“Or maybe you just forgot what it’s like to be good.” She threw back.
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me … you’re turning out more like your bloody mother everyday?”
“Huh, my mother’s nothing like …” Catlin was about to finish her sentence when she saw the look of shock horror on Ursula’s face. “What did you mean by that?”
“Nothing,” she turned away, avoiding Catlin’s stare.
“Hey!” Catlin grabbed her this time, aggressively by the wrist. “What did you mean by that?”
“Piss off!” Ursula screamed back, yanking her hand free violently.
Before Catlin could even stop herself, her arm had already raised itself up, launched forward and slapped Ursula clean across the face, leaving a red welt on Ursula’s cheek.
Catlin instantly regretted her actions and grabbed a hold of Ursula again, hugging her closely and pleading sorrowfully.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
“See, exactly like her.”
“I’m not, I swear I don’t know what you’re talking about … please Ursula.”
“Really? Are you so sure? Think about all the shit you’ve done since you came to Destiny.”
“Like what?”
“You ruin things Catlin, like a bloody virus!”
“What do you mean? What did I do all of a sudden?”
“You got the government involved with us, people got killed as a result. You ruined Destiny. Thirty years of hard work and you gave the people a bloody choice, they left! And now the facility is in government hands, because of you!”
“And let’s not forget you left my dying mother back up there in the mountains.”
“Ursula.” Catlin objected.
“Screw you Catlin Conley, now you’ve lost me as well!”
“I’m sorry. I was just trying to fix everything. Please, Ursula, just stay with me, it’s not safe.” Catlin clung desperately to her.
But Ursula yanked her arm free of Catlin’s grasp and hurried forward in the direction of the man who was quickly disappearing down the street, stifling her cries as she went. Cat slumped onto the ground, called out a few times for Ursula to stop, but she didn’t.
“Hey!” Ursula called after him. “Hey, wait up mister!”
The easy-going man turned back as he was walking, “Catch up missy!” he said playfully.
“Hey!” she said expectantly when she finally caught him.
“What’s the plan Mister?” she asked playfully as she stroked her hair.
“Well, now that I’ve found you …” he winked at her knowingly.
She giggled like a little girl and shuffled her feet where she stood. “Where are we going, what’s the plan pretty boy?”
He poked his tongue out at the insult, turned and said, “Follow me.”
As they left together, Ursula turned back and could still see Catlin sitting on the pavement where she’d left her, with a stubborn look on her face. She didn’t care, she was happy to be taking a step forward, just as her mother had always taught her.
“Well mister, tell me your name.”
“Yonas, my name is Yonas.”
“Ok Yonas, what are we going to do now?”
“Now my dear, we look for Sousa, because Sousa is the key.”
“Why is he the key?”
“Not sure, but someone told me he was.”
“Someone told you he was the key?”
“Yes.”
“Who?”
“A man, he told me, goes by the name Smith.”
- -
Marion
She opened her eyes, trying to squeeze the haze out of them, but couldn’t make anything out around her. There was no noise, no light and she detected a slightly earthy smell.
Am I dead? It’s so dark, I can’t see anything … no wait, what’s that blue light?
A faint halo of light could be seen, blue and shimmering just out of view. She squinted hard in the darkness, trying in vain to see what and where it was.
Phosphorescent blue light! This must be the light at the end of the tunnel. Am I in heaven?
She remembered the pain she’d felt before she lapsed, the tightness in her chest and arms. It was immense, worse than she’d felt on the earlier occasions. She recalled seeing Lucinda looking right back at her, a tear in her eye, but then her pain had eased and she had drifted out of the real world and into the next.
Marion thought she’d passed into the next plain, the netherworlds. A place beyond life that was ethereal, eternal and truly everlasting. Seeing a brilliant bright light ahead of her, she felt she’d arrived at that world. She felt she was on her way to the other side.
She stared at the strange blue light expectantly, but nothing happened, it was just a motionless glow stationed just out of sight. She looked about her but could make nothing out, nor hear any sounds, it was just the light.
She waited for something to happen, but nothing did.
She used her other senses, smelling the air and not quite ascertaining what it was she could smell. It had a musty smell, like dirt. Maybe when you are dead you can still smell, she wondered, perhaps I’m under the ground right now.
But thoughts of the afterlife began to fade when she started feel her body; her fingers the first sensation. Next, she wiggled her toes and could feel them inside her shoes. Her arms and legs were mobile, she could tighten her muscles and more importantly she could feel herself breathing.
Breathing! That can only mean one thing, I’m alive!
But her elation was short lived when she felt the strength in her body, she felt as though she was back in her twenties, full of energy, no pain in the joints and a supple feeling to her skin. Surely she had passed into the next world, she felt more alive now than ever.
Let’s see if I can move.
She rolled where she lay and found she could sit herself up. Looking around she tried to make something out in her surrounds, but all she could see was darkness and the blue light. She felt strange looking at it as it glowed, almost as if she’d seen it before. At first, she thought she was in the afterlife, but now unsure, she searched her mind for the memory.
