The Crystal Zyst
A Eula Banks, State Certified Zeitle Engineer, Story
Marc A. Criley
Eula stopped the panel truck at the barricade and leaned out the window, “Deputy! Eula Banks with E & P Zeitle Demolition. I need to get in there. Can you open ‘er up for me?”
A uniformed officer, wearing a low pudge and a high hat, looked up from his conversation with a young, very stressed couple. He trotted over and swung back the barricade. As Eula rolled the truck forward he pulled himself up onto the running board. She winced as the mirror mount groaned.
“Deputy Billy Taylor, ma’am. Them’s Mick and Melinda Howser. They got two kids, age six and four, caught in the zeitle. They were working out front when the zeitle flashed up. Mick wanted to go in and get the kids, but Melinda had seen one of these things before and talked him out of it, told him they needed to call for help.”
“They know where the kids are?”
“She left ’em in the living room watching cartoons.”
“Should be a quick dive and grab then. Typically these are…” Eula leaned over the steering wheel to better peer at the shimmering, inverted bowl of slowed time. “Z seven or eight? Should be no big deal. We’ll get the kids out and have it dispersed by suppertime.”
“One of your people got here about twenty minutes ago,” Deputy Taylor said, inclining his head towards a van parked in front of the house. “Y’all are quick.”
Eula saw Nora, zeitmeter in one hand and marking wand in the other, laying down a fluorescent orange dashed line a dozen or so yards out from the house.
“Thank you sir, we’re on call night and day.”
“Street’s blocked off and we’ll have more deputies here shortly to make sure everyone stays out of your hair.”
“Sounds good.” Eula checked her side mirror. “That’s my sister Patrice comin’ up with the generator rig.”
“I’ll wave her on through. Good zeit.”
“Good zeit, Deputy.” Eula peered through the windshield at the zeitle. “Yeah, Z seven for sure,” she murmured.
An hour later Eula walked the perimeter, making sure everyone in the crew was briefed and tasked. A dozen zeitscoops stood on the asphalt street in front of the Howser’s home; the perforated onyx globes resting on upturned silver collars, tripod-mounted, like giant crystal balls. She yanked and tugged on the power cables and chronodymium alloy zeitlines, then headed towards the line of parked E & P vehicles. “Patrice!”
A short muscular woman snapped her head around, waist-length braid swinging.
“Put your hair up, sis, do I always gotta remind you?”
Patrice coiled her braid and tied it in place with a mini-bungee.
“Don’t need another Hillspring,” Eula said.
“I only lost a foot-and-a-half that time. Okay, ready when you are.”
“Let’s warm ’em up then.” Eula returned to the zeitscoop array.
At the generator control panel Patrice turned a key interlock, set switches, and mashed the starter button. The primary generator engine, a high-torque semi-truck V8, turned over, caught spark and blasted to life with a roiling mass of black smoke. Patrice finessed knobs and sliders until the engine settled to a purposeful roar. She eyeballed the gauges, gave Eula a thumbs up. She slipped on a pair of thick earmuffs and eased down a tennis ball-tipped lever. The engine labored as the PTO engaged, then the generator synced and began winding up.
Eula squinted at the zeitscoop array. Above each device a diffractive shimmer formed as it started pulling in time and concentrating it. A hint of ozone tickled her nose. She checked each segment: time scoops to collator, through feeder zeitlines to cable spoolers, and then to a pair of fuzzy, chronodymium-wool zeitsuits on a wire rack alongside the curb. The pumped-in time diffused out from the suits’ fabric and dissipated. In a zeitle the boundary layer it created let a zeitsuit diver move unhindered.
Kierra and Dehzi shimmered in their zeitsuits as Eula walked up. “Zeitscoops are ready, time’s standing still, and there’s no time like the present. Who’s primary and who’s backup?”
“I’m primary,” said Dehzi. “We tossed for it.”
“Watch out for gremlins,” Kierra said, grinning. “I don’t wanna have to come in there and drag your butt out.”
