“If it makes you feel any better, they look just like us,” Despoina says. She shrugs. “You’ve seen one kind of people, you’ve seen them all, right?”
I laugh dryly. “Sure, Des, whatever you say.”
The scene shifts again. I’m Raiden.
I’m hopping out of the cab of my MTV on the outskirts of a dusty ghost town deep within the heart of the Syrian desert. My boots hit the ground with a crunch I’ve come to know and despise. I hate this place, and not only because of the dangers that lurk around every corner. I hate being so far from the sea. From the green. From the sound of crying gulls and the smell of washed-up kelp at low tide. From Cora—I hate being so far from her, most of all. This place is the antithesis of home, and I hate every damn thing about it.
I should have listened to her. I should have stayed. Once this tour is over, I’m done.
I scan the crumbling mud-brick buildings, then make my way to the front of the caravan to join Sergeant Hobbs, who’s pouring over a map drawn in Sharpie atop a satellite image of the town. Kellerman and a couple other corporals stand nearby, awaiting Hobbs’ orders.
“Something up?” I ask Kellerman as I approach.
He crosses his arms and shrugs. “I think Sarge is picking out a different spot to set up base.”
I rub the back of my neck and glance at Hobbs. The sun is behind him, forcing me to squint. We’ll be here for a few weeks, minimum, so it makes sense that he’d want to find the most secure spot to hole up. There are no hostiles here now, but that could always change.
Kellerman pulls a pack of cigarettes and a lighter out from the chest pocket of his fatigues. He opens the pack and plucks a cigarette free, placing it between his lips. “Smoke?” he asks, offering me the open pack.
I shake my head. A bunch of the guys do it—boredom, I suppose—but the habit never really caught on with me.
“Want to go again tonight?” he says, flicking the lighter so a tiny flame burst to life. “Double or nothing?”
I don’t bother to tell him that double or nothing doesn’t apply when the previous prize has already been spent. “Sure, man, whatever you say.”
The scene shifts again. I’m Persephone.
I’m patrolling the perimeter of camp when I sense someone approaching. Not one of us, and not an animal. A person. An anthropos. He’s male, and he’s young. Afraid. Not of us, but of failure. Of letting his people down.
I sense others farther out. I can feel their hostility. Their hunger. Their desperation. Their minds are harder to read than those of my people, but with a little digging, I can pull what I need from their thoughts.
They crossed the mountains days ago on a hunting excursion. The game migrates over the mountains this time of the year, leaving food on the west side of the range scarce. People in their village are already dying of starvation. They can’t go back empty handed. They won’t. It isn’t done.
After the sun set this evening, they saw the glow from the light perimeter we set up around camp. They haven’t been successful in their hunt yet, and their supplies are running low. They want to raid our camp—kill us and take our food. It isn’t personal; it’s a matter of survival, pure and simple.
I consider alerting my spearsisters, but I fear that doing so will ensure only one outcome—bloodshed and death. I don’t want to kill these men, not when all they’re trying to do is provide for their people. I want to help them.
I walk deeper into the shadows and away from camp, angling toward the approaching young hunter. This is his first hunt. He must be successful in order to become a full, marriageable man in the eyes of his tribe. He promised a young woman back in the village that he would return victorious and take her as his first wife. She is carrying his child. He cannot fail.
He sees me before I see him. I can sense it in his thoughts. The channels glowing blue along the length of my hoplon suit turn me into some kind of monster to his eye.
He raises his weapon, a rudimentary bow, and knocks an arrow. I can just make out his outline now, a gray ghost in the moonlight.
“Wait,” I say, slowing my approach as I pluck the correct translation from his mind. His language is harsh, guttural, and the sounds are difficult for my tongue to form. I raise my hands to show him I’m unarmed. “I mean you no harm,” I tell him. I’m close enough now that I can make out his features. He’s younger than I thought—younger than he sees himself.
“Demon!” he shouts and looses the arrow.
