XVI.


Crouched on its haunches, the smiling entity skulked toward her. Cords trailed a cascade of lucent waves in its wake. Sparks danced along the threads.

He approached her with the fluid grace of a shadow. Neither gravity nor friction exerted force upon him. He moved as though he lacked presence, an ontological impossibility, hardly perceived except at the limits of understanding. Though an utterly inhuman manner of movement, she couldn't deny the deliberate pace suggested intent. Dissonance addled a brain paralyzed cold.

"It's been quite some time." Its voice did not belong to Gordon. Vocal cords did not vibrate to produce sound. "Consider me a friend." It answered a question buried beneath the threshold of conscious intent, one she wasn't aware she'd desired raising. "Some might say your only friend."

Nonetheless, the words probed the folds of her cortex, reaching inside without violating boundaries of flesh and blood. It needn't have touched her to cause deep revulsion to rise to the surface. Reflexively, she turned and tucked into herself, seeking shelter in an unseen womb.

Awful stenches of blood, ash, and spinal fluid invaded her nostrils as it leaned in. She almost expected to find her father lying nearby in gruesome stagnance.

"Tell me." Smoke-hot breath gusted her ear, inducing a bone-deep shudder. "Do you wonder what really happened at Black Mesa?"

Words that were not words but incantations from a black hole, thoughts unthought, notions unbirthed, dim wavelengths of nothing inside the mind, rippled through reality.

words, mere words

She huddled against a wall of pockmarked limestone while sirens bathed them in noise. Crimson beams glistened over a diamonded sea of glass. Empty windows gaped at darkness. Dead static leaked from dead radio attached to dead security officers. Before the corpses lay

a drenched khaki pant with
a foot inside a ribbed dress sock and scuffed brown loafer
a streak dragging away, flooding the grids set into scorched tile

"Let me tell you the tale." Cloying affection swirled a nauseating hive. "Once upon a time, cradled in her father's arms, little Alyx Vance drew her last breath."

Witness the poignant scene: the happy family bound by ruin. Amputee father sits beside departed mother, attempting to jostle life into a motionless bundle. Come on, baby. Wake up.

Amidst the burning smog, a white door slides open. Rays pull and refract into the rectangular monolith. Out pours the light of heaven, purging, blinding, emitting a drone. Whispers woven into the drone unravel at the ends. Those whispers are her father's thoughts.

[This light, it's too bright to be God.]

"When I arrived, the child had perished," it said, "the mind with it. All she left behind, an empty lump of flesh wrapped in a torn coat. I needed to seize the opportunity lest it slip through my fingers."

Eclipsing the overpowering light, a man reaches down and peels back the hood covering the child.

It is unmistakably dead. Delusions have fooled her parents. What they took for their child does not resemble anything close. It is as the creature says: a lump of cooling flesh, slashed beyond recognition. It lacks an ear but bears multiple mouths, each screaming wide.

No, not mouths. Lacerations. Its eyes are sunken hollows beneath charred membranes. It weeps pus.

The child.

The mantle.

Love for this grotesque little larva clenches Eli's heart. He chokes out a gutted scream. Get away from her.

"Your father couldn't fool himself forever. As a matter of fact, when I presented you to him in that smoking, bloody corridor," it said, "he begged me to kill you."

The man returns the child Eli covets: a little girl, who blinks healthy, tearful eyes and screams ripe lungs cleansed of smoke. Its greedy wails spray spores of light he cannot see.

The small seed of horror gestating inside her gave a kick, restoring sensation in her numbed soul. Gordon, not Gordon, smothered her the instant she drew air. A gloved hand clamped around her mouth, killing her cry in utero.

"And then, of course, he attempted the deed himself."

The illusion sputters. At first rocking the precious body close to his chest, Eli wavers. His blind elation evolves from relief to shock, shock to grief. Grief to hate. Hate to despair.

Where is she? Already the door is closing. His shout echoes unheard through the walls of the destroyed Sector H dormitory. Where's Alyx? ...Damn it, what did you do with her? What the hell am I supposed to do with this? Get rid of it! You bastard, the baby wails and thrashes its arms, I want my daughter! Give me back my daughter!

