Isaac awoke hours later. He jumbled up, images of golden giants flickered across his mind, with crassus’s voice taunting him, calling out to him that he’d never find his brother. He steadied himself against the cold stone as he almost tipped over, and looked straight down into a steep fall into the overgrown courtyard of the church.
His heart beating against his chest he gripped one hand against the pillar he had slept against. His broken arm seared pain up his shoulder. He cursed and bunched over. A half eaten biscuit tumbled down his chest and cracked on the floor of the bell tower.
“How… How long have I been out?” he asked.
“Six hours, give or take.”
He furrowed his brow. “You look horrible.” She sat opposite him, leaning against a pillar, wrapped tight in several very shabby looking blankets. She reminded him of a beggar.
“Can you keep watch for a moment? I need to take care of something.”
“Of course, I mean, why didn’t you wake me? You look ten minutes away from death.” Her face was as gray as the stone she sat on.
She didn’t answer, which was seeming to become something of a pattern with Aster. Isaac hated people who didn’t answer questions. With his job he had met far too many of those.
Aster bent forward and brandished a knife. Isaac realised for the first time that she’d gathered up kindling and some pieces of wood, probably from some of the pews. The flames of a bonfire licked happily at the air. She stuck the knife inside the hot coals.
“Wait! Hold on, what’re you doing?” Isaac held out his hands, gesticulating. “You can’t have a fire! People will see, Crassus will find us! How long has this been burning?”
“Crassus is blind.”
Isaac momentarily fumbled upon getting a response, he’d planned on continuing his monologue of whining. “What about those golden soldiers? They’ll find us! And they weren’t too friendly, were they?”
“They’re busy,” she pointed.
“What…” Isaac looked.
She had pointed to the where the storm had been before he fell asleep, but now only the sun shone on the towers and heaps of scrap amidst the ruins in the Scrapyard. Isaac squinted as he tried to hone in on the miniature humanoid shapes far off in the distance. He could spot the golden giant easy enough, and the soldiers, as they stood out with their golden plates. But there were a lot more people now.
The golden soldiers bunched up around a gathering of slow moving people. It seemed they were ushering the non-gold people into lines.
“Who are they? The other people I mean.”
“They’re the newcomers.”
“The people from the train?” Isaac sat up straighter.
The lines formed fully. Some golden soldier muddled about at the front and Isaac imagined the mustached buffoon parading back and forth. No doubt inflating from the self importance and hefting his ridiculous scabbard from catching on the ground.
Something moved out there. Something long materialized from nothing, a thin pole of some sort? It flashed across several of the lines of people and they dropped out of view and melted into the ground. Isaac gasped.
“What happened?” he said.
“He probably killed them.”
Isaac’s eyes widened, “Killed them? Why? Isn’t this place hostile enough?”
“For their keys, Isaac. It’s the only thing that matters here. You’ll come to learn that soon enough.”
The remaining lines of survivors burst into chaos and the rest of the golden soldiers moved to apprehend them. The fire crackled and Isaac looked away from the carnage and was shocked to find Aster peeling off chunks of flesh from her hand with a red hot blade.
He gaped at her as she brought the blade back to the fire to heat it back up again. Sweat poured down her face and in her wounded hand she held a stick marred with bite marks. She looked him in the eye, defiant, daring him to protest.
“But… those are your fingers.” He pointed weakly with a slight bow of his head. Only three fingers gripped the stick she’d used to keep herself from screaming. The remaining two were missing almost down to the knuckles. The stump of her ring finger was slightly longer and bound up at the end in black rope, wound so tight Isaac felt second-hand pain just from looking at it.
Her pinky ended in a large burn mark. The smell of bacon wafted across Isaac’s face. He belched several times over the edge of the bell tower.
He knew why she had done it, of course. She was probably losing too much blood, at least if her skin color was anything to go by. Isaac had gone to a survival course once with his brother. He knew that’s how they’d done surgery in the field when there wasn’t a needle or thread to be found. Or rather the time to sew up a wound properly. Instead you took a piece of metal, heated it up and scorched the wound closed.
Tears reflected the sunlight and blinked at Isaac from the edges of Aster’s eyes. She didn’t mention it and neither did he. Isaac just wiped his mouth with the edge of his coat.