I deflect the projectile easily with a flash energy field. The burst of electric blue light flickers in and out of existence in the blink of an eye.
“Please, stop,” I say, halting my approach. “I do not wish to hurt you.”
The boy knocks another arrow and draws it back, loosing it deftly. He may be young, but he’s adept with the bow.
I deflect that arrow just as easily as I did the last.
A sharp sting slices across my cheek. Another arrow, from one of the men farther out. Just a graze, but a few inches to the left, and it could have killed me. I was so focused on the boy that I forgot about the others.
In one smooth motion, I reach over my shoulder and draw my doru from the sheath on my back. With a thought, I extend the golden staff to its full length, nearly tripling it in size. The focus crystal set into the top burns electric blue. I slam the butt of the doru into the earth, sending out a mild shockwave. It won’t hurt the approaching anthropos, but it should startle them. It’s a warning; they won’t win this fight.
“I do not wish to hurt you,” I repeat. “Please, lower your weapons. My people will help you track the herd. We will—”
The boy unleashes another arrow, closely followed by arrows from several of his companions. I deflect them all.
“Please!” I’m all but begging now. Begging them to stop. Begging them to give me the chance to spare their lives. To save them.
But they’re too afraid, and their fear deafens them to my pleas.
Without warning, an energy blast blows past me in a wave, knocking me forward onto my hands and knees. I stay there for several seconds, head hanging. I don’t want to look up. I don’t want to see the carnage. A blast powerful enough to knock me off my feet while protected by my hoplon suit would rip apart anyone else.
The anthropos . . . the boy . . .
“I’m sorry, Peri,” Despoina says, her soft footsteps approaching me from behind. “Your heart was in the right place, but you cannot reason with people when they’re desperate . . .” She stops beside me. “From the moment they first spotted our light, their fate was sealed. This was the only outcome.” After a moment, she adds, “There’s nothing you could have done.”
The scene shifts and, once again, I’m Raiden.
I’m standing watch from the roof of a two-story mudbrick building at the edge of town. I scan the western stretch of desert through the night scope on my rifle, slowly sweeping from north to south. There’s nothing to see, just like there’s been nothing to see the past three hours.
When my scan takes me so far south that I’m looking at the edge of the town, I start the slow scan back north.
I catch sight of movement, maybe a hundred yards out.
At first, I think it’s a large desert cat. But after it gains a few more yards, I can tell it’s walking on two legs. It’s a person. A small person.
I watch it for a few more seconds, then pull away from the scope.
It’s a kid.
My first instinct is to put down the rifle, run out into the desert, and bring the kid in to safety—the desert is no place for a child to wander alone. But rational thought quickly shoves instinct aside. Why is a kid walking through the desert all alone in the middle of the night? I can’t think of a single good reason, at least, not one that doesn’t include the most terrifying word I know: ambush.
I raise the rifle and peer through the scope.
The kid is closer now, maybe sixty or seventy yards out.
I watch them for another ten yards.
The kid is carrying something, hugging the thing to its chest, but I can’t tell what, exactly. From the size, I think it might be a stuffed animal or a doll.
I watch the kid slowly amble closer. Ten more yards. Twenty.
There’s a blinking light on whatever they’re carrying.
“Shit,” I hiss.
I know what the kid is carrying now—a bomb. And depending on what it’s made of, a bomb that size would be able to demolish half of this shoddily built town.
“Stop!” I shout, then repeat the word in Arabic and Kurdish when the kid doesn’t slow.
But still, the kid keeps coming.
Maybe the kid speaks Turkish, or Chaldean, or Ashuri, or any other of the handful of languages spoken in this godforsaken place, but I don’t know a single word from any of those languages. Hell, for all I know, the kid could be deaf.
Much closer, the bomb will be within range to take out not only my post, but our base camp a few buildings into town. Twenty-seven peoples’ lives are at risk.
I make a split-second decision and pull the trigger.