Black Mesa dwindled, along with the truth. The cave with its ring of unconscious bodies resumed its place.

Alyx Vance disappeared beside her mother twenty years ago. What remained, a blank slate for an aggrieved man to chisel his sins for posterity. Beneath her father's kind and gentle demeanor, always, the hatred and love that guarded his secrets. I loved you and I mourned you. And I don't know which is worse.

Had it been a dream, then? One man's bid to deny inevitability? The lambda, the Resistance, Gordon's contract: had he fabricated them to rationalize the senseless?

Around her, darkness laughed. Stupid girl. Your father suffered many nightmares, but only one was born of choice.

Lies.

Whether hand or mind willed it, she didn't know. The former slipped into her boot and curled around a familiar curve.

Vindicate me. Extinguish these lies.

Alyx slaked off the HEV with a shove and brandished the pincer. Let the bastard's amused gaze absorb the glint of the weapon that had lured the terrified animal from Breen's host body, made the human inside taste hell.

"This is what you really want, right?" It turned, wry amusement etching Gordon's features. "What you arranged in Black Mesa." With a spirit as chillingly clear as ice, she poised the tip over her heart. "Let him go." Pushed in until the point sank through the parka's outermost skin, slitting tender down. "Or you lose everything."

Unperturbed in the slightest, it rose, and walked toward the fire. "Of the various species I have encountered, I have noted core characteristics." Emerald radiance blurred its edges. Gordon immolated. Gordon through a stained glass window. Exalted. Untouchable. "They are born, cold, hungry, and screaming, into a world where their suffering engenders no meaning. Rather than endure such an existence, many seek relief. They embrace the end."

The pincer quaked.

"All except one. You do not know how to die."

The light was as holy as it was alien. Heatless like oblivion. Like transcendence.

"It is because you do not know how to die that your kind worships shadows. I knew your Resistance would never come to be without a sacrificial lamb or two. For that role, I could have chosen anyone. You, well. Provided the most convenient means, shall we say.

"To put it in the simplest terms I can: I don't like squandering my investments." Smooth metal nudged her breast. The heart, pumping worthless blood, accelerated at the intrusion. "At Black Mesa, I hoped to purge you of your afflictions. But I see my methods have failed. Instead, you passed your strain onto your neighbor."

Instinct checked her hand, prevented her from carrying out the threat.

The entity huffed a noiseless laugh as she relented her grip. "The flesh is a prison. It craves survival."

tery power is
four p

Reduced to a crawl, she knelt beside Barney's prone form while the entity raised its arms, spreading veined wings of cables and cords. If she couldn't commit the crucial deed, she could at least... At least...

"There is nowhere to run, Miss Vance. You both belong to me," it said, "the organs of my body."

Alyx glanced up with gnashed teeth. Sulfurous hatred trembled to the marrow. The cords that reached for her disintegrated mere inches before her, asps dispelled by fire.

The creature touched the lambda, which throbbed like a luminescent heart.

"Na'thoi," it said, "Opener of the Way. His mind summons you, draws you closer to me." And then it lifted a gloved finger, incriminating her. "Joi'sta. The piece of myself I grafted onto the mind of a dead child. It was you who cried a transgression of Black Mesa. Who tried... " Its smile split Gordon's chapped lips. " ...quelling me."

Silence.

Silence blazed inside the temples of her lungs.


Silence, creature.
Enough of your lies.
Who are you that dares bid me?

Joi'sta.

Liberator.
Redeemer of flesh.
I alone decide judgment.


We who form the Universal Union, who are Enlightened.

Shu'ulathoi.

We observe creation.
Our purpose, to advise.
To contemplate.
We have studied life from the genesis.
Yet mysteries abound.


This planet.
Small, quaint thing.
Rock, water, ozone, molten core.
Green life. Evolution. Death. Renewal.
Entropy in motion. Spinning along the rim. Toward uncertainty. Toward singularity.
Creation left to grow unfettered.
Our innumerable eyes observed without desire for intercession.
Only you glimpsed its dangers.