Aster started shaking. She held her scorched hand tight around the wrist and she turned over on her side. Isaac watched her convulse and shiver until her breathing slowed and she fell asleep. He wondered at what that young girl must’ve lived through to be so tough. He doubted anyone he knew back on earth would be willing to cut off their own fingers.
Maybe she’d been right to look at him like she had. Weighing him, disregarding him, writing him off as a lost cause the minute she had met him. But she wasn’t wrong. He’d set out to find Finn and bring him back. Isaac had known something beyond the explainable was going on. And what had he done since coming here? He’d done nothing but run and hide, whining and feeling sorry for himself. That would end now. The only thing he had to go on was his instinct and intuition, but for those to work he had to gather information. He could pretend this was another case to be solved.
He sat guard over Aster’s sleeping body while watching the horizon for signs of Crassus. While the hours went by he relived the last day in his mind and made a list of questions he needed answers to.
He looked back to make sure that Aster was still breathing and found her eyes wide open, weighing him again. Isaac felt the back his head prickle but ignore both it and her stare. Instead he reached inside the sack and handed her a piece of flatbread. She sat up and took it. Isaac contemplated his next words carefully. She sat silent and ate, still watching him.
“How come you can grow feathers?” he said at last.
She looked him over but didn’t react otherwise, like she’d known all along that it would eventually come to this. “The keys. It’s always about the keys.”
Isaac looked sceptical. “How do they work?”
“You find one that whispers to you and then you synchronize with it.”
That didn’t make a whole lot of sense. “No, I mean, what makes them tick?”
“The keys don’t tick, I said the whisper. What, did Crassus rattle your mind?”
Isaac gave an uncomfortable shrug at the mention of Crassus’s name. “No, I mean how do they work, like the physics of it?”
“Physics?” Aster looked puzzled. She didn’t seem to like not knowing something.
Isaac stared at her. “Alright, nevermind the physics, you said I had one… ehm… a key, is that true?”
This it seemed she knew because she answered with confidence. “Yes, you do.”
“Well, where is it?”
“Hanging from your neck, I’d imagine, just like everyone else’s.”
Isaac reached into his coat, beneath his shirt, and to his astonishment drew out a chain hanging there. Hung around his neck, just like she’d said.
“How the…” He looked at at Aster, “how did that get there?”
Aster shrugged, then winced as something pained her. “We don’t really know, but everyone who arrives here gets one.”
Isaac traced the chain around his neck with his fingers. A key dangled from it at the bottom. He grabbed it. “Holy shit. Every single person who comes here gets one?”
“Yes.”
“Including you?”
She bit her lip. “Well, sort of, I have several, but I didn’t get mine by coming here.”
“No? How come?”
“I wasn’t taken by the storms like you.”
“What do you mean you weren’t taken? Then how did you end up here?
She hesitated for a long while. “I was born here.”
If Isaac had held a drink, he would’ve spilled it. “You were born here? In this place? In… what did you call it?”
Aster looked saddened from his reaction. “The Endpoint.”
Her expression made him pause and he tried to hide his incredulity a bit. “Right, the Endpoint. I mean… that’s what you meant by here right? The Endpoint. You mean you were born in this world, like, in a city or something, far from here?” Isaac couldn’t imagine growing up in a place without electricity.
Aster grew even more solemn at that. “I’ve never seen a city.”
Isaac was at a loss for words. “You’ve never seen a city?”
Aster said nothing.
Then something occurred to Isaac. “Are there any cities, in the Endpoint?”
She shook her head.
Isaac leaned back. “Oh boy.” He scratched the stubble on his chin then sighed. They sat silent for a while. Isaac rolled his key between his fingers. It was silver and had an odd design. It looked old fashioned and sturdy.
“How do I use it?”
Aster stirred. She drew out a chain identical to his own from beneath her clothing. Four keys hung from it, three silver and one bronze. All but one had the chain going through it at the handle, the last key, a silver one, instead hung from the handle of another silver key.
She held out the two silver keys that were bundled together. “First you find a key that’s synchronized with you, then you hold onto it until you have synchronized back with it.” She looked up at him, her mood brightening. “Since that one,” she indicated the key in his hand, “is your birthright the synchronization part is already there.”