The explosion throws me onto my ass, and the mudbrick structure beneath me shudders. I sling my rifle over my shoulder and race across the roof, stumbling as the tiles give way beneath my feet. I barely make it to the edge of the building and down the ladder erected earlier that day before the building collapses in on itself.
Ears ringing, I stand on the dirt road, staring at the wreckage of the place I’d been moments ago. I stare at the rubble, and all I can think is: I just killed a kid.
A kid.
The ground shakes with the force of another explosion, this one on the other side of town. Then another, closer. Smoke, sand, and chunks of mudbrick blot out the stars. I stare off in the direction of that last explosion, mouth hanging open. It was too close to base camp.
Fearing the worst, I start running, heading deeper into the town. I skid to a stop when I see that the building where we’ve set up camp is still standing. I can hear people yelling from within.
I duck behind a half-demolished wall two buildings over and raise my rifle, doing a quick sweep of the surrounding area, searching for other potential suicide bombers.
Without warning, the building housing our camp explodes.
“NO!” I scream, too stunned to seek cover.
Something slams into my leg, and searing pain brings me to my knees.
Suddenly, I’m not Raiden anymore. I’m not Persephone, either. I’m me, Cora Blackthorn, and I’m aware that I’m dreaming.
Standing beside Raiden, I look at his profile. His expression is one of shock. Of disbelief. Of heartbreak. Tears streak through the dirt caked on his cheeks. I watch as he yells into the night sky, then buries his face in his hands.
“There’s nothing he could have done,” a woman says from behind me. Her words are foreign, though I understand their meaning, and I recognize her voice: Persephone.
I whip around, but before I can get a good look at her, she—along with Raiden and the town—is gone.
23
Gasping, I woke and sat bolt upright in bed, a ball of tension knotted in my gut. The room was dark, the only light the electric blue glow coming from the pendant hanging around my neck.
A word popped into my head: regulator. That’s what the pendant was called. I knew it, because in the dream, Persephone had known it. A pattern was becoming clear; each successive time I dreamed I was Persephone, I had more access to her knowledge than I’d had the previous time.
Like knowing that when the regulator’s stone was amber, it was active, creating a barrier in my mind that blocked what Persephone had thought of as powers. And when the stone was blue . . . I couldn’t quite remember what it did, then. Everything I had known in the dream—everything Persephone had known—was slipping away, fading into the shadows at the edges of my mind.
I looked down at the pendant and touched my fingertip to the glowing blue stone. Without thinking, I traced a circle around the stone. The brighter blue faded to subtly glowing amber, and I could feel the tension oozing from my muscles. Whatever this thing was supposed to do when the stone glowed amber, I knew what it did for me—it kept me safe. It kept me sane.
Even as the latent knowledge from Persephone faded, the scenes featuring Raiden grew crisper in my mind’s eye. In the dream I’d been Raiden. Just like I’d been Persephone. Both sets of dreams had felt like reliving memories, and yet they’d left me with the haunting aftertaste of an episode, just without the debilitating physical side effects.
I felt fine. Disturbed, but otherwise all right.
I heard a moan come from my left, a half-dozen feet away. I could just make out the lumpy outline of Raiden in the other bed, tossing and turning on the mattress. He’d kicked the covers off, baring his torso from the hips up. His left shoulder and arm were covered in black ink, but I couldn’t tell much more than that in the darkness. The sheets were tangled around his legs, and one of the pantlegs of his sweatpants was pushed up to his knee.
“No,” he murmured. “No . . . no . . .”
I blinked, eyes locked on Raiden’s thrashing form. He was talking in his sleep. Was it just a coincidence that he was murmuring the same word he’d screamed to the sky in the dream? No wasn’t exactly a rarely used word. Or was it possible that I’d somehow hijacked Raiden’s dream? His nightmare? His memory?
Was it possible that the flashes of images I saw during my episodes were snippets of memories? Other people’s memories, bleeding out of whoever I inadvertently touched and into me. The flashes of confusing images and sounds had always been too jumbled and muddled to make sense of before, but what if they were more than that. What if, when the stone was blue, the regulator allowed my mind to make sense of the input I was receiving from others?
