DROP POINT Episode Fifteen: Return of the Shadow

IM COMING FOR U

“So what do you think the U means?” Kenny asked, staring intently at the scrawl across Kyle’s forehead. The two boys were in their bunkroom. “I think it means ‘you’. You know, like the letter is pronounced the same as the word,” Kyle shrugged. He’d gotten over the shock of having been violated in his sleep last night.

“Something about it still gets me. Something’s wrong,” Kenny insisted. He sighed, and stood up. “We should tell someone. The Commander.” “You’re right,” Kyle stood up and left the room, Kenny right behind him. Kyle hung his head so people wouldn’t notice the writing on his forehead. When they got to the Commander’s office, they noticed the light above the handle was green, so Kyle knocked.

“Come in,” said a familiar voice, and he opened the door. “Kyle Carter,” Piott said, with a smile. “Always a pleasure -” he stopped midsentence. “What is that on your forehead?” “I woke up this morning with it. I don’t remember anything from last night except this weird dream, but it wasn’t there yesterday when I went to sleep,” Kyle explained. “I’m coming for you?” Piott was confused. “Not to be a bother or anything, but I think someone’s going to try to kill me.” “Do you have any idea who would want to harm you?” Piott asked with all calm collectiveness. “Other than, like, everyone in this base, and also half the galaxy? No, not really,” Kyle said sarcastically. “You said something about a dream? Tell me,” Commander Piott demanded. Kyle sat down and began.

Kyle felt suspended, surrounded by the calm, warm blanket of oblivion wrap around him, miles thick. It wasn’t threatening or ominous. Just layers of sleep, crackling around him softly. Sleep at its deepest and most serene. Suddenly, there was a loud, booming noise, as if something had crashed far away underwater. Kyle turned his head slowly, expecting nothing. The booming came again, slightly louder, and more shaped. Itstarted repeating itself, becoming louder and more definite with each strike. To his alarm, the brittle layers started peeling away from Kyle like a rotting onion in fast-forward, agitatedly crackling into nothing. And then he was awake. Or, as awake as you can be in a dream. Everything was hazy. His room was dark, with a creepy, pale blue underlight.

There was someone else in the room. Kyle slowly turned his head toward the thing. It was tall, powerfully built, and completely still, oriented towards him. Kyle made the mistake of blinking. The thing lunged at him, pulling something out of the back of his shirt – a knife! Kyle tried to roll to avoid the shadow, but his bedsheets caught him in their evil, aggravating web. The shadow fell on him, and stabbed the knife into his neck. Kyle opened his mouth to scream, but it placed a palm over his mouth and nose – there was a cloth in his hand, that smelled like

Kyle woke up, surrounded by whiteness. It was blinding. It hurt his eyes. He tried to move, but found he couldn’t. Something stabbed into his forehead, blinding hot. It zigzagged across his skull, searing symbols into his flesh. He tried to scream, but he couldn’t open his mouth. Suddenly, the white faded away into nothing, and the crackling layers of darkness and oblivion slowly wrapped themselves

around him again, protecting him from the shadow.

“Someone is obviously trying to send you a message, Kyle. A bad one,” Piott said. “Did you leave your bunkroom door unlocked?” “No, we never do,” Kyle responded. “Mr. Paranoid over here promptly locks the door at Nine PM.”

“It’s true. I have an alarm for it,” Kenny said, tapping the tablet under his arm. “Okay,” the Commander nodded, eyes flashing toward Kenny for a moment before moving to the computer. He shifted the floaty chair over to the keyboard and started typing.

“Some faculty have the clearance to enter bunkrooms. I’m checking to see if anyone exercised theirs last night,” he explained. “Twenty,” he said under his breath. “It’s so uncommon for one person to use it on any given night. Someone got nineteen other people to enter bunkrooms last night to throw us off their trail.”

“Will you be able to question all of them?” Kenny asked, nervous.

“Yeah, but it will take a long time. And - don’t get me wrong, Kyle. You’re a valuable asset to Luna. It’s just that I have to fly somewhere later this morning, and I’ll be gone the whole day. I’ll be right back on it the day after tomorrow, okay?”

“He was a huge help,” Kyle said as they walked towards the bathroom. Kyle scrubbed for a good fifteen minutes before the words faded away, then met up with Kenny in the library, who was laying upside down in a floaty chair similar to the Commander’s, high up close to the ceiling, away from the library’s second story loft, reading a book on his tablet. Kyle grabbed one of many other floaty chairs the library luxuriously offered and flew up to where Kenny was.

“I’m bored,” Kyle groaned. “You just had your life threatened,” Kenny said without looking up from the transparent tablet. “Doesn’t mean I can’t be bored,” Kyle urged, kicking a bookshelf and making his chair spin slowly, wobbling like a tube on water. “Go read a book.” “I dun wanna read a book.” “Then sleep.” So Kyle curled up in the chair, suspended high above the ground, and fell asleep for a few minutes, deep in thought about the shadow. But he wasn’t paying attention to what his chair was doing. You see, how floaty chairs work is that they send an invisible force thundering down underneath them, using the propulsion to keep it up in the air at a set height. It’s actually really dangerous to have it really high if you don’t have a stability lock turned on, for the reason that Kyle is unknowingly about to demonstrate. Kyle had his chair set to twenty-five feet. The edge of the chair floated over the tip of the large bookshelf, causing the chair to recalculate its height and adjust itself properly, which in turn made the chair tip over as if it were sitting on the very edge of a twenty-five foot cliff. Kyle felt the sensation but couldn’t turn on the stability lock in time before the thing capsized, making him fall on his face on the thin carpet below. Kyle spent that night in the hospital wing, which is where it happened.