Chapter 7: Fifth Flux
------------------------------------
Dawn found the Knothole camp a dismal, smouldering place. White smoke rose in streamers from tents and burned grass, and the fire still burned in the Great Forest, sending up clouds of gray. Villagers moved about wearily, soot-smudged and hollow-eyed from lack of sleep. Occasionally a band of exhausted Freedom Fighters staggered out of the woods, and a group of villagers would stride off to take their places among the firefighting lines in the forest.
Knuckles fought the fires the hardest, driven by furious guilt at having started them. He had arrived at nine o'clock the previous night and was still at it, smudged, dirty, and seething. He started backfires and helped drive the largest of the infernos into the Great River. Then he ran and glided here and there, fighting the scattered fires that remained. It only made him angrier when he saw his friends and acquaintances eyeing him with apprehension, as if they expected him to go on another rampage. He was furious with himself, with the fires, and most of all with the Chaos Emeralds.
Late that afternoon he returned to the camp and hunted down Sally. The squirrel was in a hastily-erected shelter, helping administer bandages and liniment to burns, scrapes, and various other minor injuries. When he spoke her name she whirled around, arms up as if to ward off an attacker. "Don't do that," he said, lifting his hands to show he was harmless. "It's me, not a Chaos fiend."
"Oh, I'm sorry," said Sally, straightening up and looking sheepish. "It's just that ..." she trailed off, then began again. "What do you need?"
Knuckles pulled off his left glove and showed her his hand, which by now was one massive blister. "The red emerald is never kind to its user," he said bitterly, as Sally poured lotion into his palm. Sally said nothing, but Knuckles caught her peering at him, as if she expected to see his eyes flash red.
As he rubbed the lotion into his painful burn, wincing, Sally asked, "How did you decharge?"
"Zephyer," said the red echidna. "She turned the Master Emerald on me."
"It's a good thing she did," murmured Sally.
"Yeah it is," said Knuckles, pulling his glove back on and grinding his teeth as the fabric touched his tender skin. "Ironic, isn't it? My own emerald had to stop me."
He strode out of the tent into a thick fog. Surprised, he stopped short and peered around. He could see the sun overhead, a pale white disk, and the light from campfires here and there, but apart from them the world was as white as milk. "What is this, smoke?" he muttered, sniffing. No, it didn't smell like smoke. It smelled damp, like fog off the river in the early morning.
Knuckles moved forward, arms out to keep from knocking into something. Where had a fog come from? Was it something he had caused with his transformation? Then he stopped and stood staring. One of the villagers, a raccoon, was blundering by a few feet away. But as it moved, it turned from a raccoon to a frog to a mink to a heron to a raccoon. Knuckles was astounded, and wondered if exhaustion had addled his senses. "Hey," he called, moving toward the phantom.
The raccoon looked up at him and froze. "What in the ...?" he began, then sprinted off into the swirling white wall. As he went, Knuckles saw him transform several more times.
The echidna stood still and watched other curious villagers pass by, squinting at the fog and calling to each other. But their bodies morphed and changed as if Knuckles were viewing them through a virtual reality device. He was not the only one confused by this illusion. He watched two villagers stare at each other and slowly circle, frightened and half-cautious.
"It's the fog," he muttered, groping his way back to the medical tent. He found it and stuck his head in. "Sally, stay inside, there's this fog that's making everybody hallucin--" He broke off as Sally turned, and instead of the squirrel, there stood the half-robot velociraptor Leviathan, glaring at him with glowing electronic eyes. "Knuckles?" it said in Sally's voice, and stepped forward. As it moved the illusion vanished and Sally reappeared. She was looking at him with her eyebrows furrowed. Knuckles drew a breath to calm himself. "Sally, there's this fog that's making us hallucinate. I don't know where it came from."
She stood looking at him for a long moment, then said, "I don't think it's just outside. You keep changing shapes."
"You do, too."
They stared at each other another few minutes, listening to startled shrieks and exclamations from outside the tent. Then Sally moved forward. "I've got to tell everyone what's happening. And someone needs to tell the firefighters not to worry." She stooped and stepped out of the tent opening, to shrieks and a panicked yell. "This is causing total chaos."
Knuckles gazed after her, his eyes unfocused. If it was causing chaos, could Chaos be causing it? Or more precisely, the Chaos Emeralds? Hadn't Twilight's message said something about colors?
He bolted from the tent. There was a scroll he had seen in the library and partially translated, about the variations within the Chaos Emeralds. He had to get to his island.