Raiden let out a heart wrenching sound that was part groan, part cry.
I pushed back my covers, jumped out of bed, and crossed to Raiden’s bedside, unwilling to let him suffer any longer. If he was reliving the scene I’d seen in my dream, his emotional agony had to be crushing him. I knew first hand; I’d felt it when I’d been him.
And even if he was dreaming about some other thing, if something else was troubling him and my dream was just that—a dream—so be it. He was in pain. That much was clear enough. He’d been in pain since he first returned home, only I’d been too chickenshit to reach out to him. Too caught up in feeling sorry for myself to offer him the support he needed. I’d failed him, time and again.
Well, I wouldn’t fail him, now.
I reached for Raiden with my uninjured arm, but hesitated, my hand hovering over his bare shoulder. Gritting my teeth, I deliberately lowered my hand. His skin was coated in a sheen of cold sweat.
“Raiden,” I whispered, giving his shoulder a gentle jostle.
He stilled, but he didn’t wake.
I waited several seconds, then shook him harder. “Raiden . . .”
He startled awake, sucking in a sharp breath. His eyes popped open, and he rolled onto his side, toward me. His hand was suddenly around my neck. His fingers tightened. He was crushing my throat, lost in some violent state of half-sleep.
I sputtered and gasped, but there was no way for me to get air in, let alone get any words out. I clawed at his hand, with both of mine, trying to wedge my fingertips between his fingers and my throat. The stitches in my forearm pulled, making the wound burn, but survival instinct shoved the pain to the back of my mind, and I struggled harder.
It was no use. Raiden’s grip was a vice of flesh and bone.
I slapped at his hand, his arm, his chest—anywhere I could reach—but it didn’t do any good. My throat was on fire, my lungs burning with the need to expand. I could feel myself giving up.
A switch flipped in my mind, and it was like my body suddenly knew what to do, even if my mind didn’t.
I raised my arm straight up and twisted into Raiden, then bent my elbow as I jerked my arm down, slamming it against his as hard as I could
.
Raiden’s elbow buckled, and his fingers slipped from my neck.
Without losing momentum, I continued the twist and raised my other arm, smashing my elbow into the side of his jaw.
Raiden cried out, temporarily stunned, then lunged at me.
I lurched backward, letting him tumble off the bed.
With a grunt, he landed on his side on the floor.
I rolled Raiden onto his back with my bare foot and sat down on top of him, securing his arms to his sides with my knees and planting my left hand on the floor beside his head.
“Raiden,” I said, voice harsh as I raised my hand to slap him. The strike stung my palm, and I shook out my hand before pulling it back for a second slap. “Raiden! Wake up!” The words sounded strange, like I’d suddenly acquired a foreign accent.
Raiden’s face transformed, his expression going from enraged to pained.
I froze, arm still primed to strike. I wanted to lower my arm, but I couldn’t. It was like I wasn’t in control of my own body.
Raiden winced, closing his eyes and stretching his jaw from side to side. “Ow . . .” When he opened his eyes again, it was clear that he was really seeing me. Finally.
The switch that had flipped within me, allowing me to fight him off, switched back, and once again, I was in control of my body. I lowered my arm, planting my hand on the floor near his ear and letting my head hang down. What had just happened within me was almost as frightening as the physical struggle with Raiden had been. For a few seconds, all I did was breathe.
“You hit me,” Raiden said. There was hurt in his voice—emotional, not physical.
A harsh laugh escaped from my throat. “Only because you were choking me . . .”
I peered down at him.
He looked shocked, horrified, even. His eyes traveled down to my neck, where he was bound to find an angry red mark in the shape of a hand. His hand. In a few hours, I would undoubtedly have a pretty nasty bruise.
Raiden tugged his arms free and raised his right hand, reaching for my neck.
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