Eula rolled her eyes.
Dehzi and Eula stood just before the walkway to the Howser’s front door. A light breeze rattled pin oak leaves overhead while crape myrtles on either side of the front door stood near frozen in time.
“All right then, here’s a zeitquilt for the kids.” She handed Dehzi a rolled-up bundle, plugging its jumper cable into one of the half-dozen zeitsuit belt sockets. “Careful when you activate the quilt. Those kids are gonna bust back into normal time all wrapped up, and that always startles ’em.”
“This is about a Z seven, right?”
“We can’t get a line-of-sight cord through it, but off-angle that’s what it looks like. You should be able to see just fine; light speed’s still plenty fast.” Eula swung up her binoculars and nudged the focus wheel. “Hmm.”
“What?”
“It’s just darker than I’d’ve expected, you don’t normally get dimming until Z twenty or so.”
“When were you in a twenty?”
“A twenty-five, once, about ten years back. It’s dark — seventy billion to one slowdown, so light’s doing less than a quarter-inch per second.”
“Seventy billion?“
“Exponential Z. Up in the high teens and twenties the slowdown gets huge; and there’s so much concentrated time pumping through the suit you get nauseous. Wasn’t much fun.” She checked through the binoculars again. “Probably just shadows. Let’s get goin’ and get the kids. Good zeit, Dehzi.”
Dehzi took a deep breath. “Good zeit, Eula.”
Eula waved at Patrice, then circled her finger above her head. The engine on the truck bed coughed and revved up. Dehzi stepped across the orange dashed line.
“How long she been in there?” Eula squinted at the zeitline spool. “And how long since she pulled a loop?”
“Um…” Nora checked her watch and compared it against the clipboard. “Twelve minutes since she went through the door. Seven since she pulled any slack.”
Eula peered at the open door through her binoculars, chewed on her lower lip. “Parents said it was a straight shot back from the door to the living room. Like twenty feet or so.”
“That’s my recollection.” Kierra looked at Nora.
Nora nodded.
“I can’t see in there, it’s too dark. Kierra, go in and take a look. Take a coupling and some zeit tape in case Dehzi cut her line.”
“Sure. Most likely she just snagged it and it’s pinchin’ off the flow.”
Kierra peered into the house from the front stoop. She yanked the zeitline, unspooling a half-dozen loops, then stepped through the door. Half a minute passed as the slack was drawn into the house. Another loop unrolled off the spool. A few seconds passed, and another loop slipped off. Nothing moved for the next two minutes.
Eula saw shifting shadows beyond the door. Kierra burst out, one hand on the trailing zeitline, arrowing straight for Eula. She yanked up her Z-mask the instant she crossed the perimeter. She was panting. “A black wall… and Dehzi’s all black. She’s froze, locked. She’s… she’s touching… the… whatever it is.”
As Patrice trotted up, Eula grabbed Kierra’s shoulders, brought their foreheads together as if they were talking through Z-masks. “Catch your breath. What did you see?”
Kierra took a deep breath. “There’s a wall, kinda curved, completely black, all across the hall. Dehzi I guess reached up and… her mitt’s just barely touching it. She’s all black too. I don’t know if she’s…”
Eula cut her off. “No reason to think anything bad right now. She’s time locked, probably doesn’t even realize anything’s happened.”
Patrice cocked her head. “Think it’s one of them zysts?”
“That’s my guess. We’ll need the backup generator.”
Patrice whistled through her teeth and nodded. “Yep, and more zeitscoops. Kierra, come with me.”
Eula called Nora over. “Radio the office. Tell them to call Rach Crawford over in Tremont, she runs, uh… Zeitle Remediation and Extraction. Have them tell her it’s a probable zyst and we need all the zeitscoops and zeitline she’s got. All the trucks. Might be life and death. Then go help Patrice and Kierra with the scoops.”
Nora scurried off and climbed into the truck cab to use the radio while Patrice pulled the cover off the backup generator and Kierra slipped out of her zeitsuit.
