Brink’s End: The Complete Series

By Odette C. Bell

Harvey Brink has one thing going for him. He never gives up. Which is exactly what the Supreme Outer Guardian, Commander Frost, needs now.
Because hell is on its way.
When she receives a warning that a dangerous piece of technology has been stolen by her greatest enemy, the Underside, she hopes she has time. She doesn’t. The Underside have already deployed it, and they’re coming for her.
But Harvey stands in their way. A self-processed cold-hearted soldier, all he wants to do is spend time in his mech, detached from reality and far away from people. When an accident sends him halfway across the multiverse and deposits him at the feet of the mysterious Rae, Harvey’s solitude ends. He and Rae are thrust headfirst into a fight for everything. With no time to breathe, they’ll be pushed from planet to planet as they unravel the Underside’s dangerous new operation.
To win, they’ll need to find out who they are, what they want, and most importantly, what can tie them together before they’re broken apart for good.
...
Brink’s End follows a cold-hearted mech-pilot and a mysterious alien fighting to stop an ancient enemy from rising. If you love your space operas with action, heart, and a splash of romance, grab Brink’s End: The Complete Series today and soar free with an Odette C. Bell series.
Brink’s End is the 4th Supreme Outer Guardian series. A massive, exciting, and heroic sci-fi world where the day is always saved and hearts are always won, each series can be read separately, so plunge in today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Odette C. Bell
• Release date: May 4, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224397662

Book preview

Prologue

Harvey

He wasn’t dead.

Wasn’t dead.

But hell was he close.

As Harvey lay on the floor of the dark cave and his blood seeped out of the fatal wound to his neck, his mind tried to shut down. Blackness tried to encroach on his vision, tried to swallow him whole.

Let it come.

It couldn’t take him anywhere his hard life hadn’t already dragged him.

But then she’d come along. And the thought of her was the only reason Harvey pushed against the pain and blood loss and shoved a hand out.

It was his right hand, the only one he had left. It moved all of a centimeter, then another, then another still. It didn’t matter how much energy he had to pull out of his dying heart – he pulled it and more.

He had to… had to get to her.

Another wave of blackness assailed him just like a right hook.

He rolled with it, because when had Harvey Brink ever stopped rolling with the punches? They’d taken him across the multiverse and further. They’d delivered him to the foot of the greatest power ever. Then they’d almost killed him.

And now he had one chance. To move. Now. While he still had the blood, the opportunity, the time. Because if he didn’t get to her soon, she’d die.

He… couldn’t let that happen.

Despite the odds as they climbed his back and sank their fangs into his already wounded neck, Harvey Brink slammed a blood-covered hand down on the black cave floor beneath him. And he rose.

It felt like he had the weight of the universe – no, the multiverse – on his shoulders. And he did. The whole freaking multiverse with every Guardian, every world, and every future trembling in his shaking grip.

Harvey could have fallen over; he wouldn’t let himself.

As he shoved forward, he picked up a chunk of abandoned armor beside him, the fingers of his remaining hand clutching it like it was his only lifeline.

Without even looking down at the rudimentary tech that was lightyears behind the usual gear he used, he started to hack into its comms module. He accessed the permissions codes. It took him 50 seconds. Which was the same amount of time it took him to lug his broken body over to the crushed rocks 20 meters in front of him.

Blood slid out from his neck, from the stump of his right arm, from his lips and nose. He didn’t wipe it off and never would.

Because that would slow him down.

And guess what? Harvey had been taken up to the brink and pushed off.

But he was back. Because the multiverse would have to try harder – much harder – to stop Harvey Brink from fighting back. Not when he had someone to save.

Chapter 1

8 hours earlier

Harvey Brink

We can play that kind of game if you want. But I promise you one thing. You won’t win. Because nothing can ever beat me. Harvey pressed closer to the controls of his mech suit. It was such a pathetic name for something so epic.

He hadn’t created anything, either the name or the suit.

The name came from the Supreme Outer Guardians – a protective force he was a member of. The suit? It came from an ancient civilization that had seeded the multiverse so long ago, not only were they forgotten, but pretty much every single thing they’d touched had already disappeared. Aside from the occasional obelisk with a hidden language no one could decipher, they’d only left these suits.

A handful of them.

That’s all the Supreme Guardians had. Which meant only a handful of people could pilot them. You had to be dedicated, tough, and ultimately, someone who could withstand one thing. Being alone.

And Harvey was born to be alone.

A man who singularly hated company, he much preferred to press closer to the controls of his mech, let out a tight hiss, and meld with it.

Outside of the almost perfect integrated screen at the front of the mech, he could practically taste space. He was out in the depths of the twisted fabric between the multiverse. To be between something, there has to be something else, right? So it was between the multiverse and what?

Good question.

You’d think there’d be no more questions that hadn’t been answered. The Supreme Outer Guardians were one of the greatest forces to ever have existed. And they worked for the greatest force, hands down. The Higher-Ups.

But Harvey knew there’d always be mysteries. That was the point of life.

You got judged on how you dealt with them.

And he knew one way.

Give them hell, he said, grunting as he mentally integrated with the controls of the mech suit. It was a lot like integrating with his own hands. If he had another set just outside of his real hands, big, hard, impossible to break, and impossible to stop once they started going.

In front of him, in the black pall of darkness, he saw a spark.

Gritting his teeth and grinding them hard, he watched it flash across the screen from left to right. It moved as if space was no impediment to it. To be fair, there weren’t the same physical laws out there that there were, say, on a gravity-ridden planet.

In fact, if you knew how to bend reality to your will, you could pretty much do what you wanted. But if you knew how to do that, you needed to be careful that someone else didn’t come along and bend it right back.

Now, Harvey roared.

He snapped forward.

