That flustered her. And that was a very new feeling. “Why…why do you call me that?” Had he noticed? Noticed that she had been protecting him?
“I assume that you’re not exactly everywhere at once. An’ since there can’t be a shortage of things for ya to do, it’d seem ya spend more than my fair share of time talkin’ with me.” He coughed hard a few times, taking another drink of his water and clearing his throat.
“You…interest me. I talk with others. But you interest me.”
He chuckled again. “Fain my heart; I thought I was just a dumb country boy that liked guns a little too much.” He turned to face the roof access. “You’re not bad company yerself, Angel. Even better, I can understand your English; some of the new folks we’ve got from Moscow don’t know a lick, or got such thick accents I’ve gotta try not to laugh.”
For the first time, ever, she laughed. It surprised her so much that she did it again. It was an intriguing and delightful sensation.
John cocked his head to the side before walking to the roof access. “Well, there’s somethin’ new. I’ll catch y’later, Sera. Back to the salt mines for now. Though callin’ it the gulag might be more appropriate.” He disappeared down the passage of light coming through the doorframe, waving over his shoulder with his free hand as he left.
She gazed after him, examining this most remarkable interlude. The things he had evoked from her…not only the futures were changing. She was changing.
And there was a change in him as well. A lightening of the darkest parts of his spirit. The sense that there might be some hope, some optimism in him now. He was still a cynic but…not as bitter. This was what she had hoped for. Whatever lay on the other side of that blank ahead could not come from a John Murdock who was bitter and in despair.
With that thought, she was reminded of her duty. She closed her eyes, settled herself in stillness, and began sifting through a billion, billion futures.
INTERLUDE
Dark Angel
Mercedes Lackey
“Why me?” Bella blurted, finally. “I mean, you should have picked someone like Einhorn. Hell, that’s exactly who you should have picked. She’s a believer, goes to church Wednesday nights and twice on Sunday, obeys all the rules—”
Which is precisely why I did not choose her. The voice in her head remained calm, but had taken on a shade of amusement. Belief is nothing. Mortals believe in many things that are wrong. Actions are what count. What one does is infinitely more important than what one believes.
“Yes, but—” Bella shook her head. “Every time I turn around I’m breaking another rule—I thought you—I thought it was all about obeying the rules for you.”
This time there was a definite undertone of laughter to the voice. As I said, mortals believe in many things that are wrong. That is but one of them. The Infinite does not condemn those who rebel. The Infinite encourages rebellion. Rebellion gives birth to creativity. It was not through rebellion that the Fallen fell.
Now the voice took on the color of deep sadness. Of mourning.
No, it was through something else entirely. Hate and scorn for the mortal creations. The certainty that they were superior to anything mortal. Pride, and the certainty that, at best, mortals were so vastly inferior to the immortal. In this case, pride, truly, goeth before the Fall. Her voice remained compassionate, but took on a touch of steel. Now, I need you. Your world needs you. It will take more effort than you have ever put into anything before—but you will become—
She paused.
—something of an Instrument, yourself.
Bella nodded.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
No Illusions
Mercedes Lackey and Veronica Giguere
“Okay. So, you’re Mel.” Bella gave the arm of the chair she was in a swat. It was some sort of fancy rig from Doc Bootstrap’s old office, It wanted to adjust to make her all comfy. She didn’t want it to. “I’m Bell. Or Bella. Hi.” She waved at the couch, also from Bootstrap’s office. “Have a perch.”
The blonde he was signaling to gave a noncommital nod and crossed the room, sitting stiffly on the edge of the cushion. The Echo uniform they had issued her was a bit loose, and she pushed the sleeves up to her elbows before crossing her arms over her chest. “So,” she started quietly. “You a shrink, or do you just do the triage and pass me to the next person?”