Eula scanned the onlookers. “Deputy Taylor!”
The deputy trotted up, the parents trailing behind. “What’s the problem, ma’am?”
“What is it, Miss Eula?” Melinda’s words barely made it past her rigid jaw. Mick’s face was red.
“I’m ninety-nine point nine percent sure it’s a zyst,” Eula said.
Blank stares answered her.
“I ain’t never personally seen one. They’re like a time shell. You know geodes? Those hollow rocks? It’s like them only made out of time. Hollow on the inside, with time passing at normal speed — Z zero. But the shell has an extremely high slowed-time magnitude, what we call the Z magnitude, compressed into a very short space. That makes a really steep Z gradient; very difficult to push through.”
“How high is ‘extremely’ high?” Mick said.
An engine roared to life as Patrice fired up the backup generator.
Eula raised her voice. “We haven’t measured it yet, but I think Z twenty or so is typical. Zysts are really rare, like only one in three thousand zeitles. “
“You said a steep gradient,” the deputy said. “What does that mean?”
“It means I need more equipment. I got a call in to Rach Crawford. She knows what she’s doin’. Zeitles are easy, but zysts are a whole ‘nother matter. You need a really heavy-duty zeitsuit and a ton of timeflow to get in and out of one. My zeitdiver touched it and it’s sucking time out of her suit faster than we can pump it in. Won’t hurt her, time’s just stopped for her right now. First thing we gotta do though is get her out.”
“And then?” the deputy asked.
“Then we’re gonna have to wing it. There’s experts for this with high-Z equipment, but the nearest is two states away. We gotta make do with what we got…” Eula took a breath, “…because we ain’t got time to wait on them.”
Mick and Melinda reached for one another’s hand. Mick’s face turned to stone. “Why not?” he asked.
“‘Cuz inside a zyst the flow of time reverts to normal. But right now nothing can get in or out because of that high Z time shell. So…” She met Mick and Melinda’s wide-eyed, fearful stares.
“Oh jeeze,” the deputy said. “There ain’t no air gettin’ in.”
Eula blinked at the sweat running into her eyes and nodded.
Nora, head down and on task, meticulously rolled yet another layer of zeit tape around three braided-together zeitlines as Kierra and Eula argued in fierce, hushed voices.
“Eula, if something goes wrong it’s better if you’re out here trying to fix it. I didn’t even know zysts existed until an hour ago.”
“Everything I know is from a seminar and what I read about that California disaster.” Eula crossed her arms. “We’re wasting time. I’ve been doing this for thirty-five years and if anybody’s gonna risk a zyst it’s me.”
“Kierra’s right,” Patrice interrupted. “You think fast on your feet. We’ll need that. That’s what kept you and that guy alive in Belle Chevre when everything caved in. We won’t have that if you get stuck. And I really don’t want to get into one of those zeitsuits again. Too many years, too many meat-and-threes. Trust your people, Eula.”
Eula stared into Patrice’s eyes, then sighed. She turned to Kierra. “Okay, suit up. You’re on point.”
Eula fed the braided zeitline around the hallway corner as Nora, a fuzzy-edged silhouette in the doorway, pulled it in across the front yard. Kierra, one hand gripping the zeit-taped braid hanging off her socket belt, slid up alongside the Dehzi-shaped hole — utterly black, no texture, shading, or relief. Dezhi faced the zyst wall, right arm raised with the tip of her mitt barely contacting its surface.
“Don’t touch anything,” Eula cautioned, despite knowing sound didn’t carry through open zeitles.
Kierra stopped and signaled. Eula pulled in another couple yards for slack, signaled Nora to wait at the door, and edged forward. She leaned over and pressed the side of her Z-mask against Kierra’s.
“Don’t touch anything.”
Kierra kept her Z-mask pressed up against Eula’s. “I know. I’ll try to get hold of her hand”–she mimicked a lobster claw with her zeit-taped mitten–“about an inch back from the… thing.”