Feeling curious, she got up from the floor and stood warily, thankful that all felt normal and intact. Marion moved towards the area the light was coming from, slowly and deliberately with her hand stretched out in front of her. She hesitantly rounded a sharp corner and saw the light brighten. Knowing she’d reached the source she instinctively reached out towards it, but just as her fingers were about to touch the mysterious light she remembered where she’d seen it before.
She gasped as she remembered and wondered if she was dreaming. This light was the same as one she’d seen for the first time, thirty years ago. A light that was housed for thirty years at Destiny, that’s where she had seen it before.
It was a thread.
Marion was contemplating all sorts of scenarios in her head as she stood there pondering the light, have I gone back in time, am I still alive?
Quickly she turned and fumbled around, trying to find something in the dark that might allude to her whereabouts. She followed the dirt wall, back the way she’d come until her knee banged into something wooden with a loud thud. Yowling with the pain she realised she wasn’t dead, she was somewhere else, that was real pain she felt in her knee.
Still reaching, she found the object her knee thumped into was a desk. She carefully ran her fingers along its surface until she touched an object. She fumbled it in her hands but discarded it, along with many other objects she came across, trying to find something useful. She kept searching, eventually grabbing hold of a long, cylindrical object and breathed a sigh of relief when she realised she’d grabbed a torch.
She flicked it on and shone the light around her, trying to get her bearings
. Quickly she identified a small dark shape in the corner, on the floor in the room she was in. She moved over and knelt down to touch it.
“Marion?” A scratchy voice sounded in response to her touch.
“Lucinda?”
The shape on the floor moved in the torchlight, turning to the left where a lamp must have been stationed. Lucinda switched it on and light billowed into the room, revealing to Marion exactly where she was.
An underground cave.
“Lucinda! What’s going on? Where the hell are we?”
“We’re in a cave,” she replied as she turned a knob on the lamp, slowly brightening the room. It was enough light for Marion to turn her torch off and take in the small room properly.
Sure enough, they were in a cave. To the left was a small passageway that had been rudimentally dug and ascended upwards. Marion looked up the passageway to see a set of metal stairs run the length of the tunnel, assumedly to the surface.
The second passageway was much shorter and was where the blue light came from, Marion noticed several wires coming from the blue lit room. She traced them from there and had to do a double when she noticed they were connected to a laptop resting on the desk.
“No, no, no!” Marion started screaming. “You didn’t!”
“What?” Lucinda replied, sitting up from where she was sleeping in the corner of the cave.
Marion was about to begin a tirade of scolding on Lucinda when she noticed how dramatically Lucinda’s appearance had changed. “My god woman, what’s happened to you?”
Lucinda had seemingly aged twenty years overnight. She looked very old.
“I’m fine, bad light, getting old is all,” she replied, ignoring the question and getting up.
“Is this a dream?”
“No.”
“Well, what the hell is going on, I feel like I’m twenty and you’re look like your eighty?”
“Nothing.”
“I died, didn’t I?” She covered the yelp. “And you revived me, didn’t you?”
It was a statement more than a question. Marion saw her backpack on the ground by the desk and went over to inspect it. Ruffling around inside she couldn’t find what she was looking for. “The device, you took it from my bag and used it didn’t you, you used it to connect to that thread in there and revive me? That’s how I’m alive.”
Marion hurriedly moved to inspect the next room with the torch to confirm her suspicions. Sure enough, next to the thread lay the device she’d taken from Destiny earlier.
“Oh my god,” she exclaimed. “You freaking used that bloody thing to revive me!”
“I couldn’t help it Marion, I couldn’t let you go.”
“And who’s life did you take to save me huh!” she challenged. “Another poor African kid, another herder? Some other life that you are going to make some excuse for me on ... it’s hogwash Lucinda, absolute baloney!”
Lucinda didn’t say anything, but did move over to the chair that sat by the desk, she slumped into it thankfully, her apparent lack of interest in the conversation only further inflamed Marion.
“Don’t you damn well ignore me! You’re going to fix this right now, you hear me!” She grabbed the back of the chair Lucinda was on and spun it around. “You are going to revers …” she cut herself off as she looked into the dilated pupils of Lucinda and realised something.
“Oh crap ...” she let out a cry. “You look so old Lucinda.”
Creases, wrinkles and grey hair were now obvious features on her face, the light helping to illuminate so Marion could see her properly. She knew something had caused Lucinda to age quickly and there was only one thing that could’ve caused it.
“I thought it was just the bad light, I thought it must have been the dark room or something but ...”
Lucinda still didn’t offer a reply, she wasn’t comfortable with the analysis.
“Lucinda, did you take some sort of life from yourself?”
She avoided eye contact with Marion.
“Hey!” She scolded, grabbing the chair firmly. “Did you take a life from you and use it to revive me?”
“I had to,” Lucinda replied. “I need you.”
