prairie grass again. This isn’t my normal fugue—that otherworldly state where I defeated an ascender named Augustus and an artificial Mind that threatened to consume the world. That I’ve learned how to control—no meditation or God-mode inducing meds required, just a flick of my will, and the world shifts. It’s part of the not-entirely-human thing. The ascenders have cybernetic, immortal bodies and super-intelligent minds. The augments have human minds with some body parts replaced and enhanced by ascender tech. Most humans in the Resistance are entirely flesh and bone.

  I’m none of the above.

  The visions are part of the fugue, but different. They come whether I want them or not, mixing the two worlds, not unlike when I couldn’t control the fugue at all. Worse, that’s not the only part that’s bleeding over into reality—strange animations are showing up in my art as well. I don’t know what’s happening, and that’s what freaks me out the most—and why I’ve been hiding in my tent, trying to get it under control.

  I’m still not precisely sure what ascenders like Lenora did when they created me, but I know I’m some combination of their tech and my mother’s human DNA. They wanted to create a bridge between here and there… there being a world overlaid on our own where the dead aren’t dead, and reality is both less real and more true. And they succeeded—in the fugue state, I can see people’s souls. If that’s what they are. And the people who have crossed over the bridge I am left pieces of themselves behind, stitched into the fabric of my being. Being a bridge for those souls nearly blew me apart, but after pulling myself back together, I thought I had everything under control. My mind had somehow expanded to hold it all—the memories, the lives. I didn’t think I was in danger of unraveling anymore, but now with this bleeding over… and the armored girl coming unbidden, even at the caves…

  “Eli?” Kamali’s soft voice jars me out of my thoughts.

  I squeeze my eyes shut for a moment, cringing internally. Getting lost inside my head is not good. Especially when the gorgeous girl I’m falling in love with is sitting right next to me.

  I open my eyes. “Sorry.”

  The deep seriousness of her expression doesn’t change. “Can you see them?” She means the other couples, not the visions. She doesn’t know about those.

  I peer out into the dark. I could shift right now and see through the cover of night and barrier of granite to the other lovers, but I don’t—not least because everything feels just a little too out-of-control at the moment.

  Kamali is awaiting my answer, too expectant.

  I turn back to her and slide my fingers into the softness of her hair. “The only thing I want to see out here is right in front of me.”

  She smiles, but it’s bashful, and she drops her gaze. A split second before she speaks, my chest tightens—because I can too easily guess what she wants to know.

  The same thing as everyone else.

  “What’s it like?” she asks, slowly drawing her gaze back up to mine. “In the fugue, I mean. What does it feel like?”

  Like floating. Like I’m going mad. Like falling in love. “It’s nothing special.” I want to keep pretending I’m just a boy and she’s just a girl—but a heaviness settles on my chest. This conversation is happening, regardless of what I want, which is mostly to kiss Kamali and not discuss how strange I am. Or that I might tap into the God she believes in, but I don’t.

  “Come on, Eli.” The hard set of her mouth shows that determined look I love… but don’t especially like when it’s pointed in my direction. “You brought me back from the dead. You can’t tell me that’s nothing special.”

  The tightness in my chest squeezes harder. “No, that part was. Definitely.” And the fallout from that continues to grow. People are talking about me. Getting restless. Expecting things. I know they are—I’m simply trying to ignore it while I get my head straight. While I figure out what the fugue really means and what I’m supposed to do with it.

  “Just tell me,” she says, voice soft again. “I have this image in my head of holy light and choirs singing and pure joy. I’m sure it’s nothing like that, I just… I need to know.”

  She’s not far wrong—at least, for her. A knife of guilt stabs me as I leave that part unsaid. “It’s more like seeing people as they truly are. Plus some extra stuff I don’t really understand.” That part’s true—the fugue isn’t just seeing people’s souls. There’s a lot more—the visions, the times I visit places I’ve never been. Some things are fixed, some changeable, some totally not real. At least, no reality I understand. Honestly, I don’t understand most of it.

  “What kind of stuff?” Her eyes are bright with curiosity.

  I trust Kamali. I want to come clean about everything, so there are no secrets between us. I suck in a breath and dare to tell her everything. “I don’t just see the souls, or whatever they are—essences—of people. I call them fugue-state forms. I can touch them as well, have them pass over me like I’m a bridge of sorts between the two states—here and whatever there is. But it’s, well, kind of rough on me. It’s like their entire being crosses through me and leaves a copy of their memories behind. Which is disorienting at best, and at worst, there’s this infinite grayness I get blown out to whenever I’ve encountered a mind stronger than my own.”

  “Like the ascenders,” she says, nodding and hanging on every word falling from my lips.

  It makes me squirm. “Yeah. The ascenders are just too much. I can only skim them, like when I stole Augustus’s personal key.” Augustus is the power-mad ascender we destroyed when we took out the Mind, but he’s almost certain to resurrect any day now. I keep hoping he can’t without his custom bodyform—which I suspect was modified illegally and has mind-enhancing properties—but I know nothing for sure. I’ve been watching and waiting, but so far… nothing.

  “But human minds are okay.” She’s pointed about this, and my chest tightens some more.

  “Well, yeah.” I’m hoping she won’t put it together. Won’t ask.

  Of course, she does. “So, when you saved me, did I… leave something behind?” Her eyes are wide, and her fingers tentatively touch my face. I’d prefer a lot more of that, and a lot fewer questions I don’t want to answer.

  I force the words out. “No, actually. You’re different for some reason.” Which is true—I dragged her back to the world of the living not by being a bridge, but by wanting it more than anything I’ve ever wanted in my life. I give her a small smile. “I think it happened because I believe
d it could.”

  She nods, eyes still wide. “So you’re a believer now?”

  A frown collapses my smile. “No.”

  An awkward tension reigns between us. It has to seem crazy to her—I can bring her back from the dead, but I don’t believe in her all-powerful God. As if there weren’t enough strange things about me, this feels like the one that could actually keep us apart. Which breaks my heart just thinking about it.

  She studies the dark grass next to us as I flounder for something to say.

  Then she looks up. “What else do you see? The other stuff you mentioned.”

  I let out a low breath of relief. “Well, there are the visions. Like when I saw the Mind before I knew what it was.” That I really don’t understand. Sometimes the visions are of the past, things that have happened in the real world. Sometimes they’re of the future, but not a set future, just like a possibility. Or a warning. And now I’ve got them spilling over into real life, smearing along my sketchpad or popping up like this girl with battered metal armor who keeps haunting me. Which goes back to my grip on reality and how it’s not always a sure thing.

  Okay, maybe I’m not ready to come completely clean.

  Kamali leans closer, peering into my eyes. “I think I saw a glimpse of that vision of the Mind.”

  I frown, just now remembering. “Your dream? The one you had of me?”

  She nods, a little too fervent. “It was like someone was telling me to help you.”

  I grimace, but I can’t let her think I’m talking to her God. “It’s not like that for me. I mean, it’s not someone handing out instructions. Or even hints.” I frown because even that’s not entirely true. There’s a master painter who’s often my first stop in the fugue—he’s a gate guardian of sorts, only he’s mostly cryptic and not helpful.