A Latent Dark by Martin Kee Read Free Book Online

his beak on the concrete.
    The skullcap felt warm and comfortable. She found the chinstrap and adjusted it to fit snugly on her head. Wearing the goggles and looking out from the huge pipeline, Skyla felt like the world’s youngest aeronaut at the helm of some enormous airship. She imagined herself in one of those aerolores they made in the factories behind her house, or maybe even one of the gigantic airships she had seen only in books. She dangled her legs over the ledge, smiling.
    Caught in a moment of playfulness, she pulled the brass fittings down over her eyes where they seemed to latch on their own with a muted click . All at once the world went dark.
    But not Orrin. He was as white as a star. He winked at her.
    She held her hand out, in front of her face and noticed a few strange things. For one, her hand appeared highlighted, only a shade dimmer than Orrin. A personal spotlight seemed to illuminate her skin. But everything else was almost imperceptibly dark.
    Waving her hand produced, to her astonishment, brilliant trails. She adjusted the lens and noticed a needle in her periphery. It wiggled and ducked depending on where her hand was placed in her field of vision. Next, Skyla grabbed one of the knobs around the lens and twisted.
    There was a click, and then her world vanished.
    Her vision was consumed in a swirling kaleidoscope of images bleeding into one another. The gorge was there and not there. It was a meadow. It was a grey waste. It was a pavilion of pillared ruins. It was the center of a volcano. It was a desert, a taiga, a grassy plain.
    The sewage pipe she sat in disappeared and she found herself sitting on thin air. It reappeared again and encompassed her like a huge concert hall. The waterfall was at once beside her and very far away, then not there at all. She saw stars.
    She felt herself wanting to puke.
    Her stomach doing cartwheels, she grabbed the lenses and pulled with trembling hands. They unlatched, swinging back up and away from her face. She gasped for air.
    The strap came away with shaking, sweaty hands and Skyla threw the goggles back into the backpack as if they were alive and rabid. She took long, controlled breaths of the rich pine air. Her eyes stayed closed until the dizziness subsided.
    She looked at Orrin. The raven looked back at her.
    “Did you know that would happen?”
    Squawk .
    She stared at the closed rucksack, then at her surroundings, not entirely convinced that they were real. She touched the concrete, touched her face. It was nearly an hour later before she felt comfortable getting back to her feet.
    To her left a small landing of jagged rock spiraled downward to the edge of the cliff where the forest began. Skyla took great care choosing her footing, testing every foothold, not entirely certain which rocks were real and which ones weren’t.
    Here lies The Wilds , she remembered the childhood warning, the place where men turn mad, screaming of gods and impossible beasts, a place of infinite change, where the curtain of the world can no longer obscure what lies beneath.
    She stood a moment, gazing at the thick wall of trees that seemed to yawn at her like a mouth.
    Skyla took one last breath and stepped through.

Chapter 5
     
    “So glad to finally meet you,” said Chief Constable Perlandine. “The archbishop said to expect a visit.”
    Perlandine was a stout man with a wide dark mustache that curled upward at the ends. His navy blue uniform bulged in odd places betraying years of comfort and privilege, its brass buttons doing their best not to pop off from the strain. His helmet sat on one corner of his desk, the traditional gold shield emblazoned on the front. His eyes squinted as he reached out a meaty paw and pumped The Reverend’s hand so hard it was as if he thought coins might fall out. After shaking hands, the two men sat opposite each other in large comfortable-looking leather chairs near a wide window.
    Perlandine offered a cigar to the Reverend from a cherry