“I’m not a shrink, but I’m also not triage.” Bella rubbed her temples a little. “Doc Bootstrap, who used to own this furniture, is DOA in the Invasion. At the mo, Echo doesn’t have anyone who did what he did. Shrinks, yes, but shrink-with-empathy…no. And no one can do, it seems, what I can.” She grimaced a little. “They seem to think…and my mentor thinks…I can do a bit of empathic rewiring. If you’re willing, I can try to fix you. Like, permanently. But I have to warn you, I’ve never worked on anyone as seriously messed up as you are.”
Mel stared at her for a moment, trying to figure out if the blunt honesty and matter-of-fact statements were a cover for something else. “Seriously messed up. Yeah, you must not be a doctor like the rest of them. They’d always try to sugarcoat it.” There was another pause, and the corner of Mel’s mouth lifted in a very faint smile. “What’s the worst that you’ve tackled before me?”
“Couple of people with hysterical claustrophobia after being buried in the remains of the Echo tower. I have a friend I am not even going to touch without a helluva lot more practice.”
The smile turned into a smirk. “So you know your limits. I can respect that. You talked to Bull or just read what the Army docs wrote? ’Cause there’s ‘messed up’ and there’s all-inclusive FUBAR.” Mel sniffed and shifted in her seat. “And if Echo’s recruiting from the second, then things must be pretty bad.”
Bella shifted in the chair. “Well…that’s where the whole rewiring part comes in. There’s FUBAR, which is what my friend Vic is, and then there’s you. Which is…” She drummed her fingers on the chair arm, trying to select the right words. “Look, what happened to you got treated with drugs early on. So it’s not the massive scar mass that Vic has. She’s like a kitten got into a whole basket of yarn and turned it into a nightmare. You…I think…and my mentor thinks…I can untangle and heal. Am I making sense?”
“Sorta. At least you’re being honest, which is more than I can say for anyone else I met before.” She let out a long breath and pushed her hair away from her face. “People tried something besides drugs at the beginning. The issue wasn’t that it couldn’t work with time, it was more…” Mel paused, pressed her lips together, and looked Bella eye-to-eye. “What did you do before they hauled you here? You’re too young to have been doing this since before everything went to hell.”
“Paramedic, Las Vegas FD. Augmented class, empathic healing powers, Echo OpOne, on permanent assignment from Echo Rescue. Now…” She twisted a piece of hair around her finger. “They class me as an OpTwo-point-five, and I keep getting stronger, keep being able to do more stuff. It’s kind of scary.”
Mel nodded slowly, arms uncrossing as she leaned forward. “First person to try and help me was probably twice as old as you, a sweet and tough-as-nails nurse who’d been in all sorts of messy situations. It wasn’t the ability, it was…” Her voice lowered, and there was a sense of shame in the words. “…What she saw. They’d start, I’d flip, and then they’d have to deal with the projections. It just got easier to drug me and let me go, for the sanity of whoever drew the short straw.”
“Yeah, read all that. And…well, this is gonna be a lot different. It’s either gonna work, or not. My mentor thinks it will. I trust her. She’s not wrong…that I know of, ever. So, I kind of have that to hang onto…” She shook her head. “Look, I’m rambling. Let me just tell you what I need to do, and you tell me if you’re up for it, because I can promise you, it is gonna be a helluva lot harder on you than me. Okay?”
“’Kay.”
“I get inside your head. All the way in, which means you don’t get to hide
anything. This is like, whoa, way more intimate than most people can handle, so you really, really need to want to try this. Then I trigger the first traumatic memory. I will be in there with you for it. This is the full empathic version of desensitization treatment, what the nurse tried. We get through that one, then next session we handle the next memory. I’ll be doing a…healing treatment as I desensitize you, to rewire the neural pathways so that it stops being a trauma trigger and just becomes a shitty memory. That make sense?”
Mel nodded slowly. “How far back do you go? Just to what caused things, or…” She fidgeted and took a deep breath. “Never mind. You did Vegas; I’m sure there’s not much that would turn you colors.”
Bella laughed. “Paramedic on the Strip and off it. Oh honey, you would not believe the things we removed from places they shouldn’t have been.”