Once more, you summoned our counsel.
Behold this crude temple.

Black Mesa.

Where humans probe the edges of what they cannot understand.
They strive to reach through the borderworld and touch us, the Enlightened, we who observe and fathom.
Far too dangerous to permit them contact.
We must inoculate ourselves before we are contaminated.
Yourself afflicted, you proposed this.
Your bright intent masked your dark heart.
And so we agreed.


We fashioned you a mantle of human flesh.
Your purpose: cauterize the wounds in the borderworld.
Deliver the crystal unto the idolatrous temple.
Destroy Black Mesa.
Isolate them.
Teach humanity the lessons of the flesh. The lessons of misery.
Purge and sanctify.
Only then shall they know peace.


I do not know why the madness chose you.
Only that it consumed you.
You fell ill.
You hungered.
You devoured us.

Joi'sta and na'thoi.
Redeemer and Opener.

Subsumed into your vile, writhing flesh.
Cut it down.
Cauterize.
Brand its eyes so that it may not seek more prey.
Futile. Death refused us. We could not be extricated.
You are us and we are you.
Organs of an ailing body.
Our suffering, endless.
It is not without purpose.


Black Mesa.
Tragedy. Waste. Exploitation.
A trick you played for power.

"That will not suffice us."

More.

"The borderworld, Xen, is in our control for the time being, thanks to you."

The lies you fed them.
Speaking for us. As us.
Lulling Freeman to sleep inside your cradle of madness.
He slumbered human and awakened the Opener.


We corrected you.
Your lies and deceit.
Tore your treacherous mind asunder and scattered the pieces.
We killed your mantle to entrap the disease inside.
Forced your consciousness to grow in the synapses extinguished within.
To suffer its pains.
Not for punishment. Not for humiliation.
To teach you what you had forgotten.
What mortal flesh endures.

But your resistance was great.
Your rage, even greater.
Thoughts of revenge sank you deeper into madness.
Almost human, your nightmares.


Your darkness thrived.
In darkness, dreams.
Through them, you escaped.


You gathered minds.
At Black Mesa, you chose the child's father.
Binding him.
Binding her.
Binding me.
Binding Freeman.
Binding Kleiner.
On and on.


Remember.
Human beings cannot be Enlightened.
Wallace Breen.

Unnatural.

Let us consider the inverse.
An Enlightened, choosing human flesh.
Why?

It was a necessary sacrifice.


Witness my mantle.
Fragile. Dangerous.
To grant it life, I have forsaken all else.
She will deliver judgment.


Heed me, Alyx Vance.
Freeman has surrendered his body.
The exogen parades it before us.
A threat to quell our thoughts.
A weapon to silence our tongues.

Perform the ritual.
Go to the palace.
Show them what has happened.
Seize the vessel.
Drive it into his heart.
Avenge your father. Grant us freedom.
Do this, and Black Mesa is no more.


We who constitute the Universal Union. Minds linked in Enlightenment.

Shu'ulathoi.

We have no use for this disease.
Return the Opener to his flesh, or suffer by my hand.


"Yeah," she whispered. "I remember."

attery power is
three

Lethal intent brimming in her heart, she snatched the pincer again. But a bright stab, more excruciating than the rest, thundered through her skull. She screamed the same instant the thing masquerading as Gordon staggered. The light surrounding them evacuated the cave at once, leaving only darkness.

"L'iir." Luther opened sky-blue eyes. "Most unwise."

The entity dissolved into smoke before he dealt a fatal strike. His swipe gouged a scar of clarity in the mist. Growling at the cowardice, he ran over and steaded Alyx on her feet. "Hurry. We must find Freeman."


I'm afraid our time is coming to an end.

And to think, I had begun to rather enjoy working with you.

You know what they say about all good things, however. Surely I needn't repeat myself.

Joi'sta cannot resist my call. It will kill its host and shed the trappings of mortal flesh.

Nothing good can come of this senseless flailing about.

One way or another, she will die.


[alyx.]

[help.]


Do not interrupt me again, Doctor Freeman.

I believe you would very much... regret... a lesson in courtesy.