I watched as light flickered, dancing across the landscape, across the sky, and to the great black fissure. Stuttering lights connected to everything nearby, like a blinding flash of lightning, utterly silent, that left ghostly images of planet-sized monstrosities dancing amid the spots in my eyes.

Each of the three gargantuan agents turned to look, in near-synchronicity with the goons in white. Anticipating.

The flickering stopped, the lights going out, everything returning to the way it had been. Collectively, they returned to their nearly silent work. Preparing, I was sure, for the moment that flickering started and didn’t ever stop.

From Within 16.12

Lights flickered, dancing from the feet of agent to person, person to person, and off to the distance, neurons in a larger system striking like lightning. But in this too-bright corner of a dark, living landscape, these lightning strikes could only travel so far.

This world was like a broken window, the landscape cracked, and the fact the light didn’t travel to where it needed to go served as a suggestion of just how broken it was.

The others approached, and I motioned for them to duck their heads down as they peered over the cliff’s edge at the group on the other side of the ravine. Three agents and fifty people dressed in Teacher’s pristine white garage-worker coveralls.

The workers were just numerous enough that in an ordinary situation I wasn’t sure one wouldn’t look in our general direction and make out the masks, helmets, and heads of hair that stood out against the consistently dark background and landscape. But these weren’t regular workers, they were thralls, and they were wholly wrapped up in what they were doing.

The agents were the really scary thing, and as much as they seemed fixated on picking at and adjusting the edges of the portal, the notion that they might turn and give us their full attention was a hell of a lot scarier.

We didn’t make a sound, aside from the occasional scratch of armor on crystal or harder-than-normal exhalation.

Off to the side, Tattletale motioned, indicating something to Sveta. I saw her hold up five fingers. Then six.

I could count the flashes and where those flashes were traveling. Six flashes moving from the group to a specific point in the distance. Our flashes had a consistency too, messages transferred along these neurons, dancing along the hard edges of the crystal, always to the same destination.

But these guys… they didn’t have powers. By all rights, they shouldn’t have had a common source. Except for Teacher.

Except we couldn’t get over there. A canyon separated our section from theirs, and the failures of lights to find any means of connecting suggested we were on an island.