I cried as I did it. Feeling lost, feeling alone, feeling…whatever it was that had grabbed a hold of me and would not let go for all the credits in the world.
A single, solitary thought entered my beleaguered mind and it shocked me to the core.
The weak shall perish.
The weak shall perish.
The weak shall perish.
Hot tears ran down my face as my vision went cloudy and I felt like something sharp was knifing me in the gut.
Why now? Why now? Why couldn’t it have been eight or nine years ago? After the accident? After the accident–!
Why keep me alive?
The thoughts were my own, but I could tell something else was trying to intrude on my suffering and misery.
You don’t deserve this. The raw feelings. The inescapable power to shake the foundations of the known universe. You are weak. You will always remain weak. Like the pitiful creature that you are.
I moaned at that point, still gripping the sides of the bowl with all of my natural born–human–strength, feeling disconnected, washed out, reality coming in and out of focus like the worst energy trip you could ever think of.
And it was happening to me.
Happening to me!
It took all of my focus and willpower to speak to whatever had a hold of me.
“You…will…never…win.”
It’s not a matter of winning, you foolish girl. It’s about getting back what was lost to me so many eons ago. But you’re free to think what you will. I won’t stop you from doing that. But you will become my vessel. My right hand. My instrument of destruction.
The pain was palpable. I was feeling it now in every pore of my being.
“Why…?” I hissed in quiet agony.
To sow the seeds of chaos. To sow the seeds of despair and misery. It had been far too long since I last walked this world you called Earth. And I only want back what was initially denied me from so long ago.
I cried out then, as another sharp pain hit me out of the blue–only this time it went right through my brain pan and blood exploded out of my nose at the speed of light.
I fell backwards in a heap, my head hitting the floor.
In that moment, in that daze, I saw two people stand over me. One was a woman I didn’t even recognize and the other–?
It was me. But not me.
When did I even have brown hair with red highlights?
“That’s enough, Rinia. Leave her alone. She’s suffered enough.”
The other woman bent down and looked at me with a calculating and cold expression.
“It’s never enough, Isis! I want what is mine!”
I looked up at the two of them helplessly.
“W-what is yours…?” I whispered, feeling completely out of it. It didn’t matter if I hurt now or I started hurting twenty minutes ago.
I just wanted the pain to stop.
The other me interceded on my behalf and pulled Rinia back. I could tell that she was pissed off about something. But I couldn’t tell what. My vision swam in and out of focus. The lights dimmed a bit as the two of them passionately argued about something of grave importance and I could only hear snippets through the haze of disjointed memories.
“–the Source promised me that I would be the next Starchild of Ancient Lore! Why give it to this pathetic imitation of you?!?”
“It’s not like we had a choice in the matter, Rinia. Calis was most adamant that a piece of it find its way into this universe–for her sake as well as ours.”
Rinia’s face flushed with anger. “She’s not worthy of the mantle. I bet she doesn’t even know what she has.”
“The books will tell her the truth. The ones we left behind in the shopkeeper’s care. They will tell her everything. Once she gets past the transference process.” The other me was saying. Then she took a hold of the other woman’s arm and pulled her away from me.
“Come on. Let’s go. The portal I left open won’t remain open for long. Through the mirror. That’s right. That’s it. Keep going. I’ll join you in a second.”
At this point, two people became one and I was now looking at myself. If only a couple of years older.
How is that even possible? I silently wondered, still trying to see if anything I had saw or heard was making any fucking sense to me.
The other version of me laid a hand on my stomach.
“I regret this has come to this, Isis. But we really don’t have much of a choice. The world as you knew it as is quickly coming unglued at the seams and it’s having a detrimental effect on both our universes.”
“What…must…I do?” I managed to get out.
“Finish the transference process. Wed yourself with the shard that’s buried deep within you. Then you will see what we’ve been saying all this time as being part of one long and ugly truth.”
My mind was fucking blown at this point.
“What…truth?”
The other me shook her head. “I can’t say. Not that I don’t want to, but because you would not understand. You’ve been separated for so long that your memories have become entangled with this reality. Not the ones that you used to call home from so long ago.”
Now I was really confused!
“Come again…?”
The other me looked at me with some self-pity and genuine sympathy.
“I’m sorry, but that’s all I can tell you. The rest you’ll have to figure out for yourself.”
Then–like a ghost–she walked away from me and vanished like she had never come.
I was still on the floor in a miserable heap when I heard a quiet knock on the bathroom door.
“Help…” I whispered then, having virtually no strength to carry myself up in the end.
“Hello?” Came Bayen’s soft voice. “Are you in the bathroom, mom?”
My eyes fluttered weakly.
“Bayen…Bayen…Bayen….” I called out repeatedly, trying to sound urgent, but nothing was working properly.
“Okay. I’m coming in.” He decided then, opening the door and looking around for a moment and then down–spying me sprawled out on the floor in a disorganized mess.