“There can’t be any gradient resistance,” Eula said. “Or almost none. Your heart could start overdoing it if it can’t pump blood out to your hand. We’re lucky Dehzi’s in as high a Z as she is, the timelock should keep her safe until she’s out.”
“Okay,” Kierra said. “Ready when y’all are.”
“I’ll have Nora signal Patrice to crank it up. You should feel a gradient pulse when it hits. Good zeit, Kierra.”
“Good zeit, boss.”
Eula watched as Kierra’s silvered mitt neared Dehzi’s hand. A couple inches away its motion slowed, then stopped. Kierra reset her stance and started leaning in.
“No no no,” Eula said and took a half-step towards her.
But Kierra drew her hand back, looked over at Eula and shook her head.
Eula eased down the hall, met her halfway.
“Too much gradient,” Kierra said when they were back in contact. “Felt like I needed another four or five Zs, can we get another zeitline?”
“The spares are in the braid, there ain’t no more till Rach shows up.” Eula looked back down the hall at the three cables coming in — the thick braided one, Dehzi’s, and hers. “Wait a minute,” she said. “I’ve got an idea.”
Eula stood face to face with Kierra, guiding Kierra’s hand to her zeitline quick disconnect. “Pull the pin, then plug the zeitline into your suit, and don’t waste any time. You’ll feel a bit of a surge when you connect.”
“You ever done this before?” Kierra asked, “disconnected inside a zeitle?”
“A couple times. Saved my life once.” Eula squeezed Kierra’s hand. “Pull the pin and get Dehzi out of here so we can get a move on with those kids.”
There was a two second pause, then…
Light and shadows shifted and blinked. Eula caught snapshot stills of Kierra, of Dehzi reappearing from the black. Counting: One Mississippi. Two women crumpled on the floor, then an empty hall. Two Missis– A hand dropped onto her shoulder and a frisson of time radiated outward from her waist. A Z-mask pressed against hers. “Y’okay, Eula?” asked Nora.
A brief flash of nausea flitted over her and dissipated. “Yeah, Dehzi okay?”
“Pretty much. Kierra had to haul her out. A deputy’s taking her to the clinic to make sure there ain’t no blood clots or anything. Oh and she threw up in her suit.”
Eula winced. “How long I been locked?”
“Half hour. I took a reading on that thing. It’s just under thirty-two.”
“Thirty-two. That’s gotta be some kind of record. That is not good. That is really not good. Any ETA on Rach yet?”
“Last I heard, couple hours. She’s swinging by their storage unit to get extra scoops, zeitline, and a backup backup generator.”
Eula preceded Nora out of the house and headed straight for the perimeter. As Eula pulled off her Z-mask, she heard a ruckus by one of the traffic barriers. A woman was pleading with one of the deputies. “Mick!” Eula barely heard above the generator racket. “Monae… …to play! …think…your kids.” She pointed at the house.
The hairs stood up on Eula’s arms, slithered up her shoulders and neck.
Mick shouted to the deputy, who let the woman pass. She ran to Mick and Melinda. Tears streamed down her face as she spoke, Mick holding one arm, Melinda the other.
They all turned to stare at Eula.
“Oh shazam,” she said.
Nora, with Eula checking the math over her shoulder, reworked the carbon dioxide poisoning formula on the clipboard, adding in a third child. Trapped now for six hours, leaving… six to get air in or the kids out.
The parents huddled together. Melinda kept a hand clamped over her mouth to stifle throat-cracking sobs. The new woman, Esmy, wrapped her arms so tight around herself her shoulders curled in. Mick, red-faced, fists on hips, thumbs hooked in belt loops, looked to be staring a smoking hole into the asphalt.
