The Last Mystic

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  Mindjack: Kira

  Open Minds (Book 1)

  Closed Hearts (Book 2)

  Free Souls (Book 3)

  Mindjack Short Story Collection (Novella Box Set)

  Mindjack: Zeph

  Locked Tight (Book 1)

  Cracked Open (Book 2)

  Broken Wide (Book 3)

  Singularity Series

  The Legacy Human (Book 1)

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  The Illusory Prophet (Book 3)

  The Last Mystic (Book 4)

  Stories of Singularity

  Restore

  Containment

  Augment

  Awakening

  Harvest

  Defiance

  Résistance

  The Royals of Dharia

  Third Daughter (Book 1)

  Second Daughter (Book 2)

  First Daughter (Book 3)

  The Debt Collector

  LIRIUM: Season One

  WRAITH: Season Two

  Middle Grade Fantasy

  Faery Swap

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  Copyright © January 2020 by Susan Kaye Quinn

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  Cover by BZN Studios

  What if you knew there was life after death? Eli is back from the dead and determined to stop the ascenders who blasted him out to the void. But the world moved on—the girl he loves is offering herself up to fight the ascenders; the ascenders are forming a cult around the man Eli accidentally freed; and everyone is rushing to bring a Second Singularity, regardless of the cost. How can he stop the world from hurtling off the cliff when he’s the one who proved there’s something to reach, if only you could learn how to fly?

  To my mom,

  for teaching me how to see with my heart

  One

  “But you were dead!” Cyrus protests.

  “So were you.” I try not to take my best friend’s look of horror personally. I don’t remind him that I’ve already brought him back from the other side. And my second, Kamali. And several others. It shouldn’t be shocking that I can do the same for myself.

  But, of course, it is. It’s the kind of shock that could burn down everything.

  Cyrus steps back. There’s not far to go in this tiny mining shack. “I wasn’t dead for three days.” He gives a desperate glance to Kamali standing by my side.

  “It’s all right, Cyrus.” But her body betrays her words. Her strong, slender fingers dig into my arm, just short of painful like I might vanish if she loosens her grip.

  Cyrus shakes his head, tiny movements that shudder through the bulk of his body. His beefy hands clench and unclench, his eyes blinking too much, like his entire system is shorting out. His gaze drops to my clothes, and disbelief twists his face anew.

  I’m still wearing the black, tactical fatigues I was killed in. They’re lightweight and ascender-tech, more like clothing than armor, and obviously not enough to stop a blaster. My now-undamaged flesh shows through the charred holes, a bizarre display of my undying body. Incorruptible. Like one of the saints my mother prayed to back in our legacy city of Seattle. My body survived three days of death because whatever the ascenders designed me to be, decomposition wasn’t part of the equation. They gave me immortality in a never-aging, immune-to-sickness organic body instead of an enhanced cybernetic one—but I’m obviously not immune to electric gunfire.

  I shrug, hands out. “I haven’t had time to change, Cy.” It’s been minutes—no, maybe longer; time is rushed and fuzzy—since I painted with the reality of my body, making it whole again. Then I slipped into it, opened my eyes to the Resistance’s makeshift prayer hut, and freaked out Kamali. I had to reassure her I hadn’t simply risen like some monster from the grave. Just like I have to do for my disbelieving best friend. “But I’m still me,” I say to him.

  “What? Of course, you are.” The paralysis of horror breaks. He lurches across the tiny room. Kamali releases me for the first time since I’ve come back, but only so Cyrus can grab me into a hug. “Only you would decide to wait three freaking days before bringing yourself back from the dead. What the hell, Eli, we were so…” He squeezes me tighter. “We’d lost you.” It’s a choked whisper, and I feel the weight of it. Three days. Cyrus, Kamali, my mother, Lenora… I’m sure they’ve all been grieving me while my body lay there, unchanging. While people prayed at my feet.

  Cyrus releases me, quickly moving back like he’s not sure I’m still… whatever I am. Prophet. Martyr. Saint? Definitely not that last one. You’re playing with a fire that can burn down whole civilizations, Grayson had warned me.

  And that was before I rose from the dead.

  “Cy, give us a moment.” Kamali’s hand slides back into mine, gripping it.

  “Yeah. I just…” He searches my face like he wants to say something, but the words are escaping him. The door of the mining shack suddenly flies open.

  Miriam freezes on the threshold when she sees me. “Are you kidding me?” She gapes at me, her black hair unbound and wild. The standard Resistance-black shorts she’s wearing reveal her augment legs—one ascender-tech, the other the original from her people, the Makers. And with her augmented mind, she has to grasp all the implications of what I’ve done immediately.

  Cyrus bustles to the door, waving Miriam off. “Eli needs a moment.” For a split second, it looks like she’s having none of that, but a quick glance at Kamali makes Miriam retreat. What? I glimpse the growing crowd outside before Cyrus ushers Miriam out and closes the door behind them.

  Word is spreading.