He looked at me with sharp concern and horror and said: “Mom! Come quick! It’s Isis!” Then he went to my side and looked at me with worry.
“God…what the fuck happened here?!? Isis?”
My arm flopped out towards him like a dead fish.
“Bayen…” I managed to say again, but I was in no shape to continue. I just wanted to die.
Fran appeared five minutes later in a rush of sleepless urgency as she saw the scene unfold before her very eyes.
“Oh my gods…” she whispered in horror. “What happened here? Bayen?”
Bayen was busy getting a towel, a wash rag, and some toilet paper and used all three to wipe up the mess that had practically detonated in the toilet and all around me in a raging firestorm.
“I don’t know, Mom. But this is how I found her.”
“I’m getting a healer. Stat.”
“Mom–”
“I don’t care what the law says. This is fucking bullshit! The woman railed before going into the living room for a moment. She came back two minutes later with some kind of data pad and punching in a preset number to one of the medical centers located near the central hub of the space complex.
“I know someone who can help. He’s always been a real good friend of the family and willing to look the other way.”
“Are we talking about Jensen?” Bayen asked with a small amount of hope.
“That would be the one.” Fran said, before the connection was made.
“Coeval Medical. How may I direct your call?”
“I need to talk with Jensen Ferris. It’s an emergency.” Fran spoke with clear authority.
“One moment please.”
Fran nodded while Bayen continued to clean up the mess and then got up and got some more things to help clean me up. I was pretty much in no condition to do anything. M
y eyes were half-closed, my breathing ragged, my pulse fluttering like an angry bird.
“Jensen speaking. Who may I ask is speaking?” A male voice on the other end inquired.
“Jensen! I need you to come up here immediately. We have an emergency!”
“Is it Bayen again?”
“No. Someone else. I need you to bring a portal ICU module and a life support kit. Stat.”
“Understood. I’ll be up there in twenty minutes.”
Fran looked at me, the expression on my face pasty and white. My eyes glassy and distant. Unfocused. So unfocused.
“I don’t think she has that time frame.”
“Do what you can to stabilize her, Fran. I’m coming.” The link died then and Fran set the pad down on the small cabinet shelf next to her and joined her son in getting me stable.
“Shit.” The woman breathed in quiet panic, before grabbing a towel from Bayen’s outstretched hands and using it as a makeshift pillow for my head.
I was completely unresponsive. I kept seeing stars and sparks before my eyes. The very essence of the known universe was drifting right in front of me.
All I had to do was reach out and touch it. But I didn’t have the strength to do anything.
Then I stopped breathing and my body went slack.
“Isis!” Bayen called out the second I did, looking at his mother in passing.
“CPR!” Fran ordered. “Quickly!”
The other sky dancer nodded and started doing the life-saving technique–even though he could still taste the blood from my mouth into his.
“Mom! Compressions while I continue to give breath!” He said hotly and Fran nodded and started doing her part.
“One…two…three…” she echoed, stopping every so often so that her son could give me much needed oxygen.
“One…two…three…!” the woman repeated stringently, looking for any sign. Any possible reaction.
“God…I think she’s gone into cardiac arrest!”
“Keep going!” Bayen instructed. “Come on, Isis…! Breathe!” he said with strict urgency.
“Breathe!”
The two continued to work on me, even as someone new entered the picture and Fran looked up and saw that it was Jensen Ferris.
“Oh, thank god! She’s gone into cardiac arrest. We’re trying to bring her back, but nothing’s working!”
Jensen unstrapped the portable ICU module and turned it on.
“Bayen…step aside. Let me hook her up.” He said firmly.
The sky dancer nodded one last time, casting one last look at me and moved aside.
The healer thread some leads and wires along the exposed parts of my arms and side, and chest and waited to see if there was any reaction.
“She’s flat-lined.” Jensen reported. “Her heart has stopped. Bayen. Keep giving her breaths.”
“Why?”
“Doing so will feed oxygen to the brain for a little while anyways. Until I can medically restart her heart.”
“How so?”
“This way. Fran…? Step back.”
The woman nodded. I looked like I was absolutely dead on the floor.
Jensen made a few adjustments to the module and then pressed a small blue button.
My body positively jerked and thrashed under the assault and electrical current.
Fran and Bayen waited until things had a chance to cool down before Jensen checked my pulse.
Then he pressed the button a second time.
My body went rigid under the shock, then went limp for a grand total of two seconds.
“Isis…?” Fran echoed with supreme worry.
Jensen checked me again and shook his head.
“No change.”
“Are you at the maximum setting for that thing?”
“No.”
“Then do it. She’s got nothing else to lose.”
Jensen hesitated and then nodded, changing the settings and disabling the safeties on the ICU module.
Then he pressed the blue button again, shielding his eyes from what was about to happen next. They all did.
A blue-white current shot out of the machine and super charged my body so much that it practically lifted itself off the floor.