“I ’tended in the Quarter. Wouldn’t be surprised much, although you probably missed the Cajun flavor.” She laughed as well, tension broken for the moment. “So, is there another room, machines, cranky bald men in white coats…”
“You lay back. I turn the lights down. We aren’t going in chronological order. We’re going from ‘worst memory’ and working our way up.” She paused. “And don’t worry about the projections, because I won’t see them. I’ll be with you, holding your hand and we’ll fight it out together. That’s the difference. Every other time, you’ve been alone.”
She did as Bella instructed, although she gripped the edge of the couch cushion in anticipation.
Bella fingered the lighting controls, and took things down to just short of dark, then scooted her chair closer to the couch and took Mel’s tense hand in hers. “Touch telepath. Just don’t break my fingers.” Then she closed her eyes and insinuated herself into Mel’s mind, found the spot that radiated the most pain…and poked it.
It was dark and impossibly humid, with the heavy scent of burnt hair and broken electronics. The others in the “box” had clothes, one even had a light blanket, but Mel had curled herself into the furthest corner. Hands cupped over her mouth, she breathed in the sweat and dust on her hands rather than the decay that had taken over the others. Outside, she could hear the screams—it was the kid, the one who had spent the ride out talking about his girlfriend—and she waited for the gunshots.
There were never any gunshots. Gunshots would have meant some end to the torture, but that never happened.
She felt something like…a presence? As if someone was holding her hand, only not. It’s a memory, kiddo. It’s just a memory. I’m right here. I’m with you.
The door—the hatch on the top—flipped open and a rough voice barked at her as several guns pointed to the corner where they knew she would hide. A bucket of foul-smelling water emptied into the “box” to wake her up and further the stench of rot. The three with her had been there for weeks; she could taste death if she moved her hands. The kid tumbled into the box, partially clothed and shaking. There was a flare of hope at the first sign of life, and it took control to wait until the hatch closed before she could crawl over to him.
Guilt, yeah, I know, already you’re feeling guilty that there’s nothing you can do. Not just compassion, there was been there too. Shared empathy. Sisterhood. Closer than blood. We know. Only we know this, who share it.
He was facedown, the blood pooling around his face and neck. “Rev? Rev, they said you were alive here. They said you knew how to make it stop.” He lifted his head, and Mel choked back a sob as the kid tried to look at her with sightless eyes. He’d been cut from ear to ear, his young face methodically marked to cause the most pain without allowing him to die immediately. She held him by his shoulders and turned him over on his back, blood from the wounds on his neck pooling around her bare legs and feet. “Revvie? Say something, I can’t see nothing in here. It’s too dark.”
“I’m here. The…the others are here, they’re just sleeping.” It hurt to keep her voice calm, the bile rising in her throat as he tried to look at her. “I’m in here with you.”
“Can you make it stop?” Even as he spoke, the bit of life left in him trickled out over her skin. “They said you knew how to make them stop, but you wouldn’t tell them. You could’ve tricked them, right?”
It wasn’t that easy, but she couldn’t tell the kid that. She tried to say something, but he gripped at her arm with burned fingers. “Can you make it stop, Rev? Just for a little while?”
Stop. The moment froze. She stood somehow outside herself, looking down at herself, with the blue gal—Bella—standing with her. I’ve shut off all the emotional loading for a second, Mel. Now, this is what you couldn’t do at the time, look at everything logically and dispassionately. Like I am right now. Look. Analyze. Is there one single thing you could have done to change anything?
Standing outside herself, Mel could see the room, the bodies, the blood. She could draw upon the fragments of what she remembered about the area around the box, the numbers of people, and the resources they possessed. No. They were going to go through the group one by one. They wouldn’t touch a female meta, and they knew enough to not give me the chance to retaliate. They’d have done everything else, even if we’d told them what they wanted to hear.
That was the moment when…something changed inside her. She actually felt it. Subtle. Like…exactly like what Bella had described. Rewiring. A new circuit opened. One tiny little change.
Go. The moment unfroze in time. She was back inside herself, but the watchful presence was still there.
