The 13 Secret Cities (Omnibus) by Cesar Torres

shape as if a 3 - D map had turned on in my brain. The beams floated about ten yards in front of us, and they allowed me to see through and into the darkness. Their haunting tone droned far and wide .
    What is this place?
    When I understood what I was seeing, I cupped my hand over my mouth.
    Up until that moment, I had spent nineteen years—my whole life—able to see the colors of the world. Red and indigo, emerald and brown, purple and blue, they came to life when the sun or artificial light radiated onto objects that could reflect them. In daylight, back in Chicago, I could see the blue of the lake, the gray of the skyline and the green of the trees. My favorite had always been green.
    But nothing about that sunlight and those colors had prepared me for what I could feel and understand now through this dark.
    We crouched in a vast place, like a desert. Rocks of all shapes and sizes lined the ground. I felt them in absolute detail. Some were razor - sharp, and now that I could see their jagged edges, I was surprised I hadn’t cut myself open when we jumped over the wall.  
    The ground was littered with little bones. And big bones, too. They resembled human bones, but I couldn’t be sure about all of them.
    Off to the sides, I spotted crumbling chunks of stone, and a quick glance behind me showed me the wall where José María and I crouched. Its walls also reminded me of coal. The wall’s edges were decorated in shimmering runes that I couldn’t read.
    I let go of José María’s hand, and I looked down at myself.  
    This is not normal.  
    I turned my palms up and down, over and over. No matter which way I moved them, the skin looked black as night. What’s more, I could feel and understand in incredible detail. The narrow ridges on my palms became like maps carved in onyx. Whatever the cones allowed me to see was magnified, allowing my to feel every single thing as if I had an electron microscope.
    I turned the hands over, and the skin, with its imperfections and tiny triangular patterns, was as black as the downy hairs on the back of my hand. If this was what the light was doing to my skin—
    I jerked my head to the left to look at my brother.
    The fifteen-year-old who went by the name of José María Montes stared out at me through eyes whose irises and pupils were as black as crow feathers. His skin, his clothes and everything on his being looked as if it had been bathed in the thinnest layer of tar. He parted his lips in surprise as he stared at my own black face and skin, and I could see the inside of his mouth, with its tongue and teeth—all of it was black now. He moved his lips, but no sound came through. We could see each other finally, but we still couldn’t speak.
    And then the creature roared from behind the beams of light. The bells rang again.  
    The beast had stalked us well, because when it pounced, we had nowhere to go.  

    Now I was able to understand more about the imminent violence that approached. Though the beast moved with the speed of a jungle cat, I could now understand how the cones had sprung from its head. The creature was the one making the cones with its dreadful musical tone.
    The animal lunged.
    The beams arced toward the sky, and they traveled over several yards, sweeping a over heaven that bore no stars.
    As the beams crossed the air, I saw the beast in detail.
    The body was long and ragged but human. Its sinewy arms and legs bare; the skin hairless and smooth. Its coal-black skin shone with the sickly texture of diseased skin. Its toenails were long and curved—talons. It was a body that looked ill and strong at the same time, as if someone had taken a corpse and given it incredible strength.
    And the beams floated in front of its shoulders.
    They are not headlights, and they’re not flashlights. Those beams are coming from its head.
    I saw the creature’s face and its long jaw, its folded - back ears, the hard skull that tapered.
    It was not a human head.
    The shoulders