New Title 1 (27 page)

The question was, were their differences adaptive or malignant?

He could absorb and adjust their energy fields, but he couldn’t decide with assurance whether the adjustment would end up strengthening or weakening the entities.

His inclination was to assume that their differences were adaptive, and that was why they had the power to bind his matepair. After all, the others of their species had been easy to destroy.

But acting without sufficient data ran counter to his nature.

Do something,
Viator urged him, flickering back and forth across the limis.
Do something, or I will enter without you and leave those creatures strewn across the multiverse.

If you destroy them, the guardians will swarm us and drive us back to the void.

I will not wait any longer!

Bide, then. I will act.
Auctor reluctantly set himself to scanning the boundaries of their hyperverse and stretched a questing tentacle forward across the threshold. Perhaps if he erased the physical anomalies within the invoking entity, he would destroy the entity’s unusual power.

Author Bio

Dru Pagliassotti
is the author of the award-winning steampunk novel
Clockwork Heart
and her short stories have been published in a variety of zines and anthologies. She is currently co-editing
Day Terrors
, a horror anthology from The Harrow Press. A professor of communication at California Lutheran University, Dru also recently co-edited the scholarly volume
Boy’s Love Manga: Essays on the Sexual Ambiguity and Cross-Cultural Fandom of the Genre
.

Artist Bio

Katja Faith
is a twenty-two-year-old married artist from Belgorod, Russia. Her art tends to be surrealistic and dark. She happily describes herself as “a kind fairy, just in a bad mood.”

See more of Katja’s art at katjafaith.deviantart.com.