“I can give you a good dream and make it go away for a little while,” she was teling the boy, but the guilt didn’t carry the same heavy hurt as before. “Can you let me do that?”
He nodded, his head against her leg as she tried to piece together what he’d told her about his girl back home, tried to replace the dark rot of the box with an Alabama springtime, and tried to make him believe that he was taking a summer nap in the sunshine.
Then the memory faded out. She felt…well, it was exactly like waking out of the nightmares, except…except she wasn’t alone. She felt the couch under her first, then the tears on her face, then her hand being held. She heard sniffles. “Uh, mind if I let go of your hand? We both need some Kleenex.”
She still had the iron grip on Bella’s fingers. With no small sense of embarrassment, Mel dropped the thin blue hand and pushed herself up to a sitting position, arms hugging her knees as she rubbed her eyes with her sleeve. “Sorry,” she mumbled. “Hope I didn’t break your fingers.”
“Nothing to be sorry about.” The lights came up to about half normal, and Bella shoved a wad of Kleenex at her. “Oh kiddo, you did good. Then and now. Goddamn, you are strong.” Bella mopped at her eyes and blew her nose.
“That was three weeks in. Wasn’t my first tour, so I’d seen people done worse, just not…” She dabbed at her nose and folded the tissue into a tiny neat square between her forefinger and thumb. “Not for that long. Not that close. It was the smell that broke it after so long. You can shut your eyes and plug your ears, but the air…”
“Yeah.”
Mel took a deep breath. “It takes everything I have to go that far. After weeks, I didn’t have it.” She swiped at her nose again. “So, what happens next?”
“Well…I have good news and bad news. The good news is, that is the worst we’ll have to go through together. The bad news is that we’ll be hitting that same memory path a couple more times to groove the new path in. Then we’ll go on to the next worst. Can you handle this?”
“Will it put me on patrol faster if I say yes?” The question was immediate and sincere.
“Oh shit, yes. This is doable, I can fix you. I can do it without taking the memories. Kiddo, never, ever let them do that—it’s what will make you what you are.” It was Bella’s turn to fix Mel with that direct and sincere stare. “One survivor to another. We need that guilt. We don’t need it to cripple us, but we need it to keep us human and…yeah, humble, I guess. Metas…”—she waved a han
d full of Kleenex vaguely—“…we have these godlike powers, we need this shit to remind us we’re not gods. We’re just people who can do things. And when the excrement hits the rotating blades…it gets on us, too.” She took a deep breath. “Huh, now I sound like…never mind. If you’re up for this, I’m all in for it too. We can go round two right now, if you can take it.”
“Now.” It was neither question nor demand, but more Mel contemplating the offer aloud. She ran a fingernail over the dark fabric that covered her knees and gnawed on her lip, eyes darting back and forth. “So, I wouldn’t have to take my meds in a week? I could request assignment after that?” She lifted her head and offered an apologetic shrug. “I haven’t been on duty in years. I just want to be useful, that’s all. Blame the Army.”
Bella laughed shakily. “Bad Army. No cookie. Yeah, this is going to take about the same amount out of both of us, but I’m going to guess that three sessions a day, for a week, should do it. And it is never going to get worse than it just was. It will always be a little better each time.” Then, softly, “And…thanks. I just want to be useful too. Without having to kill someone to do it.”
This time, Mel reached out for Bella’s hand and gave it a reassuring pat. With the touch came a rush of what might have been feedback, if it hadn’t been offered as a sort of explanation and example rather than an accidental release. She saw and felt a shadow of what had transpired with the Rebs, including the combination of emotion from Bella as the ganger crumpled under her mental bludgeon.
“With what you’ve got, you have to know the difference between ‘want’ and ‘need.’ You did what needed to be done. You didn’t head out there wanting to have that be the end result.”
“But I need to get the control so I know, beyond a doubt, that isn’t the only option open to me. I need to be a laser, not a sledgehammer.” Bella nodded, swiping at her eyes again. “Fixing you will help me get that control. So this is for both of us.” She straightened. “Okay. Round two?”
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