Eula looked up past the traffic barricade, past the deputies, past the crowd. “C’mon, Rach…”
“Z twenty-eight’s the best we can do combined,” Rach stated around a hot-cinnamon jaw breaker. Coal-striped silver-gray hair plastered itself back along one side of her head, windblown from racing to the Howser’s. “And that’s with yours and my’s generators and scoops redlined. And the zeitsuits and quilts are only rated to thirty. There should be some margin, but I don’t know what’d happen if we tried to pump thirty-two through them, if we could even pull that much.” The jawbreaker switched sides. “Which we can’t.”
Rach glanced at the house, snorted. “Never even heard of a thirty-two. A twenty-eight or -nine we could force, but…that extra four is too much.” She kicked the street with a steel-toed boot, scattering bits of asphalt and gravel.
The circle of people standing out in the middle of the street — Rach, Eula, Patrice, Nora and Kierra, Rach’s power mechanic, and two of her zeitdivers — lapsed into stifled silence, sweating in the mid-afternoon sun.
Nora scratched her head. “There ain’t no way we can push through four Zs? This zeitle goes from zero to seven. Apart from the zyst.”
“It’s not the difference, it’s the gradient,” Rach said, “how fast the magnitude changes. A person can’t just push themselves through an e exponential four Z gradient in the span of one inch. Time’s passing fifty times slower on one side of it than the other. Once you’re partway across half of you would be starving for the blood your heart ain’t got around to pumping over yet from the other side. A person don’t last long in that state.”
“Dehzi was lucky,” Patrice said. “The gradient across her was pretty small, hit her all at once, and was high Z, so nothing had time to get out of sync.”
Eula lifted her head and inhaled deep. “C’mon, everybody,” she said, skipping from face to face. “We got four hours before the CO2 concentration…”
Kierra’s head started ticking back and forth.
“What is it, you?” Rach said sharp. “We ain’t got nothin’ here. If you got somethin’ spit it out.”
“I don’t know if it’s even…”
“We’ll figure out if it’s worth anything.” Eula said. “What’re y’all thinkin’?”
“If… if we can’t push through the gradient… could we cut… like a door or something? Focus the dispersers? Carve a hole through it?”
“Dispersers disperse,” Patrice said. “They dissipate a broad-area zeitle, not carve a hole in one.”
“Yeah, but, maybe zeit tape up some boxes, cut a slit on one side? Fill ’em with dispersers and pump in a butt-ton of time? It’ll get forced through the slots and concentrated… like a blade? Enough to cut?”
“Like heating up an iron ring to cut a hole in a sheet of ice,” Rach mused.
Eula stared at Kierra. “Best thing I’ve heard.”
“Only thing I’ve heard,” said Rach.
Eula’s brow furrowed. “We only got four or five hours and the big zeitscoops and generators are at least a day away.” She looked over at the parents, huddled together, fear and anxiety radiating off them. She turned to Patrice and nodded.
Patrice turned to Rach’s power mechanic, “Let’s go make some noise.”
Eula’s and Rach’s four 450-horsepower semi-truck engines howled on their flatbeds. That and the teeth-chattering whine from the generators obliterated every other sound for fifty yards. Patrice and Rach’s power mechanics, wearing heavy protective earmuffs, flashed a flurry of hand signals and made adjustments to the generator and zeitscoop controls on their adjacent trucks. From outside the zeitle perimeter Eula watched Nora and one of Rach’s crew haul the last of the makeshift zyst cutter boxes through the door.
Patrice strode away from the generator trucks, pushing her earmuffs up. She waved Eula toward the side of the house opposite the scoops and trucks to where they didn’t have to yell too much to be heard.
“I’m goin’ in this time,” Eula said. “Rach and I are the only ones who’ve been inside anything upwards of a twenty.”
Patrice clasped Eula’s shoulders and pulled her close. “It’s gonna be dicey.”
“Yeah, we could use a little luck.”
“Luck’s got nothing to do with it. Fortune favors the prepared.” Patrice gestured towards the line of trucks in the street, the howling generators, the crews checking lines and scoops, deputies keeping onlookers at bay. “We are prepared. You lead, we got your back. Always.”
