“Good luck getting any volunteers.”
“Yes, it’ll most likely be me,” she said. “I’m sure the Framers will love my company.”
“I’m sure.”
Leid fell momentarily silent in reflection, looking around my study. “How’s Aela doing?”
“Better, but not one hundred percent just yet. She’s refused to leave her quarters. Trauma therapy is in process.”
She nodded. “You might want to talk to Yahweh. He isn’t doing too well, either.”
“Why not you?”
“You’re better at that sort of thing.”
She wasn’t wrong. “Noted. I’m going to lift the contract hold in a few more days. I think everyone needs a bit more recuperation, unless you disagree.”
“No, that’s a good idea.” She ashed her cigarette and absorbed the waste, downing the rest of her wine and setting the empty glass on my desk. “I have some things to get caught up on. I’ll see you later.”
I murmured a goodbye as she vacated the room, and then promptly reorganized everything her feet had managed to knock over.
*
Yahweh was in the Metamorphosis Antechamber, just where I thought he’d be. He watched Zira sleep through the capsule window, his expression tired, and lost. He came here every night for about an hour or so after evening meal, but had never looked so somber.
I stood beside him, at first saying nothing.
Yahweh didn’t look at me, but his posture relaxed. “Do I have a new assignment?” he asked.
“No, everyone has a few more days to recollect themselves. It’s been a turbulent week.”
He nodded solemnly, gaze drifting over the capsule. Black veins had surfaced beneath Zira’s skin, snaking through his limbs as metamorphosis took hold. As ugly a sight as this was, his expression was quite serene.
“To think, only a week ago my greatest fear was of him never waking up,” said Yahweh, his voice barely above a whisper. “Now I’m terrified of what will happen once he does.”
“We don’t know what will happen,” I said. “Or when. It could be thousands of years from now.”
“Or it could be right around the corner,” he said, looking at me. His expression was frightened, desperate. “And if so, what can we do?”
“Nothing yet, but that might not be the case when the time comes.”
Yahweh stepped away from the capsule, shaking his head. It was clear that I was doing a piss-poor job of comforting him. “Calenus’s archived annotations state that the Multiverse is simply a colossal event happening all at once, and time is one of the coordinates.”
“The Old Regime barely scratched the surface of what we know now.”
Yahweh spun to face me, scowling. “But Aela just proved that. She was able to see the future. If time isn’t a coordinate, that couldn’t have happened.”
“Had she not gone there and seen that, would it have happened at all?”
Yahweh’s gaze shifted downward. He said nothing, conflicted.
“Zira said she’d been there before,” I added. “That he was sentenced to continue seeing her, to perpetuate a loop of our fate. That in itself suggests the future isn’t necessarily preordained.”
“Or that it is, and no matter what timeline we’re in, the ending is always the same.”
I shrugged. “I suppose, if you want to be a pessimist. He also didn’t seem all there in the head, so you might want to take what he said with a grain of salt.”
Yahweh hung his head. “He looked so… so…”
I placed my hand on his shoulder. “There is much, much more for us to learn. The investigation doesn’t stop here. In fact, it’s only begun. Dwelling on this will only hurt you. If the future is preordained, then it is. If Eschatis holds the secrets of manipulating both time and alternate timelines, then we will discover and wield them. Either way, we’re here right now, and we can only continue to climb until we hit the ceiling.”
Yahweh remained silent for a while. Eventually, he nodded. “I’m sorry, I just…”
“Don’t apologize. That capture rattled everyone, not just you.”
“Thank you.” And without another word, he began for the antechamber exit.
“Yahweh,” I called, and he paused. “If you ever need to talk, my office is always open.”
He glanced over his shoulder. “As a friend, or therapist?”
“Both.”
Yahweh hesitated for a few seconds, then vanished through the door.
I looked down at Zira’s comatose form, unable to stop myself from wondering what he might possibly do to receive such punishment from the Antediluvians. Would it even be cast by them? If we were to cease all research into Eschatis, could that reroute the outcome? After all, it wasn’t the first time we’d dipped our toes into boiling water.
Later. I would think more on this later.
*
There was a different cadence across Enigmus. Not tension, like one might expect; something else, something hard to read but unlike anything I’d felt before. It was felt in the scholars’ eyes as they passed in the hall, the way small-talk became more prevalent at meals. On one occasion, I’d actually heard laughter in the dining room.
If anything, I was now the outlier, choosing to avoid most opportunities for conversation, unless necessary. I’d spent the majority of my time in my quarters, toiling away at an SME review of the Eschatis thread and catching up on contract requests still pending. The only time I left outside of business hours was to fetch Aela’s meals. I’d get mine to go as well, and we would eat together in the privacy of her room.