The cockpit moved with him, though it was rich to call it a cockpit. He was practically pressed up against the screen. There were really only about 10 centimeters between him and the flex glass. It moved around, not like a hologram, but like matter that understood itself and understood precisely what it wanted to be in the moment.

As for the controls, while his hands were technically around them, that was just because it was easier to use them through his hands. They were connected to his mind and always would be. But good mech pilots understood that flying one of these things had to be body-based.

Humans had spent countless millennia growing up in their bodies, countless millennia controlling the world through them, and it was simply quicker to follow those deep evolutionary grooves.

The spark suddenly jerked wildly toward him. He saw what it was.

Up close, for a flash, he swore it looked a lot like his own mech suit.

Like a chunky but sleek robot from the outside without a face, with nothing more than a blank helmet where a face should be.

It was almost like a mirror someone had thrown a rag over. You knew the mirror was there – you just couldn’t see your reflection. And why the hell did Harvey spend so much time describing such an insignificant part of the mech? Because who cared if it had features? The only defining factor was its power. Was the sheer force that rippled over his knuckles, into the mech, and down into the robot’s hand.

It thrust forward.

The other spark didn’t look like a mech anymore.

And to be fair, it probably had never looked like a mech. This wasn’t the first time that Harvey had claimed the sparks out there, or the Zarpacs, their technical name, could produce mechs, may even be mechs underneath. None of the other pilots agreed with him.

Hell, his commanding officer – not that he ever saw her – certainly didn’t agree with him.

Because if the sparks were mechs, if they had a build similar to the mech that Harvey flew, what if they were the same damn thing?

You know what happens when you throw a rag over a mirror? You lose the ability to see what’s really there.

If you can’t see what’s there, if you’re really unlucky, you’ll get turned around and start fighting yourself in the dark.

Harvey… look, it was an unfounded assumption, one he couldn’t go into right now, because that spark was here to play.

It rammed into the chest of the mech, and it spun backward through the black, thankless void.

What had Harvey told you? That if you knew what you were doing and you were brave, you could alter the physical laws of the space between the multiverse.

But you had to know what you were doing, and you had to keep knowing what you were doing, because even a second of doubt would tie a noose around your neck and pull.

He shoved forward, sweat sliding down the center of his chin as he grabbed the two moldable hand units that helped him control the mech.

It was essentially mapped to his entire body. But he knew from experience that he was a better pilot when he had something to squeeze, something to punch and pummel. And right now, as he forced his hands forward, he wrapped them around the spark just before it manifested. This time it didn’t look like a mech. This time, it just looked like a twisting white shape, kind of like an embryo, but not of a solid being – of an idea. Confused? Yeah, that was the point.

And it was why only a few people could become mech pilots long-term. Everyone else couldn’t hack the changeability, the sheer ferocity, the sense that you were right there on the edge. Of what? Of the known multiverse? Worse. The edge of imagination and reality. You really didn’t want to fall too far into either side. Fall too far into reality, and you’d lose all creativity and feel like a speck of space dust against the great multiverse. What if you fell too far into imagination, though? Harvey would leave that one up to you to envision.

He twisted.

That white embryonic smear suddenly formed a face. A thousand faces. They fractured backward, to the side, up, down, you name it. There were no other objects out in this void. There was nothing to orient to. And there was nothing to stop that face from contorting and doing whatever it pleased until finally it formed one large mouth long enough to sneer right at him.

It only produced one eye. It only needed to stare at him for one second to reinforce that sneer was for him and that the deadly promise behind the twisted lips would soon come true.

Harvey had told you there was nothing out here. Until there was. Until the Zarpac decided it was time to play dirty.

It broke off a part of itself. That part suddenly became a platform right underneath its feet.

If you were used to ordinary space battles between ships, between explicable things like people, guns, and high-energy lasers – then turn away.

This was about to get trippy real fast.

Did Harvey turn away?

He hadn’t turned away ever since he’d been given his first mech. When he’d slid his hand down it in the armory of one of the main Supreme Outer Guardian Stations, he’d felt himself connecting to something. For the first time in his life.

You needed to understand that, so he had to repeat it.

Harvey had never connected to a damn thing. An orphan who’d never known his parents, he’d grown up on his own, on the streets, on a world he could barely remember the name of. When the Guardians had found him, had he finally found his family? No, he’d found a job, something steady, something to keep a roof over his head, or at least a futuristic station.

The Guardians took suitable candidates from around the worlds of the universes. And again, he needed to slow down to emphasize that point. The Supreme Outer Guardians protected the multiverse.

They had to go into every single universe whenever there was trouble, of the universal kind at least, clean it out, and fight for peace.

That did not mean they went in and saved every single twisted world from its problems. The Supreme Outer Guardians were only there to protect the universes from one another. When some warring entity from one universe spilled into some other universe, the Guardians were there to stop them.

They needed a continuous, steady stream of soldiers. They found suitable candidates along the way, people no one would miss, people who’d always felt themselves different and just needed a chance to prove it.

They’d found Harvey.

But he’d never found a family in them; he’d never found anything he wanted, anything he could connect to until he’d found this mech.

Do you know what he called it? George.

Stupid, ha?

George had been the name of an old faithful dog. Or at least Harvey thought that was the case. He couldn’t remember most of his memories from his original life. He recalled the dog, a girl he’d once traveled with, and the endless fight, but nothing else.

Because guess what? When you were like Harvey – untethered and just looking for a reason to fight – memories were pointless. You just needed battles. And sooner rather than later, you’d always find your way back to them. Just as he did now.

As that Zarpac created a platform out of its own frigging body underneath him, Harvey closed his eyes for a flash of a second so small, nothing outside of him would even be able to record it. Then he opened them. They sprang wide, and that bead of sweat shivering on the tip of his brow soon splashed onto his collar.

