“We need to talk. In private.”
“We do. This way.” He led her down the hallway to the supply room, which he knew from experience provided a measure of solitude—at least until your bossy niece barged in and refused to leave. He was indescribably happy to see Alex, and terrified for her safety in this bleak, deadly place, and there was no way this conversation was going to go well for him.
He flicked the light on and closed the door behind them. “How’s your mom doing?”
“She’s a fucking train wreck, thanks for asking.”
“Then you should have stayed. It must be an incredibly confusing time for her, and she needs you.”
“And you don’t?”
His skin felt flush—the beginnings of another post-violence breakdown. Not now. “That’s not what I meant. But your family needed you, and mine needed me.”
“They’re supposed to be one and the same, dammit.” Suddenly she was in his face, a finger jabbed into his chest. “You left me a goddamn note. Do you remember what happened the last time you left me a note waxing philosophical about life and love and duty? You died. So don’t you ever do that again.”
He only had to meet her gaze to see how much she had suffered because of his actions. Her lower lip quivered—but from hurt, or rage? “If I had told you what I was planning to do, you would have tried to stop me.”
“Or possibly I would have helped you.” Her shoulders sagged in a full-body sigh, and she dropped the finger at his chest to rub at her neck.
Despair mingled with Akeso’s flailing angst to choke the air out of his lungs. What else could he have done? “I know, but I couldn’t ask you to make the choice between your mother and me. It wouldn’t be fair.”
“Fair? Fair? Since when is the world fair? Instead you made the choice for me, and that is not okay. Don’t you get it? It’s supposed to be you and me against the universe. Come what may.”
The brutal truth of her words hit him like a punch to the gut. Where had he lost his way? How had he forgotten? How many times did he need to learn this lesson?
His chest swelled with emotions he’d feared he’d never again experience, feared had been extinguished forever beneath an avalanche of violence and cold wrath. “Saving each other over and over again in an endless cycle.”
“Yes.”
Two steps and he was pulling her into his arms. One hand came up to cup her cheek. His voice scratched past his constricting throat, emerging in a gravelly whisper. “I am so lost without you.”
Concern quickly replaced anger on her features, and her expression softened; he must sound even worse than he’d thought. “I know the feeling. I’ve been…” her eyes glistened and shimmered “…it doesn’t matter. I’m here now, so neither of us has to be lost any longer.”
He wanted so desperately to believe her. He needed to cling to the hope that she could be his guide back from this madness.
Her nose crinkled up as she wiped something off his cheek. “You’re covered in blood.”
He forced a stilted chuckle. “Just like old times?”
“Not quite. But maybe it can be.”
“I’d like that very much.” His fingertips cradled her chin as his mouth finally met hers—
—she jerked away to stare at him strangely.
“What’s wrong? I realize you’re angry at me—”
“I can feel you.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I can feel you feeling me. Through Akeso. See, I asked it for help in finding you. I sliced up my palm and opened myself up to its consciousness, and for the first time in fourteen years, Akeso spoke to me. Not in words, but it’s stayed with me all the way here. Out on the streets, when you were pinned down by those Rasu, that’s how we found you. Akeso showed me the way to where you were. And now, touching you, I can….” She closed the distance she’d briefly created and crushed her lips against his.
Need and desperation surged through her and into him, drawing his own need into a feedback loop.
“God, this is astonishing. Can you feel it?”
He pulled back without meaning to. “I’ve had to block Akeso as much as possible. It’s not happy with my current behavior.”
“Oh, believe me, I know. You should see what it’s done to our home since you’ve been gone. But while you may not be listening to Akeso, Akeso is listening to you. I never could have found you otherwise. Caleb, Akeso wanted me to find you. It wants you to be well and safe. Please.” Her lips brushed across his, tender and inviting, and her fingers slid past his damp skin to wind through his hair. “Feel me feeling you.”
Every fear he’d ever harbored lay on the other side of the wall he’d constructed to keep the worst of Akeso’s anguish at bay. Now, though, so did every desire, every longing. Dammit, fear would not keep him from this.
Please, give me this one thing, for this one moment. I beg you.
He clasped her face in both hands and fell through her wondrous eyes straight into her soul. Then he let go of the constant coil of tension maintaining the psychological barrier—
—a rampaging deluge of despair and confusion and torment knocked the breath out of him, and his knees weakened under their weight. But then the deluge vanished beneath a new avalanche of emotions: love, passion, fire, joy. Alex. He felt the rough pads of his thumbs on her cheeks and the soft curls of his hair caressing her palms.
His lips found hers anew in a hurricane of dizzying sensations. They roved over her jaw, down her neck, lingered at the hollow of her throat—it truly was as sensitive as he’d always suspected—and his own mind reeled as a double jolt of carnal need swept away every last coherent thought of his reasoning mind.
She grumbled into his lips. “Someone could come in.”
“They could. But they won’t.”
He felt her nod into the crook of his neck, and her hands dropped to the hem of his shirt and lifted it up and off. Then both hands were on his chest, and he felt his skin burning beneath her palms. One fever exchanged for another, infinitely more pleasurable one.