“My… birthright?”
“Yes, that’s what we call it. The key you arrive with is your birthright key.”
“Why’s it called that, and who’s ‘we’?”
She ignored him. “All you have to do is focus… and,” the keys in her hand glowed, “tadaaa!” A large jetblack feather grew out of her hand, a silvery color melted up the root. She smiled at him. “Now you try.”
“Are you sure?”
“Very.”
“But, how do I know if I’m synchronized.”
“You understand the whispers.”
A chill went up Isaac’s spine and a memory of voices calling to him behind a wall bubbled up, unwelcome. “The whispers?”
“Yes, or well, not understand exactly, more like you recognize the words. There’s no real meaning behind it.”
Isaac hesitated, then brought the key up to his ear. He didn’t hear anything out of the ordinary, least of all whispering voices. Still, he could remember the voices from before Crassus had burst through the wall. He didn’t really want to hear something like that ever again.
“Stop hesitating, just do it!” Aster threw a pebble at him. She seemed almost playful, it was startling to see.
Isaac drew himself up. He focused on the key, trying his best not to look stupid. Nothing happened for five whole seconds. But then he noticed something. A sound, far off in the distance. He couldn’t quite place it. The sound grew in strength. It was something like an echo.
The key grew warm to the touch and it even glowed faintly. Isaac’s eyes grew wide and his muscles stiffened in anticipation, whatever happened next, it would surely be as fantastical as everything else had been in the Endpoint.
A tiny tremor went through the key and then… nothing. His palm tickled but that was about it.
Isaac slumped down and sighed. “Well, that was… anticlimactic.”
Aster looked confused. “What happened?” She looked at him as if he should have seen what she hadn’t.
“Nothing, that’s what happened.” He couldn’t help but feel a bit let down from the whole affair. Maybe in some small place in his mind he had grown a hope that these ‘keys’ could help him survive the days ahead. Or, who knew, even help him find Finn somehow.
“Then you did it wrong, try again!”
He looked up at her sharply. “I did exactly what you said I should do. What was supposed to happen?”
Aster looked exasperated. “I don’t know, but certainly more than that.”
“If you don’t know then how do you know I did it wrong?”
“I just do alright? Trust me, I’ve been around these things since I was a baby. I’ve seen keys do things you couldn’t imagine.”
“But you’ve never seen one like mine before?”
“No! I haven’t, alright?” She shouted at him. She seemed to realize she’d raise her voice, because she wrapped her arms around herself and turned her head sharply away from him in quite a pouty fashion. “Fucking interrogator,” she grumbled.
He gave her a few seconds of personal space to calm down. Then he picked the thread back up. “Is that uncommon? For you to not recognize a particular key?”
She pouted a little while longer but it seemed she couldn’t resist sharing her knowledge with someone who was interested. “It’s not that it’s uncommon for keys to be different, it’s that I’ve never seen one that looks anything like yours.”
“Most keys look similar?”
“No, most keys look different to one another, but the basetypes are almost always one out of a handful.”
“Basetypes?”
“Yes, many keys share the same base, but the aspect is different.”
“What’s an aspect?”
She huffed. “Look,” she held up her set of silver keys, “my key is a projectile key, that’s the basetype.”
“Projectile, right.” Isaac repeated, eager to keep her going.
“That means I can create something and then shoot stuff with it.”
Isaac hesitated, then nodded, “uh-huh.”
“Now my aspect,” she said, pointing at a small emblem at the cross-section between the circular handle and the key proper, “is what determines what form whatever it is I create will take.” She beamed at him. “the aspect for my key is a feather.”
“So you shoot feathers.”
“Yup.”
Isaac looked on amazed as Aster demonstrated by ushering forth more feathers, sending a few of them into the tower roof. They did not fall down again.
“What are the different aspects a key can have?”
“Oh, they can be almost anything. Metals, rocks, liquids, organic stuff, anything.”
Isaac took some time to let that sink in. What he wouldn’t give to get his hands on some of the metal projectile ones, or even a fire aspect. He could be a living flamethrower. He needed to know more.
“The tips of your feathers are metal, is that part of your key’s power as well?”
Aster raised her eyebrows at him. “You always pay attention, don’t you, Isaac?”