He tilted forward with all of his body. He could move inside the mech. He wouldn’t sail out of the front or the back; he could twist and dance, punch and slide as much as he pleased. The mech would always faithfully move with him, and the tiny cockpit would resort to help him to complete whatever move he wanted.

Now he pitched forward with all his might. If he didn’t have the mech, he would’ve looked like he was swan-diving into the Zarpac. And it was just in time.

What had he told you? What did he keep telling you? In this between-space if you knew what you were doing, you could control it, and trust him, the Zarpac knew precisely what it was doing.

There shouldn’t be any sound out there; there was a void, and it should prevent sound from moving.

The mech still picked up and faithfully recreated the sound of stacking platforms. It was like a team of construction workers were fastidiously and feverishly building something.

But it was all just the Zarpac’s body resorting. The next thing Harvey knew, he landed on a platform just as white pillars started to pull themselves out of it. They created this mazelike vertical pattern.

The Zarpac’s true body was above, and now Harvey was all the way below.

He yanked the head of the mech up and stared.

Different data streams appeared over the screen right in front of his face.

When you were first given mechs, though it was a privilege that had only happened to a handful of Supreme Outer Guardians ever, the first test was being able to understand what it was trying to tell you, was being able to parse the information it bombarded you with.

Most seasoned Supreme Outer Guardians couldn’t even spend a second inside a mech. The mech would reject them. If that didn’t happen, the data would.

Harvey couldn’t explain it. He’d never been good with data himself. He wasn’t a scientist, had never been anything more than a soldier – and that was a glorified title, frankly. Because he was just a man who liked punching things.

His point was that he shouldn’t be able to withstand the information the mech kept throwing at him, but he could. And more. Because the second he’d touched George, the second he’d seen this mech and climbed inside, everything had changed.

He’d found his anchor, his home.

And he’d never let anyone take it from him.

If Frost understood that was the real reason he was fighting for the Supreme Outer Guardians, she’d wipe his memories, chuck him down on some random backwater planet, and never have anything to do with him again.

In other words, she’d seal him away from her precious mech.

And he would never, ever let that happen.

Harvey could’ve leapt up the different pillars. There was an easier way to fight.

Pulling his left hand up and bracing it underneath the elbow, he started firing connected blasts. Now, what the heck were connected blasts? Every single high-yield energy bolt was connected to every other one. Until they discharged into the enemy, they could move around and connect back to themselves, virtually creating whatever kind of weapon they wanted. Need a light whip? All they had to do was glue themselves together. Prefer a sword? They could do that, too. And that’s exactly what Harvey created. With five repetitive blasts, he created a line of fire, then reached in, grabbed the middle of it, and created a double sword.

He whipped it around, then threw it toward the Zarpac.

It was just as the Zarpac paused, created another mouth, and grinned again.

He could see how ordinary mech pilots might be thrown by a grin like that – Hell, ordinary Supreme Outer Guardians, too. No matter how seasoned they were, they would never have seen a smile that unhinged, that… knowing.

You might not think unhinged and knowing should occur in the same sentence. It really depended on what kind of caliber of enemy you fought.

If you asked Harvey, there was really only one lesson you needed to master to understand the multiverse. The folks out there weren’t the same as you. Maybe they could say hello; maybe they could lift a hand and rather than kill you, shake your own hand. But inside, they were still different.

They lived by a different set of rules, and ultimately, they all wanted different things.

Harvey had never made the jump to the moral conclusion that meant you couldn’t judge others.

Because he wasn’t here to judge – he was here to kill.

If this Zarpac managed to get out of the between space and onto one of the stations, it could do a hell of a lot of damage before it was stopped. The stations were already embattled. These past five years had upended Supreme Outer Guardian history. After centuries of relative peace, there were battles almost monthly. A shady force called the Underside – a fractional group of the Higher-Ups – was sowing chaos throughout the multiverse.

The one thing you needed to understand the Higher-Ups was a single word. Gods.

It wasn’t a word that the Supreme Outer Guardians were allowed to use. But after your first introduction to a Higher-Up, it was a word that would fill your head and rattle around until it blasted through your neurons and out the other side. They were different, untouchable, almost unkillable.

They had so much power in their forms, they made ordinary organisms look like nothing more than ants compared to an entire civilization.

The Underside was a group of those gods. If the theories Harvey had heard were anything to go by, they wanted to drag the entire multiverse – with every universe and world within – back to a time of chaos before everything had organized itself.

So the stakes were pretty epic, ha?

So he should just concentrate on the battle, ha? He could save the Guardians, giving them a better chance to fight the Underside – if Harvey just stopped this Zarpac.

So he would stop it.

He leapt up one of the levels of pillars. But the pillars were ultimately part of the Zarpac. They suddenly twisted, turning into flexible snakes as they wrapped around his ankles. He didn’t even grunt as he caught his double-sided blade and twisted it to the left and the right. It would’ve looked like holding the heart of a thousand stars. The kind of power that pulsed in the tip of the sword couldn’t be matched, and the pillars certainly couldn’t withstand it. He sliced right through them, twisted his blade again, then threw it once more.

It always returned to his hand like a faithful thunderbolt.

Who was that human god? Frost was a human, and Harvey had picked up a book on her world’s mythologies. The god he was thinking of was Zeus, right? He had a thunderbolt that, if he threw it, would always return to his hand. And that’s precisely what the sword felt like.

Harvey had to be careful, always had to be careful when thinking like this. It didn’t return to his hand; it returned to the mech’s hand.

And Harvey, ultimately, was nothing more than a small, squidgy, softhearted organism occupying something far, far greater.

As he threw the sword, it swung through several pillars, cutting them right at the base and stopping whatever process was helping them transform.

It was almost beautiful to watch as they shattered.