* * *
In the Forbidden Zone, Slasher lay curled in a ball with her eyes shut, refusing to look at the deceptions put forth by the fog. Metal Sonic worked amid his instruments, oblivious.
Several hundred miles from Mecha's hideout, Sonic and his human 'captors' finally emerged from their bunker and observed the fog with amazement. Micare produced a bottle, swished it through the air and screwed on the cap, trapping a sample of the mist. "This could be useful," he called to his morphing companions as he disappeared back into the depths of their shelter.
On the outskirts of Riverbase, hidden in a darkened factory, Twilight observed the fog with calm interest. Tails was frightened at first to see the black hedgehog and his velociraptor changing shapes every time they moved, but Twilight assured him it was only an illusion. "This is only another minor flux," said the black hedgehog, inspecting the contraption Tails was building. "It will pass in time. You do good work, Tails."
"It's almost done," replied Tails, warming to the praise, even though it came from an enemy. "All I have to do now is attach this part to the picture tube, and sauter it all together."
"Good!" said Twilight. "It will be done before the final flux, and perhaps it will not be so dangerous as it was before."
Tails watched Twilight's black gloved hands turn the square, delicate mesh of silicon around and around. Hands that knew their way around technology. Their grace and dexterity struck Tails as odd, but he didn't know why.
As Twilight handed the invention back to Tails, their fingers touched, and Tails felt a cold shiver snake down his spine. He turned away and set it down, trying to keep the fur on his back from standing up. There was something fundamentally wrong about Twilight, but it was so subtle the fox couldn't identify it.
The trouble was that Twilight sensed Tails' discomfort. He grinned and knelt in front of Tails, facing him over the table where the fox was working. "You feel it, don't you?" he said quietly. "The aura of Chaos. It pours from my fur. I exhale it. It makes normal people uncomfortable."
He looked Tails in the eye, and Tails' mind tried to comprehend what his gut was screaming. "You ARE Shadow, aren't you?" he said, trying to keep his voice steady.
The black hedgehog smiled a small, twisted smile. "That was my name once. Yes."
When Twilight at last backed off to let Tails work, Tails found his hands were trembling. And still, he did not know why.
* * *
Knuckles hit the Sandopolis library door running. He burst inside in a swirl of mist, slammed the door, and ran for the shelf where he had left the scroll. He snatched it up, dashed to the table and nearly upset it sitting down. He was on the verge of a great discovery, he knew it! Clumsy in his excitement, he dropped his notebooks twice before he got them opened, and tore the scroll unrolling it. Cursing his excitement, he forced himself to calm down and move slower. "Marble Gardens wasn't built in a day," he reminded himself, "and you can't make a great discovery all in a minute."
The words flew under his pencil. Verbs, nouns, proper tense, plural conjugation--he forced himself to think mechanically and not read the things he was translating. He would think about it later. Right now he had to capture it on paper.
The echidna worked for two hours, hardly moving from his position, once in a while unfurling the scroll a little more. He filled page after page of his notebook, writing feverishly, hating to delay long enough to look up a word. He was on a roll now. He had found the information he had been seeking for so long.
At last he reached the closing comments and laid down his pencil. He straightened, stretched, and opened his notebook at the beginning. It was time to read it.
Ten minutes later he left the library, the precious notebook under one arm, and a distracted look in his eyes. But one thing he knew for sure.
They had to find Sonic.
* * *
Zephyer stumbled through the fog, hardly caring that the fires were out, or that the mist changed anything seen through it. She was too emotionally drained to notice anything. All she wanted to do was crawl away and sleep for two years.
The robotized echidna reached the spot where her tent had stood, and stopped. There was nothing left but a mess of burned canvas and poles. Two villagers were making a half-hearted attempt to clean it up, but the fog had distracted all further aid in their area.
Zephyer swayed on her feet. She had stayed in the Hidden Palace for hours, too shell-shocked to leave. Then she had wandered into the crystal caverns, looking for water, but found none drinkable for three miles. By the time she made it back to the cavern with the teleporter lens, she could think of nothing she wanted more than her bed in Knothole.
She thought of it again, among the mess that had been their camp. But she couldn't face the thought of the long trek back to the village. Instead she picked her way back to the closest, unharmed tents, crawled into the nearest one and stretched out on the tarpaulin floor. She didn't think the occupant would mind much, if she explained when they returned ... that was her last thought before sleep claimed her.