Isaac felt his cheeks redden. Damn his emotions to hell. He was acting like a hormonal teenager.
“You are right my feathers do have iron tips, but that’s not from my projectile key, it’s from my armament key.” She held up the other key that hung from the first key she’d been talking about.
“What does it do?”
“It lets you turn part of yourself into its aspect.”
“So the feathers are a part of you?”
She smiled at him like he was getting it now. “No.”
“Wha—”
“—the feathers aren’t part of me, they are created by the key.”
“Then how come you can make the feathers part metal?”
Her smile widened even further and she leaned closer. “See that’s the magic of it all, each key can connect to any other… and they will interact with the key they’re connected to instead of you!”
The different possibilities Isaac had been building inside his mind suddenly multiplied. His eyes widened.
“Just watch.” She took the armament key and pulled it hard. At first the circular handle only clinked against the metal of the other key, but then the inner circle melted and one ring passed through the other until Aster held two separate keys in her hand rather than one bundle.
“Wow…” Isaac couldn’t help but be amazed. “The metal melts on its own to let one key pass through the other? How does it know you want to seperate them?”
“You just pull,” she said, like it should be obvious.
She put the key she had just freed back on the chain around her neck. She held up her hand between them. Isaac watched in amazement as the hand in front of his face turned silver. A large spot of blank iron sprouted out from a spot on the back of her hand. It grew like ice on a lake, except it started from the middle rather than the edges.
“What is that one called?”
“Armament, with the iron aspect.”
She pulled off the feather key and hooked it into the armament key dangling from her chain. She closed her eyes, concentrating, and a large black feather grew from her hand.
Isaac felt perplexed. “Now the feathers have no iron on them, but you connected the feather key to the iron key, shouldn’t it do something?”
Aster opened her eyes and looked at him with the patience of a wisened mentor. “Look where it grows from.”
Isaac looked towards the base of the feather. It stuck out from the metal on her hand. “Oh!” He looked up at her, he felt the excitement from before return ten-fold. “So normally you can only manifest the feathers from your own skin, but by connecting it through the iron key you can do so from the metal as well.”
She nodded. “Yes, that’s right. This way I can attack and defend at the same time.” She laughed. “Though I prefer more firepower so I connect the armament key to the projectile key rather than the other way around.”
“Then how do you protect yourself?” Isaac remembered her previous fights, she’d been far too reckless by his estimation.
“Just don’t get hit, Isaac,” she winked at him.
Isaac kept his face passive. “You are far too confident in your own abilities. Look at yourself, you can barely sit upright.” He waved a hand to indicate her disheveled state and scorched hand.
She looked off to the side over her shoulder and waved her hand in the air as if to downplay his criticism. “Besides, there’s also the much greater drawback that to fire, I first need to create my armament, which takes time and mass. It’s much simpler to create and fire one thing than to go through two layers of concentration before I can attack.”
“Mass?”
“Yes, you can only create a certain amount of mass per hour, up until a maximum limit of mass per twenty-four hours.”
“How do you know how much you can create in a given amount of time?”
She shrugged her shoulders. “By practicing and testing your limits, I guess. Most newcomers can’t produce much more than their body per hour though, that at least seems to be consistent.”
Isaac blinked. “So if you weigh more you can create more?”
Now Aster was the one to hesitate. “Huh, I don’t know, I’ve never thought about it like that before. It doesn’t really matter though, no matter what amount you can create to begin with, practice far outpaces that amount in a matter of days.”
“Of course it matters, you could gain weight on purpose in addition to practicing, leveraging your results on both axes simultaneously.”
Aster looked at him like he was dumb. “Have you looked around yourself lately? There’s not much food to go around in these parts.” she shook her head. “I hate to be the bringer of bad news, but most people who come here starve to death. The rest get their throats slit and their keys stolen by Tejahl and their ilk.”
Isaac swallowed. He started speaking, then choked and changed course. “Were the soldiers who killed the people from the train with Tejahl too?”
Aster still looked angry but her voice calmed somewhat. “No, they’re with Kin Tao. The current warlord who rules around these parts.”
“Tejahl and Kin Tao? How many warlords are there?”