“Holy kerfufflenuck,” she screamed. “What the hell?”
The words shocked Lucinda, it was the loudest thing she’d ever heard, “Calm down!”
“Don’t tell me to calm down you freaking lunatic, you sit there all smug while you play god with people’s lives ... screw you Lucinda, screw you!”
“What else was I supposed to do? Just let you die?”
“Yes!” she screamed back. “That’s the way it works, people die!”
“Not if I can help it they don’t.”
“That’s just it, you can’t help it can you, always got to do something. Always got to be the woman of action, solving the problems of the world any way you see fit. But in the process you only make things worse!”
“Hey!” Lucinda was starting to get offended. “I helped you!”
“You think you know everything, but let me tell you something Lucinda Caradoc, nobody knows anything! And that’s the only thing that you ever need to know. You think you helped me? Balderdash! All you’ve done is help yourself, as always.”
Instead of arguing further Lucinda changed tack and grabbed the laptop in front of her and turned it on. “Do you want to know how your daughter is doing?”
“Goddam it!” Marion screamed, running her hands through her hair.
“What?”
“I need to seriously get away from you, seriously, get me the hell out of here!” She was starting to get hysterical and stomped about the small room.
“Marion.”
“No Lucinda, I’ve had enough of you and your rubbish!”
“Hey!” She whispered back, the effort clearly draining her. “I may not know anything as you say, but if this whole experience has taught me anything, it’s taught me there are no rules ... at all!”
“What?”
“And if there are no such things as rules, then why do we make them up? When we were born, we weren’t instinctively imprinted with a set of rules to live by, we were taught by those before us, right?”
“I don’t have time for this loony tunes, you need to fix this, right now!”
“Nobody had come before us on this and the rules you think you know are not the rules. They’re just fabricated lies to enslave us, to make us think a certain way.”
Marion waved her hands in front of Lucinda. “Hello, are you hearing me? Take the life back Lucinda, I don’t want any part of this.”
“It means there are no rules Marion, except the ones we make for ourselves. Think about it, every man for themselves, to whatever end his means justified.”
“I don’t care, I just want to go back to where I belong.”
“Think about it Marion.” Lucinda pleaded, her energy seemingly depleted. “I never played by the rules because there wasn’t any.”
The temporary change from an almost violent outburst to a philosophical discussion upset the balance in Marion’s head and she found herself leaning back against the dirt wall, listening. “What are you talking about Lucinda?” Her hands flopped to her side.
“Long ago I figured, when we started this whole thing, that I had to live by some sort of a code or set of morals. At the start I never did life transfers, never sentenced people to die, or did anything to upset the moral balance. You remember who I was and what I was like.”
“Nothing like who you are now.”
“Exactly ... and I have never told you why.”
“What? And now you want to bare all for me? Why? What the hell are you planning now?”
“Do you want to know?”
“Know what?” she asked, realising she’d already taken the bait. “No! No, you don’t. I’m not getting invo
lved here.”
“The night I disappeared, with Smith and Samuel.”
“That was thirty years ago, what about it?”
“Do you want to know what happened? What caused me to change?”
“Oh bloody hell!” She cursed, realising Lucinda was getting her way. “Why do you always do this?”
“Do you remember that night, the night that changed our lives?”
Marion exhaled deeply, Lucinda had won. “I wish I didn’t to be honest and I wish I could go back there.”
“I never told you what happened …”
“And what, now is the time for confessions, when you need something? Where the fiddlesticks were you thirty years ago when I needed you? When Smith needed you?”
A tear streaked down Lucinda’s face as she sat there on the chair. “I couldn’t tell you, I …”
Marion seemed to sense her emotions were genuine, she hadn’t seen a tear in those eye’s for over thirty years. “Tell me Lucinda, tell me the truth, what happened to you?”
“That night … the night before Smith disappeared, Samuel went mad, literally. After our meeting in the tent, I went to see Smith, to talk to him and try and learn more about him and his past. He took me to his tent where we both sat quietly, I couldn’t think of any questions to ask him so the both of us just sat there, in silent reflection.”
“I’m not sure how much time passed, but the lights in our camp had been off for quite some time when there was a tap on Smith’s tent, it was Samuel.”
“But as he came in and took a seat with us, I noticed he wasn’t the same. His eyes were the most obvious sign. I think Smith sensed something was afoot too, but he remained placid as always and said nothing as Samuel entered the tent.”
Lucinda let out a sob then and the tears came flowing as she tried to recall and retell the tale to Marion.
“He sat down calmly and without warning, killed Smith. Without a word, he simply lifted his hand and slashed a knife right across Smith’s throat.”
“Oh whoa!” Marion reeled.
“That’s not all …”
“Lucinda?”
She took a deep breath, exhaled and took another, forcing herself to tell the most painful part of the story. “He had his way with me then.” She sobbed openly, “Samuel, he was like an animal and he just … he just forced his way, he was too strong for me.”
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