It looked like someone had thrown sparking confetti everywhere, and they’d set fire to it with miniature firecrackers. What was really beautiful was the way the Zarpac screamed approximately two seconds later. Throaty and raw, it made it feel as if the beast was finally appreciating that it couldn’t run forever. It could keep changing its forms, but at some point, it would have to stick with one. And when it did, Harvey would blast right through it.

His sword returned to his hand. The mech’s shoulder clunked back, but honestly, it didn’t need to.

These mechs almost had no limits.

The Supreme Outer Guardians only had five as far as he knew.

If you had 100, no, a thousand, you could take on the Underside. Hell, you could take on the Higher-Ups.

Each one of these mechs was more powerful than an entire epic civilization’s army. Harvey wasn’t talking about the civilization of some backwater planet like the one he’d come from. He meant the large civilizations, the ones that knew about the multiverse, the ones that tried to infect other universes, tried to take resources like a neighbor slipping their hand in through your window right to your kitchen cupboard.

The first time you became a mech pilot, you were told not to let it go to your head. You were advised to maintain your sense of proportionality, to understand you were still just a pilot who ultimately worked for the Supreme Guardians.

Harvey had obviously never learned that lesson.

And maybe that was the only reason he could do this, the only reason he could truly connect to his mech, even as the Zarpac understood things were getting desperate. And you really didn’t need to be next to a desperate Zarpac when they understood it was time to fight or die.

The creature suddenly slammed its hands on its thighs and screamed. To do that, it needed to create thighs, and it did. They were these spindly whiplike crackling lines of flesh. It took half a second until they solidified into something the creature could clutch. Then its clawlike appendages pierced them and held on as it screamed. Each one of its thousand different faces screamed with it, and they all coalesced to form snapping lips as they cracked over its teeth. That shriek could’ve ripped right through a Supreme Outer Guardian station. Hell, it could’ve probably cracked right through one of the Higher-Ups.

It was filled not just with anguish but with the kind of hatred that said it would get revenge.

Harvey was well-placed to understand an emotion like that. It was the same hatred he’d been running on for years.

He had a moment where he just made eye contact with the Zarpac, steady and true. He wondered if the Zarpac knew that he was staring at it, because for a second, all of its different eyes aligned, creating one seriously knowing, direct gaze.

Harvey just stared right down the middle of it, then shot forward.

He fired five blasts with his left hand, grabbed the center one, and turned it into another double sword.

Now he had two, and he knew exactly how to use them. He spun them around his body from the left to right, sweeping them over his head and underneath his feet. He cut through every single pillar. They were ultimately strands that kept the Zarpac’s body cohesive, and it was like taking a rotary blade to a tapestry. One that could scream. One that meant it.

And the Zarpac shrieked.

Harvey finally reached it. He leapt right up off the top pillar.

Lord knows what this fight would look like from the outside. Because from the outside there was nothing but the black void of between space.

Nothing but the black void punctuated by this strange crumbling house. And atop, a creature that was finally about to meet its maker.

Harvey leapt into the air.

His mech started to glow. Usually it was nothing more than midnight blue-black with white and green accents. Now each one of those accents lit up. It looked like some fine film of bioluminescence on an ocean. One that was only just getting started. With a flicker here and a flicker there, it began to glow, but then in a rush, the entire ocean was engulfed by it.

The mech glowed from head to foot, the power concentrating in both of those double blades. Harvey shoved them both down. Right into the mouth of the creature just as it opened wide to scream one last time.

There was a moment, just a moment where it felt as if the creature was terrified.

If something can be terrified, it can change, grow, and adapt. If something can know fear, it can know the opposite, too.

But even Harvey didn’t know the opposite.

He didn’t pause, didn’t flinch, just dispatched his target. Because that’s what Harvey would do. Until the end. But none of us can really know what will happen in the end. Until it reaches out, grabs our hearts, and pulls.

Chapter 2

Rae

I’ll go get some food now, Rae said with a smile.

It flickered over her lips and remained. She’d never met a smile that disappeared from her mouth fast.

Because smiles to Rae were everything.

They had to be. Over her checkered life, she’d lost most other things.

She twisted, quickly spinning through the thick crowd of the marketplace.

Beyond, she heard the gulls. She watched them sweep into the air over the side of the rusted brown metal sea wall. The yellow, brilliant blue-flecked wings looked like flowers that had just suddenly burst up into the sky. Almost everyone else thought they were pests. And they were. They were constantly going after the city’s remaining food stocks.

She still thought they were beautiful.

Because you had to find beauty where you could, smiles, too. Trust Rae – they wouldn’t last otherwise.

She twisted to the side of one of the hawkers. She could see from the guy’s harrowed face and the tattoos up the left side of his temple that he was a refugee.

Almost 60 percent of the people in the market were refugees. She was one of them, too.

That’s what happened when you took a world like this, took it, and you strangled it with civil war after civil war.

There’d been a time, not so long ago, when she hadn’t known anything about politics. She’d known nothing about much. She’d lived in a stone cloister on a lonely hilltop with her only friend – a small drone called Larry.

Then the war had finally come to her cloister. And Rae’s loneliness had ended.

At the point of a sword.

Now, she could see Larry soaring above. He never got far from her; it wasn’t in his programming, apparently.

She couldn’t remember a time without Larry. He’d always been there. Her only friend, her surrogate father, her accomplice, everything a growing mind would need. Except For touch, of course.

Now Larry darted out of the way of the gulls. And it was just in time.

The birds weren’t stupid. Not anymore. They’d formed a collective long ago, having to adapt to this world’s ever-changing circumstances if they wanted to live.

They could deploy connected attacks if they wanted to, and the gulls at the front suddenly did.

They swept toward Larry.

They created electrical charges out of the two small proboscises on their beaks.