“Just the two of them. Though Tejahl isn’t really a warlord in the same way Kin Tao is.”
“What, is she less ruthless than Kin Tao?”
Aster chuckled. “Oh, no, she’s plenty ruthless alright,” she sounded bitter, “she just has control of the tower. No key powers work there for some reason, so Kin Tao can’t really attack her there, even though he’s stronger.”
Isaac thought this new information over for a while. “How does she control the tower if no key powers work there, does she have a different kind of power?” At this point Isaac wouldn’t put anything past this new reality he found himself in.
“The key powers don’t work, but the resonance still does.”
Isaac thought back. Only a second went by before it clicked. “The shockwaves, the discs of light!” She nodded. He felt his mind slip back into the usual intuitive leaps and quick pattern recognition he’d grown so accustomed to through his investigative work. Sleeping had really helped him regain his old self. He’d been useless for far too long.
“The keys whisper,” Aster leaned towards him, “and if you whisper back, a sort of—resonance—is created.” She leaned back against the pillar and exhaled deeply. “If you guide it through your limbs, you can generate shockwaves. The explosions ignore most things, but they really react intensely with other keys. They also push on you a lot, so I use them in tandem with my gravity key to move around. Tejahl is simply unmatched when it comes to resonance fighting and so no one can challenge her.”
Isaac squinted against the sun. “But if the shockwaves ignore most things except keys, how is that useful if keys don’t work in the tower anyways?”
“That’s the thing though, even if the powers stop working inside, most people still can’t afford to leave their keys behind them. The keys are what keeps us alive, if we didn’t have them, other people with keys would simply kill us and steal what we do have.”
“But I don’t understand, that still doesn’t—”
Aster held up a hand to cut him off. “When someone resonates a key out of your chain, it leaves you stunned. It can even knock you unconscious, and then who’s going to guard your keys lying unprotected on the ground?” She clenched her hands and looked into her lap. Her next words were laced with contempt, “it doesn’t help either that she’s infamous for stealing and hoarding other people’s keys.” She looked up at him quickly then stared down into her lap again. “She’s one of the very few people who steal keys from the living.”
Isaac suspected at least one person whom Tejahl had stolen from. Still, he needed to be sure. He bent his head down and tried to make eye contact with her. “Did Tejahl steal a key from you, Aster?” he said as gentle as he could manage.
She grit her teeth and for a moment she looked like she was about to throw something. But then all the air went out of her and she slumped back against the pillar. “Yes… she stole my birthright key, the one I was born with.”
“Why did she steal it?”
She eyed him, perhaps a bit suspicious of him, but then she must’ve thought better of it because her guard dropped again. “Because it’s very valuable and rare.”
“But you know this resonance stuff as well right? Go and challenge her, take your key back..”
Aster’s back stiffened. “It’s not that easy.”
“Why not?”
Aster sighed in frustration. “She’s stronger than me, alright?”
Isaac scoughed. “I don’t believe that.”
“She is. She knows how to manifest the shockwaves away from her body. She sends them out like gusts of air. Her range is far greater than mine. She’d knock all my keys to the floor before I’d get close enough to even attempt doing the same thing to her.”
“Wrap the keys around your arm or something with rope so they can’t be knocked away easily.”
“That won’t work, when the resonance touches a key the key sort of phases out, like a ghost or something. They pass right through you.”
Isaac remembered back to the tornado, before he’d arrived in the Endpoint, and how his car had passed right through him. “Yeah, I’ve encountered that.”
Aster’s eyebrows shot up. “Oh?”
Isaac didn’t give her the time to ask him to elaborate. “Maybe I could help you.”
“Help me with what?”
“Your key.”
Aster stared at him. “Why do you assume I don’t have someone already helping me?”
Isaac faced her unblinking stare head on. “I’m not assuming anything, I’m offering you my help.”
Aster didn’t relax. “What can you do to help me? Tejahl would eat you for breakfast.”
Isaac started speaking but Aster cut him off.
“And what do you gain from helping me? What’s your play here?”
Isaac held his hands up in front of him. “Woah, hold on, I’m not threatening you, I’m offering to help you. Honest to God, I’m just trying to pay you back for everything you’ve done for me.”