I don’t remember what happened then, but whatever hit me like a bolt actually jumpstarted my heart back to normal and my eyes flew open as a result.
I cried out in shock and surprise as my heart rate went into overdrive and my pulse was doing its own patented rabbit race.
“She’s…back!” Fran said with a clap of her hands and joy in her frazzled voice.
“Oh my god…!”
I sucked in as much air as I could into my tortured lungs and a rebreather mask appeared in a flash and was fitted over my mouth.
Pure oxygen flooded my body as I lay there in a virtual daze and I could not find the strength to do anything. Not even talk.
Not that it would have helped me any.
Bayen immediately came into my worldview and actually held my hand. Held it.
At that point, I could have died again happy and not give a fuck.
“Give her some room, Bayen.” Jensen was telling me. “She needs a little time to recover.”
“But she’s such a mess. We still haven’t figured out what was causing it.”
“Was she seen by anyone else?”
“Another healer, but all he did was give her a light sedative for her troubles.”
“What happened?” The other man wanted to know–before extending his medical scanner over his eyes and doing a profile scan of my inert body.
“She’s bleeding from her stomach.” He announced before he pulled out a small medical pack from his carry on travel bag, opened it, and selected a small hypo-syringe with some medication already in the pre-fire chamber.
Then he leaned over my still form and plunged the thin needle into my stomach before injecting the medication directly into it.
I never flinched. Not even once.
“This will stop the bleeding at its source and aid in the healing process.” The man told Fran and Bayen. Then he grabbed another hypo-syringe, pulled out a small time delay medical capsule on top of that and had Bayen angle my head away from him for a second. Then he selected the trigger option on the hypo and this wicked looking needle came singing out like a javelin and stopped a couple inches out.
“Jesus, Jensen.” The other sky dancer remarked sourly. “You think that’s going a bit overboard?”
“I’m operating under Emergency Directive Protocol 37-Slash-4. Your girlfriend here was clinically dead for four minutes and ten seconds. Once we have her stabilized, I‘m calling in an air-ambulance and will have her medi-vac’d to Coeval Medical. You’re welcome to tag along.” The other man said as he injected more medication into my jugular vein.
“She’s…ah…not my girlfriend.” The sky dancer corrected with some embarrassment on his part.
“A friend then?”
“Yes.” Fran decided right then and there.
“All right. For all intent and purpose, I’ll have to have you fill out some paperwork and sign on the dotted line consenting to treatment.”
“She’s not a sky dancer.”
Jensen nodded. “I know. That’s why I’m going to have you two vouch for her treatment under the current medical directive–which overrides any current law on the books concerning the treatment of surface dwellers.”
“But the last healer said that the laws couldn’t be overridden?”
“Was he a first year?”
“By the looks of his cloak and hood? Yes.”
Jensen nodded mostly to himself. “That’s usually a common mistake with first year residents. I’m a sixth year myself, but I know the laws and which ones to bend, or in your friend’s case–? Break.”
Tapping a small comm bracelet on his wrist, the healer got in touch with the air-ambulance service.
“Patient requiring a lift from Level 1776 to Coeval Medical. This is an emergency direc
tive. Copy and transmit.”
There was a brief pause on the other end of the circuit.
“Acknowledged. Air-ambulance dispatched to your location. Will arrive in 94 seconds.” A woman’s voice relayed back. “Transmit patient profile now.”
“Transmitting.” The healer said, while Fran and Bayen watched. Afterwards, he got up.
“Bayen? Go to the front of the store and wait for them to arrive. Then have them bring a hover board so we can move her.”
The sky dancer nodded.
“Information received. Level Green.”
“Copy that. Level Green.”
“That means she’s critical.” Fran said with some worry in her voice.
“Yes.” Jensen Farris said. “It does.”
“What will happen now?”
“Now? We wait and see.”
~31~
It was a funny thing–this experience I was having. In this version of events, there were two people I knew from heart, two more from experience, and a third I was just beginning to get acclimated with.
But because I couldn’t remember their faces well, I was having a hard time placing them in this reality. Because no matter how hard I had searched in my spare time, I could not find one whiff of them anywhere in the Barren Wastelands.
My search had always turned up a ghost and it was leaving me mutually frustrated. But the second I returned home, I would always become this child version of myself where I would step through this mirror and end up on that side of the other reality.
And it was here that I would always frolic and play with my mutual twin in all things. Even though in this alternate reality, she would remain a couple years older than me, with the brown hair and red highlights and her eyes would always sparkle this crystalline blue color.
But I would always be this outcast from the other reality. And for some reason, the other me was just as happy or content to switch roles with me whenever trouble was abound.
Because at this point in time, she had begun to harness the expansive knowledge handed down to her by the Source of Chaos–through Rinia.
From what I remembered through this flood of memories, Rinia was always the disagreeable sort. An ex-Starchild in her own right, an ex-Watcher from many eons past who had been stranded here ten thousand years ago after the Fall of Man.
The Starchild Page 24