The attack soared toward Larry, but he darted to the left, flew down beside one of the defensive towers at the front of the market, and hovered low to the ground.

She smiled.

Larry could get himself out of anything.

And he’d always be there to save Rae, right?

It depended.

Larry had been the one to stop the soldiers from killing her when they found her cloister. He’d been the one to find her this place.

They’d gone through plenty of other refugee camps, but Larry hadn’t liked them.

Rae hadn’t liked them either. One of the things about living alone all of her life was that she hadn’t been prepared for one thing. Collective desperation.

She’d lived in her head, playing through the stone encampments of her shrine.

Then she’d met death, theft, brutality, and all of the other dark cousins of those emotions.

In other words, she’d met the real world.

Had it destroyed her?

No.

Had it changed her?

That depended.

Even as her sole friend in the world was almost attacked by those seagulls, she still fixed a smile on her face as she watched their sheer serenity.

She ran around the market.

It was almost rich to call it a market; it was a fraction of the size of some of the old market cities not far from this location.

Larry was loaded with an incredible amount of information. Rae had absorbed a lot of it.

When you’re alone with no other company, there’s almost nothing your brain won’t do to get stimulation. Fortunately her form of stimulation had been information.

She’d inhaled every single fact about this world that she could.

She knew every single large city, every market, almost every borough.

That’s why she understood the market behind her was less of a market and more of a ragtag collection of stalls. Because what did a bunch of downtrodden refugees have to sell one another but the same dead stare, the same dull despair, the same drudgery, day in and day out?

As she shifted to the side slightly, her shoulder banged a stand of scarves.

The brightly colored but stained fabric fluttered in the wind.

It brought the scent of the sea from outside. There was something laced across it.

Poison.

It was the same poison that now infected this entire planet. In a decade or two, it would choke it into nothingness.

From the defensive towers above, she heard an alarm.

The refugee encampment was built, not on the land, but on reclaimed cargo cruisers. They’d been lashed together and anchored deep into the ground below the ocean until they could withstand even the greatest tropical cyclone.

It was one of the few independent refugee camps. One of the few that had the resources to look after itself.

But it needed stability. It needed fresh water. And it needed to fend off constant attacks from the pollution beyond its rusted walls.

She was making it sound like the pollution was alive, like it had a mind of its own.

In a way, it did.

At some point years ago, a group of scientists had found out the principles governing biological organization, then discovered the means to rewrite those rules in the quantum realm. Now anything that was alive or was made out of a sufficient amount of biological material could reorganize into something more. Hence the fact the gulls had formed their own collective and now had the ability to generate, store, and fire electrical charges.

In the space of five years, everything had changed around the globe.

And now there was this.

The constant pressure, the pollution rising up right out of the ocean like a specter, and the daily fights.

There was a different alarm. It split across the market from above. Tall, rusted iron towers protected this space on three sides, and the most prominent one right in front of her suddenly sounded the alarm louder.

The large klaxon above it began to flash.

It was a warning that the pollution was coming for them. Again.

Rae didn’t understand the specifics of quantum biology, just that the scientists of her world had found some kind of principle that could change everything. It had taken a relatively simplistic global civilization, one of limited wealth but of stable peace, and turned it into a global war instead.

She still didn’t understand how something like this could have occurred so fast. How could a civilization go from being simple to so very sophisticated that in one single day, it could actually control the biological principles every single entity was created on?

She’d never find out her answer.

Likely, she’d live out the next decade of her life in this refugee camp until the pollution got too smart, until it came for them all.

But do you know what Rae didn’t do? Stop smiling.

Because that was her last haven, the one thing that she had taught herself since she’d woken up in that cloister as a child.

It was her anchor.

And she fixed it on her lips as she darted to the left.

Several heavily armored soldiers jumped down from the primary security tower. They wore mishmashes of armor. It was stuff that had been reclaimed, stolen from other refugee groups, and just cobbled together from refuse plucked from the ocean.

It made it look as if they were sea creatures themselves, like they were hermit crabs that had desperately grabbed every single shell fragment they could until finally they’d found themselves a home.

The guy at the front dragged a large turret gun with him.

It clattered on wheels.

He didn’t have the strength to carry it, and he wouldn’t want to get too close anyway. Because the bullets were made out of small, refined chunks of the same pollution cloud that was about to attack them. And speaking of that, Rae spun to the side.

She jerked her head up, and finally she saw something rising up over the protection of the main tower beyond.

What had she told you about the pollution? It had grouped together until it had formed some kind of collective.

She’d forgotten to tell you that it had one purpose. To destroy every single living thing it could, break it down into smaller chunks, and reabsorb it back into its body.

Her world had put that pollution in the ocean in the first place. Now the pollution would put itself in everyone else until they too were poisoned to death.

As always happened when she faced that cloud, she had a moment.

Her stomach sucked in then lurched back. She stared at the cloud and realized this shouldn’t have happened.

Her people should never have been able to understand the very governing principles of biology, then reach down to the quantum level to reprogram them.

It was more than an accident. It was more than a mistake. It was like someone had set them up—

Larry suddenly swept to the side, collected her shoulder, and shoved her against the wall.

It was just as one of the soldiers grunted at her, Get inside if you don’t want to turn into pollution mincemeat.

The market scattered.

Some of the more desperate sellers tried to collect their scarves and trinkets, old bottles, and reclaimed machines.

One guy doubled down on his sack, throwing everything into it as fast as possible. It was even as the turret was deployed. What had she told you about that? It had refined chunks of pollution for bullets. Because they’d long ago discovered that the best way to fight the collective pollution was to take chunks of it, alter them, reprogram their organizing principles, then shove them back down the collective pollution’s throat.

To do that, however, they needed very sophisticated gear.

This refugee group only had one machine capable of reprogramming biological principles.