The occupant of the tent was off on a mission of his own, informing the firefighting teams that the fog was causing an optical illusion. He was a peregrine falcon, and with Slasher and Tails gone, he was the only Mobian left in Knothole with flight capability.
Tachyon did not care for running errands, not with such heavy fog blanketing the world. His eyes could pick out a sparrow in the grass from two thousand feet, but they could not pierce the mist for more than ten feet. It was the kind of weather he was most uncomfortable in. However, there was one small consolation: people on the ground wouldn't point and wave at him.
Locating the fires was a dangerous business. There were three still burning, and Tachyon flew right over the third one, singeing his belly and wings, and filling his eyes with ash.
Smarting, he flew back to camp. He was too embarrassed to admit to Sally that he had been careless, and flew straight to his tent. He was only singed, he was sure. The worst damage had been the soot flying into his eyes, making them water and sting.
He landed, and holding his wings half open, lifted the tent flap, stepped in and froze. Was that a black robotized cat lying on the floor, waiting for him? He tilted his head and the illusion vanished, revealing Zephyer stretched out on her side, sleeping. Tachyon was irritated. What was she doing here? Especially when he wanted privacy to preen his damaged feathers.
The echidna slept on, and gave no sign of waking. Tachyon didn't have the nerve to wake her up--Zephyer had been known to punch people by reflex if they disturbed her. The falcon eyed her another moment, blinking his third eyelids rapidly. Then he carefully stepped around her and settled down in his 'nest', which was two blankets pulled into a shallow bowl-shape. Keeping one eye on his uninvited guest, he began to preen his feathers with his hooked beak.
He had a few feathers with melted ends, but aside from them he had not been seriously harmed. He plucked the most scorched of his feathers and smoothed the rest, keeping one black eye all the time on Zephyer.
The falcon was working on his right wing and making a faint rustling when Zephyer sighed and opened her eyes. Tachyon folded his wings and looked at her. She lifted her head. "Tachyon? Is this your tent?"
He inclined his head in a slight nod.
"I'm sorry." She sat up, head and shoulders drooping. "My tent's gone."
Tachyon felt sorry for her, which made him feel awkward. He didn't know that she had stopped Knuckles, but he had observed her tarnished, smoke-stained metal body and guessed she had helped fight fires the previous night. But he didn't know what to say, so he remained silent.
Zephyer looked at him another moment, then crawled out of the tent. She paused outside. "Is there anywhere I can get something for burns?"
"Yes," replied Tachyon in a slightly high-pitched voice. "The big tent on the east side."
"Thanks," muttered the echidna. "I think the fog's clearing."
Tachyon listened to her departing footsteps and felt like a heel for no reason.
* * *
Zephyer was still tired, but felt a little refreshed from her nap. Now her face felt numb, and she remembered that Knuckles had burned her when he knocked her down. She plodded toward the big medical tent through patches of clearing mist. A breeze was blowing, rippling tent canvas and sending the fog by in dense clouds. Once in a while a ray of sunlight would slant down, and looking up, Zephyer could see blue sky.
Sally was sitting in a corner, resting, but jumped up when Zephyer came in. "Zeff! You're okay!"
"I think my face is burned," replied the echidna. "Could you put something on it?" She held up her metal hands, which were not suited to rubbing lotion into injured flesh.
The squirrel complied, her hands gentle and swift. When she was finished, Zephyer asked about getting a place to stay, but was interrupted as the door flap was flung aside and Knuckles burst in, dreadlocks flying about him.
"Sally, we've got to find Sonic," he said, then looked at Zephyer. She looked away.
Sally ignored this. "Why? What have you found?"
Knuckles opened his notebook and held it out. Sally took it and began to read, eyebrows furrowed. There was a moment's silence. Zephyer stared at the wall of the tent, or the floor, or a nearby pole, but would not look at Knuckles. He watched her, sensing that she was still angry with him. He figured she would get over it and turned to Sally, whose eyes were widening. "Knuckles ... does this mean ...?"
"We've got to find him within four days," said the echidna. "There's no telling where he is, but wasn't Slasher wearing a communicator?"
"Yes," said Sally. "I've already tried tracking it, and it's out of range."
"Rats." Knuckles bit his lip and looked at the floor, thinking. "Could we send someone to Riverbase? We know he was there last. Maybe he went looking for Tails."
"Maybe." Sally looked dubious. "We only have four days."
Unexpectedly Zephyer spoke up. "Tachyon's fast."
