Afterglow

by Karsten Knight

The steam started to rise out of the water, enveloping them in a fine, warm mist. “Just pretend for old time’s sake,” he said, “that there’s no world outside. It’s just you and me floating in our own private cloud.”

  “For old time’s sake,” she agreed, and pressed her lips to his.

  The cloud slowly enshrouded them, and to any remaining bystanders on the beach they might have looked like two teenage spirits, deeply in love, vanishing into the great abyss.

  REUNITED

  New Zealand, 2080

  Johanna sat at the bar, a near-empty bottle in her hand. The rest of her fellow crew members—all men—were scattered around the bar. Most of them were playing darts or hitting on the few local women who were unlucky enough to stumble into this pub on this night. The women came for a drink and maybe a little attention; what they discovered instead were a lot of sex-starved sailors with wandering eyes and hands.

  Those men had learned better than to sit next to Johanna.

  After all, she was Joaquin’s girl.

  The bartender continued to polish a glass in front of her, eyeing her, but she kept her gaze on the old, broken holo-screen, which flickered with age. The three-dimensional image showed a torn-up field and a gaggle of rugby players wrestling for a ball. Johanna had no idea of the rules of the game, but the barkeep had confused her Polynesian roots for New Zealander and become convinced that she was originally from the island, even after she had assured him that she had grown up in Toronto, and she was on shore just for the night, before the crew left port tomorrow.

  She felt the stranger looming behind her before he even had a chance to say anything. His shadow spilled over her like an oil slick, blocking the light from the dingy electric lantern overhead.

  Johanna didn’t even give him a chance to draw first blood. “Oh, come on,” she said, over her shoulder, without even looking at him. “You should know that you’re supposed to think of the pickup line, then walk over. Not the other way around. What is this, amateur hour?”

  Still, he said nothing, but from his shadow she could see that he was gesturing with his hands. “Are you listening to a word I’m saying?” she started to say, swiveling around on her barstool.

  She stopped when she saw the stranger. He was a strikingly handsome man, with a dark, even tan, and hair cropped close to his skull. Either he came from a life of hard, manual labor, or he was just naturally built, because his forearms were like small logs. She could tell that his T-shirt concealed some hard, toned lines as well.

  But it wasn’t the man’s beauty that stopped her mid-sentence. It was the fact that he was gesturing wildly with his hands, alternating between signs and then touching his throat.

  The man was a mute.

  “I am so sorry,” Johanna said. She clamped a mortified hand down over her forehead. “If I’d known you couldn’t speak . . .”

  Then the stranger’s hands fell back to his sides, and a devious grin spread across his face. “There’s nothing wrong with my vocal cords. I just wanted to see you squirm.”

  Johanna crossed her arms. “Wow, this must be a new record for me,” she said. “You’ve only put two sentences together, and I already hate your guts.”

  The stranger nodded back toward the door. “Want me to give it a second try? I’m sure if I worked really hard, I could have made you hate me in one sentence.”

  “Great. Think of one and come back tomorrow. I’ll be here.” Johanna spun back to face the counter.

  The stranger slid onto the barstool next to her. “Here’s the thing. I fully acknowledge that I’ve blown whatever remote chances with you I thought I had, before I awkwardly approached you from behind and inconveniently found myself speechless. I assume, from the calluses on your hands and from the surly coworkers of yours who have invaded this bar, that you probably work on the boat that pulled into port this morning, and that romancing you is futile when you’ll just set sail again tomorrow. Your general standoffishness tells me that you’re either not looking for romance or you’ve got a boyfriend, and the fact that a room full of horny, sex-starved sailors are keeping their distance from you like you’re radioactive suggests that it’s probably the latter. So,” he said, and propped up his head on his beefy fist, peering at her profile. “Think of this like a trade: I buy you a drink, in return for you enduring a conversation with me so I can save face. Everybody wins.”

  Johanna finally gave him the courtesy of eye contact. “That doesn’t buy you much time. I drink very fast.”

  “Fortunately, I talk very fast.” The stranger held up two fingers to the bartender, already assuming she’d agreed to his terms.