If it was ever destroyed, this place would go a second later.

Larry shoved Rae harder.

A door opened behind her just as another soldier bolted through it. She rolled past the guy because she didn’t have any choice. Larry flew into her arms and pushed her backward. The next thing she knew, she fell hard against an old, rickety set of metal steps.

The soldier didn’t bother to close the door behind him. Which meant Rae saw the moment that the pollution splashed down into the center of the market. That guy from before, the guy who’d been so desperate that he couldn’t possibly let his sack go, was just destroyed.

Destroyed wasn’t even the right word. He was taken. He was changed on the cellular level. Then he was reabsorbed.

It wasn’t as harrowing as watching someone be completely eaten up in front of her eyes. There was no blood – because the pollution wouldn’t waste that.

Rae trembled down to her knees just as Larry twisted around, smashed into the door, closed it, and created a very small shield.

It was just enough to ensure that no pollution could eat through the metal or, heaven forbid, splash underneath the door.

He turned.

He was just a perfectly smooth ball. Occasionally, he had lights that would flicker around the girth of his body. Apart from that, he had no expressions, no features, nothing but his shiny metal surface. She still got the impression that he was looking at her with worry filling his nonexistent gaze. There is no point in dwelling on what you cannot change, he said.

The words she couldn’t change anything echoed in her head.

She imagined they echoed in the head of every single survivor.

What was the mainstay of this ugly, never-ending war? That nothing could change.

It was like they’d found some incredible weapon then, rather than find out what it did, immediately turned it on themselves.

And this was just the long death throes of her planet.

She kept calling it a planet.

She wouldn’t refer to it by its real name, because planet was stuck in her head and had been from birth. She couldn’t tell you why. It was almost as if, from the very beginning, when she’d first become conscious of her life in that shrine, she’d realized she shouldn’t be here. She was a traveler in someone else’s world.

But she was also stuck on this world. And there wasn’t a darn thing she could do to break free.

Larry could act, though, and he flew up to her. He shoved himself against her chest again, forcing her fingers to tighten around the smooth surface of his silver body.

Then he twisted her around, dragged her backward, and shoved her up the stairs. He didn’t let her trip, but he also didn’t let her slow down. There is nothing you can do. Except for saving yourself, Larry added. That right there was a statement that he had been repeating since the very beginning. Whenever she’d asked in that shrine why there weren’t other people around her, why she was on her own, he’d always refocused her and told her to concentrate on herself. All she had to do, all she ever had to do, was keep herself safe.

From what?

From the inevitable destruction of this planet?

But how could she keep herself safe from that?

She soon made it to the top of the stairs.

There were no windows in this building. Windows would be unprotected points that the pollution could splash through. That didn’t mean she couldn’t hear the battle from beyond. There was the constant thump, thump, thump of the turret gun.

Occasionally, the most bloodcurdling of the screams pierced through the walls, too.

Larry, she began.

Now is not the time for questions. Now is the time to get somewhere safe.

This world is dying, she tried.

You will be kept safe, Larry said.

He spoke with such certainty as if he knew that there would always be a way out.

But how could there be a way out?

Rae was living in a trapped world at the end of its days. The only way out was to join it as it destroyed itself, to join the pollution as it ate right through the organizing principles of biology.

The only way to join it was to die with it.

But even though Rae couldn’t appreciate this right now, Larry was right.

She couldn’t die here. He wouldn’t let her.

But Larry was just a security orb.

There was something out there, something she’d never met, something she couldn’t understand, but something that was reaching for her nonetheless. Something that would never let her die. It couldn’t.

It needed her and always had.

It needed her, because it alone would use her.

Because why would you destroy one world when you could destroy them all?

As Rae was forced to hunker down in a small, rusted iron room, Larry floating protectively in front of her face, his single gun at the ready, she closed her eyes.

She closed her eyes and waited.

She would not have to wait much longer.

Chapter 3

Frost

Everything changed. It always did.

Change is a principle that life, no matter where it is, is built on. Without change, you have suffocating stagnation.

But Frost could hardly be proud of the fact the station kept changing out from underneath her, that every new month brought a new battle and, critically, new losses.

She stood behind her desk. She faced the portal window. She’d recently had it reprogrammed to make it circular. Her station could pretty much change as she saw fit. Or at least the upper levels could. The lower levels where the Higher-Up prisoner was kept would always remain the same.

And it was the prisoner that her thoughts went back to. She could admit to you that her thoughts kept snapping back to him practically every day now.

She had to be careful.

Though she’d met him a handful of times, it had only ever been during station-wide crises. She could not get into the habit of going down to see him just because she wanted to. Even though she knew out of everyone she’d ever met, he was the only one who could ever tell her the truth.

And Frost would find out the truth. Even if it involved crossing barriers she’d decided she would never breach.

Even if it involved going up against the Higher-Ups.

As that thought snaked into her mind, she closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose. She turned fast. She reminded herself of one thing as the light of the spaceport played behind her, making her glow as she stood next to the window. Ships were coming and going, docking at her station more than they usually did. Because the other Supreme Outer Guardian stations were just as embattled as this one was. It was a time to connect, to communicate, to help one another.

And it was a time to fight. Not the paper tigers in her mind, but the real tigers out there in the multiverse.

She dropped her hand.

And she reminded herself of that one thing, one thing that beat in her chest, that glowed on her breast, that was the oath upon which she existed.

She would serve the multiverse.

She would find out the truth. And she would protect.

She had just enough time to affirm that promise in her heart before the door opened.

She was expecting Tatiana, one of her most trustworthy mech pilots.

It wasn’t what she got.

Harvey Brink walked in.

Frost had forgotten that they were going to have a meeting after he’d successfully dealt with the threat out in the betweens.