Her hands trembled with urgency, and her craving reinforced his own. He fumbled with bunching the material of her tank top up and over her breasts before yanking it above her head. Skin met skin, and they both nearly passed out from the sensory overload.
She moaned haltingly as her hands found his belt, and he felt her growing pleasure as he kicked his boots to the side and hurriedly stripped his pants off. Then he was on his knees, his tongue dancing around her navel as his hands dipped inside the snug material of her pants and frantically tugged them down.
He had to know. His tongue darted out—
—every nerve in his body screamed in a burst of agonizing pleasure, and he fell back, landing on his ass on the floor. Delicious delirium engulfed him, and he touched a fingertip to his tongue. “Oh my god….”
Alex, naked and magnificent in the harsh, antiseptic light of the supply room, started giggling into her hand. “Shhh, quiet.”
“Right, right.” He climbed to his feet, then instantly shoved her hard against the wall, relishing in how his muscled body pressing on hers caused her desire to spike to new heights. Or was it his desire? There no longer remained a difference.
His hand gripped her thigh as her teeth scraped past his ear. “I may not survive this.”
He laughed, his heart buoyed by a joy he’d believed beyond his reach. “If this is how we die, it’ll be a good death.”
She wrapped a leg around his hip, and he slipped inside her. The world exploded.
They held each other up, he thought, or perhaps they were on the floor. Or the table stacked high with crates that stood beside them. Where didn’t matter. He was in her and she was in him and they were one and it was everything.
Five megaparsecs and many galaxies away, confident no one was apt to notice, a planet shuddered.
They rested against the wall near the far corner, curled up in each other’s arms on the floor. Breathing, touching, experiencing.
He’d never felt closer to her than he did right now—a truth in the most literal sense.
And it frightened him. Past the passion and the afterglow lay the tattered wreckage of his psyche. He didn’t want her to see how weak he was, how broken and battered, struggling for the smallest gasps of air. But if she was the cure, if she was his guide back to the light, didn’t he have to let her see everything? The blood, the pain, the darkness?
She murmured contented sounds into his neck. If she saw any hints of it, she wasn’t flinching away. “How long will this last?”
He kissed the top of her head. “I’m not sure. How long has it been since you communed with Akeso?”
“About fourteen hours.”
“Then it should last another day or two, I’d say.”
“Or longer?” She lifted her head to meet his gaze; her face was still flush from a new manner of ecstasy. “Do you think Akeso will let me keep the connection?”
Come home. Heal. All must replenish you, must repair what has fractured.
He winced reflexively at the reappearance of the voice in his head. He was relieved beyond measure that Akeso had not forsaken him permanently. But while this rapturous interlude might have just saved his life, his trial wasn’t complete, and it wasn’t time to turn to healing. Not yet. “I don’t know. I’m afraid I no longer speak for Akeso.”
Her brow furrowed, and she reached out to touch the medwrap covering his upper arm. “Can I?”
He nodded silently, and she peeled it away…to reveal a patch of pink, healing skin. He chuckled quietly. Point taken and lesson learned. I’ll come home soon, I promise. But I’m not done here.
“What are you thinking? I can feel you thinking, but the thoughts themselves…it’s as if they’re churning barely beyond my grasp.”
He rested his forehead on hers, relishing in the soothing touch of her warmth, of her breath blending with his. “I have to put the wall back up now, as much as I’m able. I can’t do what I need to do here with Akeso fighting me at every step. It’ll get all of us killed.”
“When you do that, you won’t be able to feel me any longer, either, will you?”
He glanced away. But so long as the connection between them remained this strong, he couldn’t escape the sorrow engulfing them both. “No, I won’t. And it will be the greatest tragedy of my life.”
She tried for a weak smile and failed. “Well, we made it work for fifteen years. We can do it again. I don’t need supradimensional sentient microbes to feel you in my heart.” A single tear hovered on her eyelashes before breaking free to trail down her cheek. “Besides, while the physical feedback loop is yobanyi fantastic, I can’t handle the emotional one. We’re both useless like this.”
“Liar. Thank you.” He lifted her chin and pressed his lips softly to hers, drowning himself in their mutual sensations for one last, perfect moment.
Then he closed his eyes and gathered up the scattered pieces of the makeshift wall he’d constructed then ripped apart and carefully refit them together. In the last few minutes Akeso’s turmoil and angst had begun to grow loud once more, but as the last sections of the wall locked into place, they faded into the background in time with the fading of his connection to Alex. The walls shrank in around him, closing him off from everything he held most dear. But it was necessary. There was no other way.
He found he was shivering despite the warmth of her body still snuggled against his. “We should get dressed and get back out there before they send a rescue party for us.”
“We should.” She studied him warily as she disentangled herself from his arms and stood, and he watched her battle to bury the heartbreaking sadness behind her eyes. “Are you okay? Will you tell me if you’re not?”