  Johanna pushed away her empty bottle and accepted the fresh beer from the bartender. “You know, some say persistence is a virtue. I say that persistence can get you killed.”

  “You’d be surprised what I’m impervious to,” the stranger replied. He took a sip of his beer to cover a smile.

  When he turned back to her, he could see something in her eyes as she peered at him. She’d shucked the whole standoffish act, replaced it with curiosity . . . and if he wasn’t mistaken, the first symptoms of déjà vu. “What’s your name, stranger?” she asked.

  “Colton Halliday,” he said, and held out his bottle to toast her. “Call me Colt, though.”

  “Colt?” She giggled in a way that was disproportionately feminine for a roughneck deckhand. “Are you a man or a horse?”

  This time it was his turn to itch with déjà vu. “Some would say neither,” he said.

  She rubbed her eyes wearily. “I’m sorry, I . . . I was just overcome with this weird sensation. Have we met before?” She studied him, taking in the hard lines of his cheekbones, the disconcerting flawlessness of his skin. He was beautiful to be sure, but there was something surreal to the perfection. He was like one of those computer-generated people she’d seen in old films, where they were so immaculately animated that they looked too real to be real.

  There was a flash of concern on his face, and he shrank back in his seat under the scrutiny of her gaze. “I assure you,” he said finally, “that if we had met before, there is no way I could have forgotten you.”

  This visibly relaxed Johanna, who loosened up a bit with a mocking smile. “And I guess there’s no way I could have forgotten your over-the-top, pitiable charm.”

  But despite their rough start, she played right into his hands: She indulged him in conversation, a real conversation, while they both nursed their beers. She talked about growing up in Canada, adopted as a newborn from a Micronesian orphanage, and about tracking down her long-lost sister twenty years later, who she had been separated from when she was too young to remember. Colt told her about his own life, also as an orphan—raised through foster care in the American southwest before he was emancipated at age sixteen. Taking on what odd jobs he could find, enough to pay his way as he traveled the world. He talked about certain elements of his life in great detail, and shrouded others in vague statements.

  Colt noticed how Johanna wasn’t racing to finish her beer. And if he had any doubts that she was enjoying his company, they were erased the moment she signaled for the bartender to bring them two more.

  Tell me now, he thought with a mental smirk, that persistence doesn’t pay off.

  His entire existence, his mission in life—for the last five hundred years—had hinged upon unflagging persistence.

  And it was about to pay off.

  He could see her eyes growing cloudier the more she drank. She was laughing more frequently, relaxing her posture, even touching his knee once or twice during their conversation. She didn’t even look disapproving when his eyes took the liberty of roaming her body once or twice.

  Little did she realize he knew every inch of her body very well.

  Eventually, while she was in the middle of a story about a bar fight in a Taiwanese port, Colt interrupted her: “Hey, do you want to get some fresh air? Step outside and go for a walk?” She raised an eyebrow at him, so he continued innoce
ntly, “You only get to spend so much time on land, it seems a shame to spend most of it cooped up inside a dingy bar.”

  Johanna’s eyes flicked to the other sailors, perhaps weighing the consequences of following Colt outside. But then she chugged the remainder of her beer, set it down hard on the bar, and took Colt by the hand. He led her through the front door, and as the eyes of the other sailors followed her with surprise and warning, she offered them a wan smile back that said, I’ve got this under control.

  Outside the bar she took the lead, but she only made it three steps before she felt Colt resist. With a masculine but graceful confidence, he spun her back to face him. Before she knew it, she was in his arms, sandwiched between his chest and the brick wall of the bar.

  Still, he paused just shy of kissing her. “What about your boyfriend?” he whispered, like it mattered to him at all.

  Johanna let her lips trace a line along his jaw before whispering back: “What boyfriend?”

  Colt tried to lead her back in the direction of the motel room where he was staying, but Johanna laughed mischievously and dragged him toward the freight ship, Renaissance, that was docked nearby.