  Kamali lets out a breath like she’s been holding it, then suddenly her hands are in my hair, and she’s kissing me. It’s short and fierce, and I barely respond before she breaks it and pulls me into a hug instead.

  “Tell me,” she whispers, and it’s half gasp. “I have to know.”

  I have no idea what she means. We’ve barely spoken since I returned. After the initial shock, as soon as people started streaming into the tent, Kamali hauled me away from everyone. As she hustled me through the heavily-wooded camp, gathering shocked stares, she explained this was the Resistance’s northern encampment, sequestered on a small island in a lake in a pre-Singularity Canadian province. Then she dragged me up a steep, rocky trail to the very top of the island and this tiny mining shack. It’s ancient—rotted wooden timbers, four walls and an earthen floor, hundreds of years old and barely standing. I thought she was trying to protect me from the crowds before things got out of hand.

  I should have known it was more than that. “What do you want to know?” I pull back so I can touch the delicate brown skin of her face and gaze in the deep well of her dark eyes. “I’ll tell you anything. You know that, right?”

  She’s holding her breath again. “What did you see?” Her hand reaches up to mine, the one on her cheek, grasping it with that too-hard grip again. “When you were dead, when you were on the other side… did you see God?”

  I frown and open my mouth, then hesitate. So much happened. I can still feel the pieces of me stitching together—it wasn’t just my body that had holes blasted through it. My mind, or maybe my soul, was shattered into a million infinitesimal fragments. And then I came together again. How is on the fuzzy side.

  “It’s complicated,” I say carefully. I knew coming back would change everything, but my chest is suddenly cramped with the possibility that my resurrection might change us—Kamali and me. Because I know she’s a believer. And I’m not. Still. Because there was nothing like her God in that great gray void. Except… something called me back into being. Coherence. That’s what Marcus called it when Lenora’s ascender cognition was shattered, and I had to help bring it back together. But that’s not the same as—

  “Tell me,” Kamali insists, taking both of my hands now and holding them between us. Urgent. Almost feverish with the shine in her eyes and the tight set of her dusty pink lips. “I need to know what you saw, whatever it was. Eli. I need to know.” She glances at the door. There’s an argument raging outside. It doesn’t take a genius to guess it’s about me.

  I frown. “What’s happened while I was gone?” I mean to her. This urgency—there’s something she’s not telling me.

  “You first.” She squeezes my hands to insist. “Everyone else was knocked out when it happened. They said you were the last one standing when Hypatia’s forces found Lenora’s apartment and took everyone down. And when they awoke, she was gone, and you were…” She grits her teeth and says it, “Dead. You were dead, Eli. Lenora insisted on putting your body on display like that in the tent. She said you were designed not to die. But I never thought…” She shakes her head, squeezing h
er eyes shut.

  I pull her back into a hug. “I’m sorry—sorry I was away so long.” It’s just now dawning on me that no one else could know what happened. How Hypatia tricked me into helping her bring back Diocles. That the two most dangerous ascender minds on the planet are now fused into a monstrous whole, supported by the custom bodyform Hypatia built just to hold that expanded cognition. “I need to warn the others. About Hypatia and Diocles—”

  Kamali shrugs her way out of my hug. “We know all about them. That Diocles released himself from storage. That Hypatia and Diocles are now fused into one being. Lenora’s on top of it, as much as she can be. The ascender world is just chaos right now. They’re bringing Diocles’s followers out of storage, too—the ones who went to vapor when he did. They’re gathering support in the ascender world at an insane rate.” She curls up her fists and shakes them at me—she’s not angry, just frustrated. “We’re running out of time, Eli! You need to tell me—what did you see?”

  “I… I don’t understand, but… okay.” I take a breath and try to piece together what she wants. “I used the fugue to access Diocles—he was waiting for a sign, and I guess I was it.”

  “Wait, what? You released Diocles?” She’s horrified, and I guess that’s fair.

  “I didn’t mean to,” I protest. But I know I’ve unleashed a monster. “And I couldn’t stop him—he was far too powerful. When he and Hypatia fused, they blasted through me—through my cognition, or soul, or whatever you want to call it. That sent me out to the void.”

  “Tell me what that’s like.” Her eyes have gone round and luminous.

  “Gray? Empty?” I grimace, but at least she’s not holding the release of Diocles against me. “It’s a place of… non-being.” I really can’t describe it well. “I was blown to pieces, Kamali. It was not a good thing.”

  She frowns. “Then you put yourself back together.”

  “No.” This is hard to admit because I don’t understand it—and I don’t want to give her false hopes. “I mean, I’ve done that before, pulled myself back together, but I was too far gone this time. I don’t think I was even, well, conscious there for a while.” I squint. Even the memories of that time are hazy. “Hypatia-Diocles blasted through me. Then it was like… nothingness for a while. I wasn’t really me if that makes sense.”

  “Because you were in pieces.” She leans back like she’s grappling with the horror.