Knuckles and Sally looked at her, but she was looking at Sally, as if Knuckles weren't there. "Tachyon could hunt around and it'd only take him a day or two."
Sally hesitated, then said, "Okay, I'll ask him." She left the tent. Zephyer sideyed Knuckles and did the same, leaving him alone and feeling somewhat silly. After a moment he went after them.
Zephyer fell into step beside Sally as they strode through the camp. "I hope Sonic's okay," Sally said softly to the echidna. "With him missing, it's like my right arm's gone. And Tails, and Slasher ..."
Zephyer looked at her and saw a terrible anxiety in the squirrel's blue eyes that had grown day by day, but was kept masked by Sally's iron self-control. Zephyer was suddenly moved. Here she had been caught up in her own petty troubles, when her friend was suffering. "Can I do anything to help?"
"You already do," said Sally. "You helped organize the camp, and you neutralized Knuckles. I couldn't ask anything more."
They arrived at Tachyon's tent, and Sally patted the top instead of knocking. "Tachyon?"
"Yes?" The falcon's gray-striped head emerged from the door and looked up at them with one black eye.
"I need you to fly to Riverbase and look for Sonic," said Sally. "It's imperative that we find him within four days."
"Very well," said the bird. He withdrew into the tent, and stepped out a moment later, buckling a belt around his middle. Zephyer watched his wingtips bend as he fastened the belt. She knew his wings were more like hands with long, delicate fingers, but it never ceased to amaze her to see how graceful they were.
Tachyon looked up at them. "Is there anywhere I should focus on?"
Sally shook her head. "We don't know where he is. You'll have to comb the whole city."
Tachyon looked at the ground a moment, digesting this. "Affirmative. Goodbye." He walked a little ways past them, opened his wings and fluttered toward the clearing sky.
* * *
"Water vapor," announced Micare.
The blue-haired human was peering at a computer screen over a complicated mass of wires and sharp metal tips that composed a sensor array. In the center of the sensors was a small tube with a sample of the fog in it, which by this time had condensed on the sides. The sensors scanned it and dumped their findings into the network. Micare had been hard at it for an hour.
Sonic had run about in the free air, watching the mist dissipate and gazing longingly down the road, which zigzagged away down the mountain. He was homesick, and worried about Slasher, and Tails, and Twilight, and what had happened to Knuckles. He wanted to break into a run and not stop until he was in Knothole.
But he wanted to see the results of the research team's work, and figured he would hang out until noon. They had agreed to release him, although reluctantly. They viewed him as a valuable find and had plans to use his abilities, but they agreed that he could go home. "But you've got to come back!" insisted Jordan.
Sonic clattered down the metal steps and was watching over Micare's shoulder when he announced that the mist was water vapor. "But there are some peculiarities at the molecular level," he added, half to himself. "The computer's chewing on it."
Andrew appeared and sat down at another console. There was a moment of silence.
"Aha," said Micare, fingers flying over a keyboard. "I knew it. It was triggered by a variance in the Chaos Fields."
"What?" Sonic asked.
Micare glanced at him. "The chaotic wave patterns neared the upper end of their spectrum and caused the molecules near them to vibrate. It probably created fog around the globe."
"Right," said the hedgehog. "At least I got the second half of that. So it was another jump in Chaos energy?"
Micare pulled up a screen with a line chart, which again had jumped off the top and was just descending back toward its normal levels. "Yup."
"Dude, look at this," said Andrew. On his screen was a line chart that measured Chaos Levels over a long period. There were five spikes in it--the recent fluxes--but each time the line descended, it stopped at a higher point. The 'neutral' Chaos Levels were rising.
"Oh my gosh!" said Micare, staring. "Why haven't we seen that before?"
"You were, like, busy with Sonic," replied Andrew, ironically. "And the world's like collapsing, you know?"
"Five," Sonic muttered, drawing their attention. His fists were clenched, blue spines bristling. "There's only two left. I've got to get home." He ran for the stairs.
Micare scrambled after him, but he was not as quick as the hedgehog. "Sonic! Make sure you come back!"
"I will, if the world doesn't end!" Sonic hollered over his shoulder.
He dodged around Jordan at the door of the bunker and bolted down the mountain. His heart was racing. Once the last emerald fluxed, the Chaos Levels would be so high that anything could happen. And what then? What could he do? He had a vague idea of getting Knuckles to use the Master Emerald, or Chaos Controlling somehow.
The point was to get home.