The betweens was a colloquial name for space that was… even stranger than the rest of space around these parts, frankly.

Frost was thankful that she’d lived on the stations for as long as she had. She could appreciate how someone who came from a solid, predictable world would freak out at the sheer strangeness of multiversal space. Nothing remained the same. The physical laws that governed most planets simply didn’t exist out here.

It meant you had to have a certain kind of mind. And she did.

What about Harvey? He had a different kind of mind.

As he took one step into the room, he stared at her with those by now familiar cold eyes.

Harvey Brink was a soldier. When he’d been found on a simplistic world with an equally simplistic civilization and brought back to the stations, she’d had high hopes for him. She’d seen something in his eyes that suggested he’d be a good Guardian.

But she’d only seen a kernel of it. And in the years that he had worked for her, the kernel had never grown.

It had never, ever sparked large enough and bright enough to otherwise diminish the dead stare he always shot you. Because it seemed like there was something that had rotted in Harvey a long time ago. Or if it hadn’t rotted, it had never been born.

It’s done, he said in his gravelly, baritone voice.

He didn’t snap a salute. Harvey never saw the point.

And every time they had meetings just like this, every time he stared at her with that dead gaze, she wondered if she was making the right decision.

Soldiers like that, who have no heart, who have no spark, aren’t really soldiers.

Sure, they can follow your orders. They are even better at it than most other soldiers. But there’s one thing you need to run an army like the Supreme Outer Guardians – trust. You need to know that your soldiers will do the right thing. They need hearts. And she’d been digging these past several years trying to find out if Harvey had one, but she’d never found a hint of it.

She took an edgy step back, not because she thought he would attack her – he never would.

Harvey lived for his mech, and he wouldn’t do a thing to jeopardize his position as a pilot of one.

And that had been a decision that had been agonizing for Frost. Before she’d introduced him to the mechs, she’d been about to get rid of him.

But something inside her had told her to give him another chance.

Sometimes, the soldiers you’re least certain about just need a different kind of task.

The mechs were one of the greatest secrets that the Supreme Outer Guardians had. They were also one of the greatest tools. They only had five. Across every Supreme Outer Guardian station. And they would never get more. They could not be built. Nobody understood the technology they were based on, let alone where to find the resources they were built on. They came from an ancient time before the Golden Age. If you didn’t understand how far back that was and what a significant timeframe it was, then you needed to shove your head into the Supreme Outer Guardian history books and read.

If Frost had a thousand mechs, she wouldn’t have a problem. She’d never have any problems ever again. With that kind of force, you could fight anything, including the Underside. They could throw the Maws at you; they could melt your stations with battery fluid. You would simply smash right through them.

She’d never met anything that could stop a mech.

She’d also only ever met a handful of pilots who could fly them. Inexplicably, Harvey was one of them. And that’s why she couldn’t get rid of him. He was one of her best, too. And unlike the other pilots, you could just sit him down in his mech out in the betweens for weeks if not months on end, and he’d happily wait for his enemies to arrive. He’d sleep there, and because the mech offered him sustenance, he wouldn’t have to eat there. He wouldn’t even need to stretch his legs.

He was something else entirely. And once more as she looked at his dead stare, she wondered if what he was was heartless.

She turned away from him and the growing suspicion in her heart. She didn’t want to show weakness in front of him, but Harvey was like a computer. He could assess every single thing that he saw in his environment and process it so quickly, even the most momentary flinch would be noted and understood.

Harvey let out a gravelly laugh. Still don’t trust me then, Frost? You know, every time I come to see you after one of these missions, I fear it will be my last. Was that my last mission, Frost? he asked in a voice that was just as controlled as it was slightly amused. If it were anyone else, she’d take that arrogance, turn around, and use it to kick his ass out into the corridor.

She didn’t need soldiers like him.

… Except she desperately needed soldiers like him. He’d been deployed for the past three weeks. He’d only come back because he’d finally defeated his target. Which was great news. She’d sent him and a bunch of other mech pilots off to fight the Zarpacs. A shadowy, violent, incredibly powerful race that stalked the betweens, the few times they’d ever managed to get past the Supreme Outer Guardian front line to reach a station, they’d wreaked havoc. Recently, only two months ago, one of them had slipped past – not Harvey, one of her other soldiers. They’d almost destroyed a station. And that was just one Zarpac.

That’s why she needed Harvey. That’s why Harvey used that voice on her, the one that was slightly amused. And it’s why he smiled.

To be fair, the smile didn’t seem to know what to do with itself. It flickered up on the left side, then the right. But it was like a firefly that simply couldn’t be bothered getting out of bed. Why glow? It wasn’t here to do that. It was here to fight.

Harvey took a knowing step forward. Your steps can’t know anything, can they? But Harvey had this embodied sense and always would. And maybe that’s why he was the best mech pilot she’d ever find. Reminding herself of that fact one last time, she dropped her arms, letting them swing down to her hips. She even placed her hands in her pockets, though it was a casual move she would never use against anyone else. Because no one else would be able to see through her quite as effectively as Harvey. I’m not about to fire you, Harvey.

Because you need me, he said. It was an automatic response, and though she wanted to say it was arrogant, was it?

It was just somebody who knew exactly what position they were in. And unlike most of the other mech pilots, he wanted to be in that position. That’s why he smiled. And that’s why you’re gonna send me back out on another mission, Frost.

You were deployed for two months. Two months without any recreation. Two months without leaving your mech to stretch your legs—

He shrugged. And I loved every second of it. So let’s cut the crap, shall we, sir? He said sir with no deference whatsoever. His lips knew how to move, and his brain knew exactly what syllables to form. But the word sir – and the fact she was his superior officer – it was all just irrelevant to him. It was dross. She could see it in his eyes; she could hear it in his statements. He just wanted to get back to his mech.