  “Yeah. I guess. Then something… called my name.” That sounds really weird out loud. “Not like Elijiah Brighton. More like, the thing that I am was called into being.” That’s not any better. “It’s hard to describe.”

  “No, I understand.” She’s scowling now, intensely.

  “You do?” Because I barely understand it.

  “There’s something greater than you,” she says with deadly seriousness. “Greater than everything. And it called you into being. It created you.”

  “I was already created,” I protest.

  “Then it recreated you. Brought you back together.”

  “Kamali, it’s not anything like… it’s not a god summoning me from the void.”

  She nods, but not like she agrees. More like she thinks I’m a child incapable of understanding serious things. Which stings, but she’s not even looking at me now, just blinking and looking past me at nothingness. “What happened next?” she asks. I don’t like the hollowness of her voice—it’s frankly ripping fear through my heart. Because whatever lies outside this creaky, dusty, mold-smelling mining shack, whatever lies ahead of me now that I’m back from the dead, I need her by my side. I wish I could lie to her and pretend the fugue, or the afterlife or whatever, was exactly what she wants—I wish it could be what she needs. But I’m just not capable of lying to her anymore.

  “Kamali,” I say softly.

  Her focus sharpens, and she whips her gaze to me. “Whatever it is, I need to know, Eli.”

  “Why?” Something’s happened. Dread is filling up my chest like I’m drowning.

  “Because I might be going there.”

  “What? What are you saying?” The drowning feeling climbs up to my throat.

  She glares at me. “You first. I need to know everything. Every step of how you came back.” She locks her arms across her chest, and I know that look—I both love that steely determination and really don’t like it when it’s pointed at me.

  “All right.” I glance at the door again because the shouting outside keeps getting louder. We don’t have much time before all this spirals away from me. “I was in the void,” I say, swallowing down my dread and turning back to her. “Once I was, whatever, called into being, I had some time—a lot of time—to ponder just how I got there. What a disaster it was for Hypatia-Diocles to be loosed upon the world. Then there was this horrible ripping pain and…” I cringe at the sudden concern in her eyes. “It wasn’t that bad. But I think that’s when this happened.” I gesture to the charred holes in my ascender-tech shirt.

  She frowns. “You died after you went to the void?”

  “Yup.” I tip my head. “And then I saw Leopold.”

  Her eyes go wide. “So the ascenders…”

  “…have souls. Just like I said.” The tension eases out of my chest. Leopold was somewhat of a leader among the ascenders, but mostly he’s very publicly dead. If I can figure out how to bring Leopold back, proving that ascenders have souls, it might solve everything.

  “You were truly dead then,” Kamali says. “Like Leopold. How did you come back?”

  “Same way I brought you back.” I give her a tight smile. “I just decided to do it.”

  Her eyes light up. “Can you take me there? To the afterlife? With Leopold. Show it to me!” There’s way too much fervor in that request.

  I lean back. “Why?”

  “Can you or can’t you?” she demands.

  “I… don’t know.” Why does Kamali want to go to the afterlife? Does she think she’ll see her god there? I’m not even sure what there means in this context. Kamali’s afterlife was a dancing studio. Leopold’s was a temple. But those were no more real—or any less—than this body I’ve somehow made whole again. To say I understand none of it is a cosmic understatement. I rub a hand across my forehead. “First, I need to figure out if I can bring Leopold back. We have to prove to everyone that ascenders have souls. Then we can talk about—”

  Her shoulders slump. “It doesn’t matter. It’s too late for that.”

  “What do you mean, too late?” The dread surges back. “What’s happened while I was gone?” The way her full lips press tight has me reaching for her, taking her hands in mine again. “Your turn. I need to know what’s going on.”

  Her expression turns soft like she has a million things to tell me, but she has to keep it all locked up for some mysterious reason. She drops her gaze, nods at the floor, then looks up, a shine in her eyes. “You know how I feel about you.”

  My heart skips a beat. “Yeah.”

  “You know that I’ve always believed in you.”

  My heart hammers on my chest. “What are you saying?”

  “We’re running out of time, Eli.” Tears are shimmering in her eyes, but I don’t understand it, and it’s giving me a heart attack.

  “You keep saying that but—”

  “I’m so glad you’re back.” She smiles through the tears. “But it doesn’t matter.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Then the door flies open again, and suddenly the crowd is surging into the shack—no, not a crowd, just a handful of people who’ve had my back through all of this. Miriam, who volunteered to be the Maker’s Offering and super-enhanced her cognition so she could lead her people into a new age for humanity—only to lose nearly all of them when Augustus firebombed Old Portland. Cyrus, my best friend from since we were kids in Seattle, who’s been by my side through all of this, even before I brought him back from the dead. Tristan, a Resistance medic and Kamali’s ex, who annoys the hell out of me, but he’s undeniably loyal to the cause—and has proven he would lay down his life for me. And Grayson, right hand to Commander Astoria, an augment, and a man whose sharp-eyed stare feels like he’s reserving judgment on whether me standing before him is a good thing or perhaps the end of the world.