He was reaching for his shirt where it had landed on the floor; the material bunched up as his hand fisted around it. “No, I am not in the slightest bit okay. But I’m better now that you’re here…or at least I can now imagine a future where I will be better. Because of you.” He pulled on his shirt and took a deep, ponderous breath. “I ask this with the deepest of appreciation and love. Why are you here?”
“Caleb, I was always coming for you. But if you want a logical justification? If you all have located the origin of the quantum block, we have a plan to destroy it.”
PART IV
THE WAY FORWARD
ASTERION DOMINION
57
* * *
NAMINO
Camp Burrow
Nika wore a smile as she wandered among the throng of people gathered in the bunker, but it was tinged by sorrow. Her heart wanted to burst with joy at the realization that so many of her friends had survived the siege. But Selene said only a few of the other bunkers were occupied, which meant the total number of survivors in Namino One might be less than a thousand. The prospect of such a gargantuan loss was staggering, and merely thinking about it threatened to force her to her knees in despair. Then there were the innumerable people who had been taken captive and were being subjected to the Rasu’s horrific experiments.
If the Rasu hadn’t cracked the kyoseil puzzle in eight years, they weren’t going to suddenly crack it now. Their torture of innocent souls was utterly pointless and all the more tragic for it.
But why hadn’t they ever cracked the kyoseil puzzle? She switched off the visual filter Parc (on Mirai) had configured for her and let the prismatic kyoseil waves wash over and through her. The bunker burned bright from a tangled web of interwoven strings connecting every Asterion present.
It didn’t make any sense for kyoseil to be immune to the quantum block, given the life form’s supradimensional existence—it should by definition be quantum in nature. Yet her vision didn’t lie. The key to unlocking the answer felt as if it was on the tip of her tongue, dancing just outside the reach of her arm. She stretched out her arm anyway, and the strings undulated happily through her skin. Unknowable and, thus far, uncontrollable.
As soon as Joaquim, Grant, Selene, Parc and a few others had joined her at what she’d been told constituted their official meeting circle, she issued a declaration. “We need to destroy the quantum block.”
Joaquim protested. “Damn, Nika, you didn’t need to travel all the way here just to declare the bloody obvious. Ask Selene, who I’ve driven quite insane with my insistence since day one that we need to destroy the block.” Beside him, Selene cast a rueful glance at the ceiling by way of response. “I don’t know if you saw the laser light show on your way in, but unfortunately the block mechanism is defended.”
Nika dropped her elbows to her knees and brought her hands to her chin. “Then we’ll find a way around those defenses.”
“You know I have always appreciated your tenacity. But our potential weapons consist in their entirety of two rocket launchers, a handful of assault rifles and amped Glasers and a big pile of archine blades. I heard you brought some modified grenades that will fuck up a bipedal Rasu nicely, and we’ve devised improvised explosives to do the same, but against that compound they’ll be like tossing pebbles into the side of a mountain.”
Alex and Caleb joined them then, having finally emerged from their private reunion. From the complicated expressions they wore, she honestly couldn’t guess what manner of reunion it had been.
They sat beside Marlee, and Alex caught Nika’s gaze. “Those aren’t your only weapons. We brought a stealthed, combat-ready adiamene-protected ship loaded with negative energy missiles.”
“Are the negative energy missiles cloaked, too?”
“Of course not.”
Joaquim spread his arms wide and shrugged. “Then they’ll get shot down long before they reach the target, same as our rocket did today. I assume shooting negative energy missiles out of the sky will make for some fascinating explosions and will probably do a little peripheral damage, but I doubt they’ll get close enough to take out the spire.”
“This is why we brought one more weapon—me.” Nika extended her arms in front of her and flipped them over. �
�This new aura of mine isn’t solely for show. My body is soaked in kyoseil for a very specific purpose—to protect the virutox loaded into my OS. One of Dashiel’s teams at Conceptual Research derived it from the Rasu’s own programming language. When injected into a Rasu system, it’ll do the same thing a virutox does to us—corrupt running programs, degrade the operating code and, hopefully, severely cripple the overall functionality of the targeted system. Quantum block or no, if I can get my hands on a Rasu system—literally—the additional kyoseil woven through my body means I can deliver the virutox and bring the system down.”
She stood to pace deliberately around their circle. “I came here not knowing exactly how I might use this to our advantage, but now it’s obvious. The lasers that took out your rocket fired off in response to some type of proximity alarm. This means automated defenses. Automated defenses I can cripple. Once those defenses are eliminated, the Siyane can fire its negative energy missiles at the spire, destroying the blocking mechanism and the power vortex fueling it. Then the quantum block is gone, and everything about this war changes.”
Joaquim arched an eyebrow. “Great plan. I like it. But there’s one problem. How the hells are you going to sneak past the compound’s defenses and deliver the virutox in the first place?”
She winked at him. “I was thinking you’d get me in there.”
While Nika hashed out the details of their plan with her friend Joaquim, Alex took a minute to just…stop. Caleb had disappeared back down the hallway, saying he needed a quick shower. In truth, he probably more needed a minute or two of solitude to clear his head and internalize everything that had happened between them, so he could don the warrior’s mask once more.
Inversion (Riven Worlds Book Two) Page 34