And even if it meant that he wasn’t as trustworthy as she wanted him to be, even if it meant that he couldn’t toe the party line, did it matter?

This is the bit where you tell me that you’re obliged to give me leave. This is the bit where I tell you I don’t need it. This is the bit where you freak out and think that I’m a coldhearted soldier who can never be controlled. And this is the bit where I tell you I just want to go out and fight. And this, Frost, is the bit where you think, good, because you need a man exactly like me. Someone who is gonna fight right up until the end. Because you’ve got no other option.

She bristled. She’d taken half a step away, but she planted her balance down into her heel and spun. She started off looking at his feet then slowly let her gaze climb him. It settled on his eyes. It was an intimidating set of movements that would have rattled anyone else.

Harvey? He waited for her gaze to lock onto his eyes. Then he did the equivalent of catching it with his mental hands. Catching it and holding it still with a bare-knuckled grip. He stared right down the barrel of her own gaze and met her attack, blow for blow. You think I’m arrogant. You think I’m coldhearted. I am both. But I’m the best soldier you’ve got. And I don’t need to stretch my legs. I’ve stretched them enough. He demonstrated by shoving one of his legs to the side, pushing his foot down, then rolling his ankle about. He twisted, planted the foot on the ground, and stood with one of the most solid stances she’d ever seen. Because he knew what he wanted.

If you wanted to take up space like that, if you wanted to show the world that you were formidable, that’s all you needed. A clear, direct mind.

It didn’t matter if that clear, direct mind didn’t see the world like she did, could only see the black and white, the good and bad, the enemies and friends.

Because Harvey was right.

She needed him.

She pinched her nose. She closed her eyes. Then she pointed to the door.

He smiled. You made the right decision, sir—

You and I both know that I’ve made the only decision I can. Was there any fondness in her voice whatsoever? No. It was practically adversarial.

Harvey took one step toward the open door, then turned. He just looked at her. He didn’t say a word. Momentarily his eyebrows peaked, and just for a second she wondered if that tiny spark of compassion in his eyes would finally grow. She stared at it like a farmer who had just seen a seed start to peek its green head out from underneath a blanket of winter snow.

The spark didn’t grow. Harvey didn’t say anything, didn’t note her stress, didn’t try to de-escalate the situation. He just chuckled once. I’ll be waiting in the mech room.

With that, he was out of the door. No goodbye, no thank you sir, no pleasantries. As Harvey didn’t need them.

She relaxed as soon as the door closed. She hadn’t realized how much tension she was holding, but it gripped her shoulders like the fingers of a cold skeleton.

It forced her forward until she grabbed the lip of her desk, until she slowly straightened.

She almost took a step toward the door, almost called Harvey back. What was the point? He wanted to go back out there, and he needed to go back out there. Though once upon a time, Zarpacs had been rare, they were being spotted in the betweens regularly now. It wasn’t impossible that they were getting ready for a fight.

And if they showed up in numbers, they could sweep through every single Supreme Outer Guardian station. There’d be nothing left.

All you would need them to do was coordinate their attacks with the Underside, and the Supreme Outer Guardians would finally lose the war.

So Harvey needed to get back out there, regardless of how he treated her, regardless of what he thought.

And she needed to release her hands from around her desk.

She turned.

It was just as she received a call.

She stiffened. For she understood exactly who that call came from.

It wasn’t one of the other stations. It was them, the Higher-Ups. Mercury, to be specific.

For a very short amount of time, he’d been deployed to this station. Technically, he’d been there to find her – the Higher-Up who’d gone missing, who the Supreme Outer Guardians had been tasked to discover for years. It was one of the greatest missions they’d ever had, but they’d never gotten traction on the case, and it felt like they never would.

Realistically, Mercury had been here to assist Frost in fighting the Underside.

But then Mercury had gone on his own path of self-discovery, had almost unwound, and had only just saved himself – the multiverse, too.

He was now deployed on a different mission, but occasionally, he still checked in with Frost.

Of all of the Higher-Ups, he was the only one she truly trusted.

He didn’t communicate with her via her computer, via her command pip, via anything real.

It was just like his intention split space until he was right there, right in front of her.

His hologram, or a perfect version thereof, appeared several meters to her side. She spun, knowing this had to be important. Her lips twisted into a deep frown, her brow furrowing hard.

Mercury’s left eyebrow peaked. It’s a long time since I’ve seen you as stressed as that, Frost. As far as I know, there are no current problems on your station. He said that like he was fishing. Like he needed to know if she was currently under stress, because guess what? He was about to add to it.

She tried to free her mind of thoughts of Harvey. She straightened. Little things. Nothing too large. You’re contacting me with something large, though, aren’t you?

Mercury smiled. It couldn’t reach his cheeks. It was far too stiff and far too knowing.

He clenched a hand into a fist by his side. He knocked his knuckles against his red, starlit armor. We just received a worrying report.

We? she questioned.

He smiled knowingly.

She wasn’t sure who Mercury ultimately worked for anymore. She was sure of one thing. When he’d gone on his own journey and fallen in love with one of her Guardians – B’Anna – he’d been through a crucible that had changed him.

He would never be the same coldhearted, proud god again. In other words, he’d proverbially been brought back to Earth.

And like anyone who had to live in uncertain, unpredictable times, all he wanted to do was help.

The Underside are on the move. We’ve received reports they’ve stolen a critical piece of technology from one of the Higher-Up storerooms.

Her eyebrows peaked.

The storerooms might not sound like much, but remember they were owned by the Higher-Ups. And what was in them? The greatest spoils from across the multiverse. And she used the word spoils intentionally. These were her superiors, but the fact of the matter was that the Higher-Ups had gone through the multiverse for an unknown period of time, taking whatever they could from dead civilizations.