Eula turned her head away, wiped her eyes.
“Fast thinking, Eula dear,” Patrice said. “It’s your gift. You’re probably gonna need it in there. You’re the best partner, best friend, and best sister I’ve ever had.”
“Sweetie, I’m the only sister you’ve ever had.”
Patrice laughed, her eyes glistening.
“Alright, let’s get those kids out.”
“Good zeit, Eula, I love you.” They walked hand-in-hand back around the corner of the house. Then Patrice strode off towards the trucks, sliding the earmuffs back down over her ears.
The thick braided zeitline jerked as a tsunami of time breached the insulators and slammed into the jury-rigged ring of boxes stacked up against the zyst. The boxes went from black to zeit-taped gray; they shuddered but held firm. Eula watched from around the hallway corner.
Nothing happened.
Then a twinge of gradient nausea flickered through her belly as the surface of the zyst within the ring crazed with fine white filaments wrapping penny-sized, faintly glowing, pulsating purple-black granules. The filaments and granules roiled the surface while a flickering blue glow slid out from underneath the ring of zyst cutters.
A blue-white flash erupted and an opening appeared within the ring. Glimmers of light, like a blue campfire’s embers, skipped and flickered around its expanding perimeter. Through the opening Eula glimpsed the doorway to the living room and could just make out dimly illuminated carpet and the leg of an end table.
She stepped around the corner and approached the zyst. Nora pulled zeitline in through the front door and dragged it down the hall behind her. There was no time to waste. Eula bumped on the little in-suit oxygen tank and headband flashlight, and checked again that the three zeitquilts were plugged in to her belt.
Nora tapped Eula on the shoulder, leaned into the back of her Z-mask. “Good zeit, Eula.”
Eula nodded, took a deep breath, gave a mittened thumbs up, and stepped over the bottom zyst cutter.
Gradient nausea and blue flickering washed over her and receded as she passed through the gap. In passing she saw the cut edge lined with spiky blue-tinged blisters.
She hurried into the living room swiveling her headlamp. Just beyond a recliner the zyst surface emerged from the floor, arced across the room and up into the popcorn textured ceiling. A sliding glass door next to a TV stood open.
Sweeping her light around the room there was no sign of the kids. She unplugged the zeitquilts, laid them out, and walked through the sliding door to a playroom with toy chests and bookshelves lining the walls. One end of a rolled up play mat emerged from the painfully black inner surface of the zyst where the far wall should have been.
Huddled in the corner to her right were two children, either asleep or unconscious. Eula sidled towards them while scanning for the other child. She slung the girl over her shoulder, adjusted her footing, then slipped an arm around the boy’s chest. She lifted him with a grunt and headed back toward the sliding door. She spotted the third child, Monae, curled up in a blanket in a nook between two bookcases. She hesitated.
Two birds in the hand, Eula.
She hurried back across the living room to the flickering passage and lowered each child onto a zeitquilt, wrapping and zipping it around them. She clipped onto the girl’s quilt, picked her up, and stepped into the opening. Nora clipped a zeitline jumper onto the quilt while Eula unclipped and turned back for the boy. She clipped on and carried him to the opening. Down the hall beyond Nora, Kierra rounded the corner with the girl; Nora took the boy and stepped back.
Around the edge of the opening the embers had flared into an almost steady glow, and blisters and spikes were now spreading across the inner zyst surface.
Eula hurried back toward the playroom. Halfway there an actinic flash flared behind her. The whole interior of the zyst flickered. She froze as a wave of nausea surged through her. She looked back. The hole was now half as high as it had been, and sharp, faceted spikes were spreading across the zyst’s interior shell for several yards around it.
“Hell,” she said and took off for the playroom. Through the sliding door and turn; four strides and her feet went out from under her, smacking her down hard.
The zeitline. Eula got to her knees and yanked for slack, but the line gave nothing. She tried to align better with the door and pulled again. Still nothing.