Aster’s stare didn’t falter. “There’s more, you’re hoping to gain something, tell me what it is. Now.”
Isaac’s face soured, but he didn’t move or speak. He thought for a long while.
“Alright,” he said after the fire had all but died, neither of them moved to replenish it. “I’m looking for my brother, Finn. I was hoping you could help me find him.”
“You’re in the Endpoint now, Isaac. You’re not on your own homeworld anymore. Your brother is lost to you twice over.”
“He’s not on Earth, he’s here, in the Endpoint.”
Aster shot him a very worried glance. “But you just arrived here, how do you know he’s here? Did you see him?”
Isaac gave a shrug. “Well, I thought I did, but then…” He blanked out for a couple seconds. “But nevermind that,” he waved his hand, “no, I didn’t see him. But I do know he disappeared the same way I came here. So unless there’s several Endpoints then, yes, he is here. I’m sure of it.”
“Hold on, hold on,” Aster paused, “you knew he disappeared in a storm?”
“Yes, I was part of a team that procured volunteers for the experiments that the government was conducting on the storms.” He gathered a handful of gravel from the cold stone floor and threw it back down again. “They’re probably still conducting those experiments right now, with more clueless idiots to carelessly throw away.”
“You knew he disappeared, and yet you decided to follow him, willingly?”
“Yes.”
“You’re crazy.”
Isaac thought that was pretty rich coming from Aster but he didn’t say anything.
“I’ve never heard of someone entering the Endpoint on purpose. No one would even make up such a story.” She looked stunned. “How did you find out about the storms in the first place?”
“As I said I didn’t, my government did.”
“They’re a group?”
“In way, sure.”
Aster tilted her head. “Are they very strong or something?”
Isaac chuckled, but he didn’t feel very mirthful. “You could say that, yeah.”
They sat silent for a while after that. Aster seemed to continue to be stunned over the revelation that he had ran into the tornado intentionally. Isaac didn’t really see the big deal, he’d done it to rescue someone. It was only natural. He stoked the fire back up again until it roared with flames.
“Do you know of anyone called Finn?”
Aster sat with a glazed expression, staring into the fire, and she took a couple seconds before she jolted out of her reverie and answered. “No, I don’t know anyone by that name. But if he came here then he is dead.”
Isaac sat up. “What? What do you mean?”
Aster seemed confused at his reaction. “He’s dead.”
“How can you say that?”
“The vast majority of the ones who come here, die in the first few seconds. You saw one of the unlucky ones yourself. I practically had to pry you away from him.”
Isaac saw the glint of gold again, and remembered the way he had felt upon seeing it. He remembered the disappointment when he had realized the man wasn’t Finn.
“Out of the ones who do survive the storm itself, most of those people are killed by the soldiers of a warlord like Kin Tao.”
Isaac buried his head in his hands.
“Still, even of those who survive that, most don’t live longer than a week, much less a year.”
“Alright!” Isaac shouted into his lap. “I get it!” He looked up at her, his eyes stung. “I don’t want to hear it ok?”
Aster raised her upper lip in disgust. “You won’t last the week, Isaac. You should be more concerned with yourself. Forget your brother.”
Heat surged from his gut. “Enough!” He slammed a hand down into the pile of kindling and sticks and splinters from the church pews scattered everywhere. “I’ve treated you with nothing but kindness since the moment we met and you will reciprocate and treat me with some goddamn respect or I am out of here!”
Aster drew her head back until it touched the pillar behind her.
“I mean it, Aster! I will leave.”
Her mouth became a tight line. “Fine.”
Isaac breathed out. “Now are you certain you don’t know anything about Finn?”
She pouted for a bit while idly peeling at the bark on a stick of kindling. She gave him a nasty look. “I don’t know anything about Finn. But I do know of someone who does.”
“And that person will help us?”
“She will.”
“Good.” Isaac ruffled his hair with his broken arm, winced, and switched arms.
“We’ll travel to her when the daylight arrives. But after that, you will help me get my key back from Tejahl.” She stared him down, not letting their eye contact go.
Isaac didn’t hesitate. “Deal.”
They sat for a long time, neither speaking. The animosity between them didn’t let up.
“Where is this woman anyways?” Isaac tried.
Aster answered without looking up.
“North.”