  For the next ten minutes Colt lost himself in a cloud of desire and excitement, barely aware of his surroundings as Johanna led him onto the Renaissance, then through a labyrinth of shipping crates. They seemed to be moving away from the crew’s quarters, which made sense if she bunked with her supposed boyfriend. Instead she stopped at a blue shipping crate on the port side of the ship, looking off to the western horizon, where the dusk sun was just finally plunging into the ocean. He didn’t have time to enjoy the view, however, as Johanna heaved open the rusty, squeaky door of the shipping crate.

  “It’s my little oasis,” she explained, then stepped into the dark interior. “My quiet haven on the ship to escape the rest of the crew.” Her face slowly slipped beneath the cover of shadows as she backed inside with a playful smile. “Follow if you dare.”

  Colt did join her, closing the door behind them so there was just a crack of dusk light casting a line against the steel walls. In the corner, a new, fiery light blossomed, revealing Johanna standing in front of an old-fashioned lantern. He didn’t see any matches, and he realized with a thrill what this meant:

  She’s come into her powers.

  The rest of the shipping crate was sparsely decorated for an “oasis”—just a small nightstand in the corner with three books on it, and a quilt and some lumpy pillows spread out on the floor.

  He wasn’t here to critique her interior decorating though. “Lie down,” she told him, nodding to the quilt.

  He did as she said, feeling the hard metal floor of the crate press unforgivingly through the thin quilt. But pain, especially for him, was nothing in pursuit of a dream that had been postponed for the better part of a century now.

  Johanna kneeled over him seductively. Her fingers slipped inside his button-down shirt, and with a harsh rip the buttons popped free, exposing his chest. She ran one hand over his bare skin, and he closed his eyes in ecstasy, taking in the smell of her. “How hot do you like it?” she whispered to him, her breath warm against his hear.

  “Very,” he groaned back, his eyes still closed.

  Then he felt the heat. His eyes shot open. Her hand, now pressing hard against his chest, had ignited in a wreath of fire, searing a deep, red burn into his flesh. He screamed, despite himself, and jerked back, trying to get out from under her.

  She knelt down on him hard though, locking him in place. She pulled her hand away, and even as he struggled to conceal his chest with his shirt, she watched as the molten handprint began to fill in, then lighten, then disappear altogether, as skin fused back over it.

  When the healing was done, she nodded, pensively staring at the scar-less flesh, not looking surprised at all. “I just needed to be sure,” she said, matter-of-factly.

  Something snapped around his ankle. Johanna’s other hand, which had disappeared behind her, had fastened a metal shackle just above his foot. She backed off to admire her handiwork, while he reached down for the restraint. The shackle—which had been concealed beneath the quilt—was snug around his ankle, like it had been molded just for him. The other end of the thick chain was bolted to the shipping crate floor.

  He sprang to his feet and lunged toward Johanna, but the metal leash stopped him, his fingernails swiping just inches from her unconcerned face.

  “Why are you doing this?” he said, trying to muster innocent confusion as best he could, but he was starting to panic. “Johanna, is this some sort of game?”

  Johanna rolled her eyes and leaned against the inside of the crate. “Here’s the deal,” she said. “I’m going to stand here and say absolutely nothing until you drop the ignorance act.”

  “Johanna, I don’t understand!” he cried out. For minutes he pleaded with her, begged her to let him go, saying he’d do anything, pay her anything.

  Johanna just yawned into her hand. Her eyes never left him. They were cold and bored.

  Eventually, he saw that his ruse was going nowhere. So he conceded defeat the only way he knew how. “So,” he said. “How much do you remember? All of it? Some of it? Has it bled in through your dreams?”

  Johanna shook her head. “I remember none of it,” she said, with complete honesty.

  “Then how—”

  She waved for him to be silent, then pulled up a small stool, still out of his reach. “To answer that,” she said as she sat down, “we have to go back seventy years . . . to when Ashline Wilde was still a teenager.”

  He flinched when he heard the name. Another nail driving into his coffin.