She pulled the disconnect pin. A wave of gradient sickness washed over her, but settled rapidly in the zyst’s Z-zero interior. She picked up the unconscious girl as icy white light flashlit the room through the sliding door. Oh no no no no no. Eula rushed back to the living room, blinking away afterimages and ignoring the disconnected zeitline. Her breath burst out in relief as she saw the passage still open, but it was now barely above her knees. The interior zyst surface roiled with growing, faceted shapes. Fast strobing bursts flashed from the opening.
She zipped Monae into the zeitquilt, spun a couple loops of zeitline around her and pushed her, head-and-shoulders first, into the opening. Nora took hold from the outside while Eula guided the girl away from the zyst’s blistered edges until she was through.
Eula fell to her knees, criss-crossed zeitline tight around her chest and shoulders, flattened to her belly, and reached through the opening, avoiding the blazing blue edges. One hand’s mitt fingers grabbed onto the bottom zyst cutter.
Another scalding flash, followed by pitch blackness. She waited for her vision to clear. It didn’t. A hot knife swept up her forearms. Dead silence but for a pounding in her ears, her heart trying to pump blood where it no longer had time to go. She couldn’t move her arms; they were locked in place, locked in time like Dehzi’s still form. The hot blade swept past her elbows. Eula ducked her head down, tried to bury it against her chest. Not gonna work. Heat baked the back of her scalp. Pounding in her ears. The zyst. Collapsing. Freezing. Darkness.
Oh me.
Eula’s heart slammed against her ribcage. Her arms and legs felt encased in ice. They thawed and everything caught fire. Searing pain lanced across one hand. She heard a distant shout: “Dr. Philippa!” Eula groaned. Sound faded. Pain faded. Time faded. Or did it? Start counting. One Mississippi…
A hub-bub of voices. Close by.
“Sheriff Taylor!” someone called.
She heard a vaguely familiar man’s voice. “Y’all gonna be fine, Miss Eula, we got you now.”
A hoarse voice in her ear: “Eula?”
Silence.
Jostled awake, she felt… motion? Rolling. Nausea but not like gradient sickness. A bumpy ride. Cold air brushed her face. Red and blue lights flickered. She glimpsed her breath, tried to turn her head. Passed out. Awake. Count again. Two Mississi–
A buzzing droned its way into Eula’s brain. It stopped, then started again, louder. Buzzzz, silence, buzzzz, silence. Like her sister’s snoring from when she was a kid.
She opened her eyes. Ceiling tiles and a dim fluorescent light. She rolled her head to one side. Red, amber, and green lights winked and glowed on hazy equipment. Her left hand hurt. She rolled her head to the other side. Large windows letting in daybreak light silhouetted a figure curled up in a chair. A woman. The snoring was coming from her.
Eula tried to speak, but nothing came out. She tried again, managing a small sound.
The woman started, lifted her head, shaking off sleep. “Eula!” she cried, gathering as if to spring from the chair. But she moved slowly (Z two and a quarter thought Eula), scooting forward, bracing her arms on the chair, pushing herself to her feet. She shuffled to the bed, leaned over, cupped a hand alongside Eula’s face. “Oh Eula,” she said from deep in her throat. “It is so good to have you back.”
The face belonged to Patrice, but a really tired and worn-out Patrice. Deep lines creased her forehead, and more ran from her nose to each side of her mouth.
“How long have I… been here?” Eula murmured.
“They cracked you out four days ago. The doctors say you’re doing okay, and in a couple weeks you’ll be fine.” She stroked Eula’s forehead. Patrice’s brow furrowed, deepening the wrinkles. “But I have to tell you -“
“The kids… they okay? And Dehzi?”
“They all got out. Dehzi’s fine. But -“
“You need to go rest,” Eula said. She noticed Patrice’s hair now hung down either side of her face and was cut off at the shoulders. Thinner and mostly gray. The waist-length braid Eula always had to remind her to pin up was gone. She scanned her sister’s face anew, studied the furrows, the wrinkles. She’d… aged.