* * *
Slasher was pacing. Three steps forward, turn. Three steps back, turn. With each turn her long tail whipped over Metal Sonic's head, but he paid no attention. He was standing at the far end of the room, downloading a transmission.
Slasher was accustomed to more exercise than she had received in the past three days. Cooped up in the small stone building, the velociraptor had to do something to burn energy that did not involve beating Metal Sonic to scrap against the floor. She wanted out, she wanted more food than the skimpy rations he had been giving her, and she, like Sonic and Tails, was homesick.
Three steps forward, about face, three steps back. One way she faced a star etched into the wall, and the other way she faced a thing like a hash mark. Back and forth, back and forth. With each turn she lowered her tail until it was brushing Metal Sonic's pointed ears. Was he capable of becoming annoyed? If so, at least the results would be interesting.
He lifted his head, and her tail glanced off his face. He looked at her. "Desist. I have received news." He walked past her and flung the door open. "Go."
There was no need to tell her twice. Slasher whisked outside, glanced around the hilltop, then turned inquiringly to Mecha. He was closing and locking the door with careful precision. "Going somewhere?"
"I am leaving this zone," droned the robot. "You may go where you choose. The odds are against your survival."
"Why is that?" asked Slasher, shifting her bandaged wing a little.
Mecha stepped into the open and ignited the jet in his back, lifting a few inches into the air. "The next flux involves electricity," he said. "The Forbidden Zone will be the hardest hit. I would not survive. Goodbye." He kicked off, flew down the hill and across the swamp in a swirl of hot exhaust.
Slasher listened as the screech of his jet dwindled into silence, and glanced at the sun. She would need to travel west, if she remembered her maps correctly.
The raptor leaped down the hill in three bounds, and dashed along the edge of the swamp. She had a long way to go before she would consider herself safe from the flux.
* * *
Riverbase was in shambles. Tachyon flew here and there, once in a while landing in a tree or on a stable rooftop to look around. The city had been devastated by earthquakes. Buildings lay with walls caved in, and some were mountains of rubble. There were apartment buildings with half the walls missing, the rooms inside exposed to the open air. Here and there were little shelters and gatherings of survivors, and teams worked among the rubble, looking for trapped unfortunates. The largest gathering of people was along the river, where water was available.
Tachyon despaired of finding Sonic, but dutifully looked anyway. The falcon was tired, his wings ached, and he was growing hungry. In his heart of hearts he resented being assigned such a mission, but years of training had killed his ability to defy an order. He would do as commanded, but he was unhappy about it.
The sun sank behind the treetops across the river, washing the sky with orange. Tachyon tried to ignore the insistent gnawing in his stomach as he circled an industrial park. The buildings here were intact, but all the factories were shut down, and all their windows were dark.
He landed on a jutting pipe, the silent dusk weighing on his spirits. He was not a social bird, but this kind of solitude, where everyone for miles was suffering, was depressing. He actually missed the cheerful rumble of Knothole.
Tachyon was unclipping the communicator from his belt, wondering if Sally would want him to stay the night, when a light flickered in a factory window thirty feet away. "Someone looking for shelter," he thought.
The light came again, but this time it cast Tails' shadow on the windowpane.
The falcon jumped off his perch and skimmed toward the window. It had a wide ledge which he landed on, and standing to one side, peered in.
* * *
The hanging light above the worktable swung as Twilight brushed past it, the claws on his gloves extended. Tails circled the table, keeping it between them. "I was just looking at the Cyclone, I wasn't doing anything--"
"You were sending a message," hissed the black hedgehog, his eyes dilated in the dim light. "Contacting your friends! SOS, send help!"
"No, I wasn't--"
Twilight jumped over the table and sprang at Tails. They struck the floor with a grunt, and Twilight pressed the flats of his claws into Tails' face. "Don't struggle," he snarled, sitting up. "And don't deny it."
Tails lay still and panting, eyes wide above the gleaming steel. Twilight glared at him with withering scorn, and his mouth worked. "I would kill you if not for ..." He withdrew his claws and pointed at the table, where Tails' invention lay amid a tangle of power cables. "Finish it. If you don't, we die."
"And if I do, I die?" Tails whispered.
A smile stretched the corners of the black hedgehog's mouth. "If I knew how, I would." He stood up and moved away, and Tails shakily picked himself up.
* * *
Tachyon flew to the roof, shaken by what he had seen. His feather-fingers fumbled at the communicator buttons. "Sally," he said quietly, "I've found Tails."