  “Put yourself in her shoes,” Johanna said, then corrected herself. “In my shoes, I suppose. You, Colt Halliday, are finally dead, and I want to start living my life like you never existed. But in the back of my mind I know the awful future that’s in store for my next lifetime: I’ll return remembering nothing, and you, who remember everything, will seek me out. The dance begins again, and sooner or later, you’ll win. Maybe not this lifetime. Maybe not the next. But eventually you’ll get to me.

  “Now,” Johanna went on, and this part seemed to excite her. “If I know I won’t remember anything when I’m reborn, then my next best bet is to reach out to her—to me—to warn me. But that won’t work either. The old me, Ashline, has to die before the new me, Johanna, is born. I don’t know who the future me will be adopted by, or where, or what her name will be, so there’s really no way to leave a message for her, is there?” Johanna left a pregnant pause. “Unless . . . unless I leave that warning someplace public. Someplace very public.”

  Colt’s eyes widened as he realized what she was getting at, but she’d waited too long to let him finish the story for her.

  “What if,” Johanna continued, “I wrote down my whole story—starting from when I first discovered my volcanic abilities, my identity as Pele, through your fateful arrival in my life . . . and documented all of your treachery, and eventually, your death? And what if, rather than filing that story as nonfiction—because who would ever believe that, really?—I published it as fiction. And what if”—Johanna accented the final “if” triumphantly—“a girl named Johanna, raised in a culture that’s not her own, one day decides to start reading stories about her heritage, about someone just like her. She finds the book that Ashline wrote and realizes that the girl described in the books has all the same fiery powers that she’s just discovered herself. It could be coincidence, it could be fiction, but then again . . . maybe it’s not.”

  “Johanna—” Colt tried to interject, but as much as Johanna was curious to hear whatever bullshit he’d try to manipulate her with, she was too proud to let him interrupt her story.

  “Sure enough, when I did some research, I found Eve and Rose—the new Eve and Rose, that is, living under new names, with new families. I found others from the stories too.” Johanna pointed through the open slit in the crate doors. “That’s why I took a job that al
lowed me to travel so much. I’ve been slowly finding all the people from the last story. Enlightening them. Letting them know that they’re not alone. But there was still one person, one god, I needed to meet to know with absolute certainty that everything Ash had written down was real, a person that in all my travels, I’d never met. . . .” She smiled grimly at him. “Until tonight.”

  “I didn’t mean you any harm,” Colt pleaded with her, sounding like a little boy who’d been caught shoplifting candy. “I wasn’t going to try to mold you back into Pele, you have to believe me! I just . . . I just couldn’t stay away from you. The attraction was too strong.”

  Johanna shook her head. “All you had to do was leave me and my sisters alone. To learn your lesson. But you tracked me down anyway. And you tried to feed me lies from the moment you introduced yourself in that bar. The only thing you were too stupid and arrogant to lie about was your name. Of course, even if you’d changed your name, I still would have recognized you. Names can always change, but flesh—” She pointed to his bare chest, where she’d burned him. “Flesh never lies.”

  Johanna—the girl he once knew as Ashline, and before that as Lucille, and before that as Pele, and in the many lifetimes their paths had crossed throughout history—opened the door to the shipping crate but lingered in the entrance. “I warned you that persistence can be deadly, Colt. Fortunately—or maybe unfortunately—for you, I’m not going to kill you. But I am going to leave you someplace where you’ll never harm me or my sisters again.”

  Colt came at her hard this time, sprinting toward her and the door. Maybe he thought he could pull hard enough that his restraint would snap clean off the floor, but she’d welded it herself, with her own fingers. The chain held fast, and she could hear his ankle break. He howled and dropped to the floor, and came at her on his hands and knees, like an animal. Spittle flew from his mouth.

  Johanna looked down upon him now with pity, as his extended fingers clawed at the toes of her work boots. “I’m not going to sugarcoat it for you,” she said. “If you’re truly invulnerable the way the books say you are, then I guess that means you won’t asphyxiate or drown in this container the way a human would. The bad news: Eternity in here is going to be very boring . . . and very wet. That’s why I’ve been kind enough to leave you a present.” She nodded back toward the nightstand. “I recommend you read it as quickly as you can while that lamp still has fuel left.”