Eula sought her sister’s eyes. “How long?” she said.
Patrice took a breath. “Twenty-six years, Eula. And some. It’s almost Christmas.”
A monitor’s beeping accelerated, synched with the heart beating in Eula’s ears.
“We tried everything,” Patrice said. “More generators, more cutters, nothing worked. The deep zeitle folks came in, they couldn’t even scratch the surface. Scientists flew in from all over the world. Years they were at it, finally said all we could do was wait and hope.” Patrice closed her eyes and shook her head. “Once in awhile someone would come in with a new idea, but…” She shrugged. “Nothing. After years of that, of nothing, I’m sorry, most of us had to move on.”
“S’okay, sis,” Eula said, reaching up slowly to stroke her sister’s hair. Her index, middle, and ring fingers were bandaged…and missing beyond the first joint. What…?
Patrice wiped her eyes, quietly snuffled. “It was Monae, Doctor Monae, who finally got you out.”
Eula wrested her gaze away from her bandaged fingers, squinted at Patrice. “Doctor? Monae..?”
“I have waited so long to meet you,” a voice sighed from the door. Eula turned her head slowly. A woman, thirties maybe. A long dark braid swung from the back of her head over her shoulder, reaching just below her waist.
Eula stared.
Monae walked to the bedside. “Welcome back.”
“You’re that little thing I pushed out of the zyst?”
“I woke up in the hospital with a terrible headache and mom hugging me tight, telling me a hero named Eula went into the darkness to save us but didn’t make it out.” Her dark eyes glistened in the growing dawn light.
“This kid,” Patrice gestured towards Monae, “started hanging around whenever we cleared a zeitle. She’d come tearin’ up on her bike and pester everybody with questions. I took her on as a gofer, then a summer hire. I had her diving zeitles early on, she’s a natural. Hired her full time to help earn money for college.”
Monae spoke softly, eyes fixed on Eula. “My PhD thesis was ‘Characterization of Planar Crystalline Zysts’, but it was really ‘Saving Eula Banks’. The first time I got permission to visit the zyst I bawled my eyes out right there in the hallway.” Monae looked up to the ceiling, gulped deep breaths. “You were there in front of me. I couldn’t see you, but the zyst cutter box was still there, where you’d reached out when the zyst crystallized.
Eula’s amputated fingers throbbed.
“That box was a shrine; pictures taped to it, a vase. And the zyst was so… black. No reflection, no nothing.
I’d talk to you while I ran tests. Tell you what I’d figured out, what ideas I was chasing, go through the equations with you. I promised you I’d find a way to get you out.”
Patrice leaned in. “And she invented a whole new scientific field to do it.”
Monae smiled. “Zyst crystallography. I mapped out a matrix of thirty-six cleavage planes, and calculated frequencies that would fracture the crystalline lattice structure but leave you unharmed.”
“And four days ago, she whacked ’em all at the same time. Whole thing shattered,” Patrice said. “All that crystallized time fizzled up in the blink of an eye — didn’t leave a trace. And now you’re back with us.”
The morning sun was full up, pouring warm winter gold into the room. Patrice reached over and gently took hold of Eula’s injured hand.
Eula smiled. “Everyone out, and being back with my partner, best friend, and sister is the best thing I could ask for.”
Patrice smiled back. “Even better than having a whole new scientific field invented for you?”
“Even better.”
END
“The Crystal Zyst: A Eula Banks, State Certified Zeitle Engineer, Story” © Marc A. Criley, A new story first published here in Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores on July 31, 2019
Marc Criley avidly read fantasy and science fiction for over forty years before finally deciding to try his own hand at writing it. When he’s not writing or working full-time as a software developer, Marc and his wife “manage” a household of cats and Tammy the Dog at his home in the hills of North Alabama. Marc maintains a blog at kickin-the-darkness.com [1] and noisily tweets as @That_MarcC.
Illustration by Fran Eisemann using stock from NASA and Pixabay
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