With two dishes in hand, on the way to Aela’s room for evening meal, I passed Yahweh, Pariah and Mehrit, congregated near Euxodia’s entrance. From their expressions, they’d been engaged in lighthearted conversation, but as I passed them their faces fell and the conversation died. They paid me a respectful nod in unison. I did the same, and on I went.
Halfway across the mezzanine, I spotted Qaira and Leid in the courtyard below. They were in mid-embrace, and Leid’s hand moved to brush the side of Qaira’s face. He then took it, kissing her knuckles. The sight was moving enough to nearly make me smile.
We had seen our end. It’d stripped away the illusion of immortality, adding a time-limit to our existence.
Time.
When you weren’t at the mercy of it, it was easy to take things for granted. The odd, heady cadence around here was the direct result of our cosmic hourglass being turned over.
Aela waited for me by the window of her room. She looked longingly out at Exo’daius’s dusk sky, kneading her hands in an anxious state. She turned to look as I entered, her diamond eyes glittering against the light. Her blond hair was loose and disheveled, the shapeless black dress that hung just below her knees made her already thin frame border on frail.
At the sight of me her expression lifted, and that felt good to see. Too many times had I come in to see her curled in a corner, shaking in a panicked mess. I set our plates down on her desk—something she’d rarely used, and therefore afforded us enough space—and we sat together with our chair arms aligned.
“How are you feeling tonight?” I asked, gently.
“Good,” she said. “Better than yesterday.”
“The others have been asking about you. Would you be willing to take a visitor?”
Aela stared down at her plate. “I… I don’t know. Who wants to see me?”
“Yahweh.”
She took a bite of her meal, chewed, and then sipped her drink. “When?”
“Whenever you feel ready.”
Ever since she returned to us, Aela has suffered the worst case of agoraphobia I’d ever witnessed. It was undeniably caused by trauma, but not wholly from her account with Zira. After several therapy sessions, and an intervention with Leid in a semi-successful attempt to link resonances to prod at her unconscious, it was clear that she had been somewhere prior to Zira’s waystation. Aela couldn’t remember, nor could Leid glean much more t
han that. But whatever had occurred convinced Aela that something terrible would happen to us if she stepped foot outside of her room.
I didn’t believe this was a permanent thing. She would be the most difficult case I’d taken on, but I was up to the task. And I was invested, because deep down, I knew that this was my doing. I was responsible for tasking her with the envoy, and then insisting when she’d had her doubts. The fact that she was considering taking a visitor was a step in the right direction. A rigorous course of exposure therapy was in order, but not just yet. Visitors, first. Then we would try making it into the hall.
After our meal, I asked if she was up for a session. She said she was, and so we moved. She sat on the bedside with her knees curled to her chest, while I sat cross-legged on the floor. She was most comfortable with a casual arrangement. Whenever I used a chair it made her feel like this was an interrogation, and she clammed up.
“What made today different?” I asked. “You said you felt better than yesterday. Do you know why?”
“I didn’t see anything,” she said.
What that meant was that she didn’t have any disassociations. More than once she’d insisted on seeing events through the eyes of unknown people. Sometimes the events were banal, other times horrifying. She spent a large part of her day in a state of maladaptive daydreaming, unable to control it. I’d recorded her accounts of places and things. Some matched real locations in the Multiverse, others not at all.
“What do you suppose that means?”
“I don’t know, but I’m grateful for it,” she murmured. “What scares me the most is that I never know when it will happen.”
“Have you had a chance to practice the exercises when an episode comes on?”
“Yes, once last night. It worked, sort of.”
“Good, that’s a start.”
“Adrial, I…” she began, lowering her head. “I don’t know if anything will ever be the same again. I’m frightened.”
“It will,” I said. “You’ll see. I can’t guarantee that you’ll come out of this experience unchanged, but you’ll adapt, and you’ll be functional again. I promise.”
When she looked back at me, there were tears brimming her eyes. “I feel like I’ve sentenced us to death. I shouldn’t have gone there. I shouldn’t have—,”
“You did nothing of the sort. You did your job, and no one, least of all you, could have predicted what would happen.” I moved closer, kneeling in front of her. She didn’t flinch when I wiped the falling crimson tear away. “Your discoveries have given us more data than we ever could have imagined. We’ve made breakthroughs, all thanks to you. Our perception of everything in existence will have to be revised, all because of you.”
Her lips quivered as more tears threatened to fall. “Are you proud of me?” she whispered.
The desperation in her eyes struck me. That was all she’d ever wanted.
I stared at her, abashed.
“Please, tell me you’re proud of me.”
I cupped her face in my hands, my thumbs brushing over the Antediluvian markings that never faded from her skin. If anything, it’d only added to her beauty. “How could you ever think otherwise?”
Aela sobbed, but I felt her joy.
I then leaned in, and our lips met.
Oh hi,
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Covenants: Quantum Dream (Hymn of the Multiverse Book 11) Page 16