The Bargaining Path

by T. Rudacille

  ***

  “Brynna…” Tyre’s voice, gentle but slightly urgent. “Come now, Brynna. Look up. Open your eyes.”

  My eyes opened on their own; my mind did not want to know my predicament. I did not want to look up and see Tyre and his people around me, because I knew that time was running out before my “lessons” began.

  “Look up at me, Brynna.” Tyre gently raised my head. In the short time it took for my head to be level, parallel to his, I had blinked, and in that one-tenth of a second, I had managed to convince myself that it would be James across from me when my eyes had opened again; only James raised my head that way.

  “No one is going to hurt you here, alright?” Tyre told me gently, “No one will lay a hand on you here. You must know that now.”

  “I just want to see James and Penny. We just want to go. We want to leave here and find my sister and my friends. Tyre, you will never hear from us again. We will live out the rest of our lives somewhere far from you, far from this. Why do you need all of us here?”

  “Come now, we will not discuss such things. You know that Purissimus is a dangerous place, and that if we are to survive it, then we must remain together. ‘Strength in numbers.’ I am told that that became a very popular Earthean phrase in the final years.”

  “Then just them. Just James and Penny. You don’t have to give him anything; he will just take himself and her out into the woods, and you will never hear from them again.”

  “I hardly think Maxwell would not return for you. He loves you deeply, Brynna.”

  “Yes, and I love him. I love him so much, and over these past two years, we have raised Penny as our own. Our father and mother are only biologically our parents. I am Penny’s mother, and James is her father. She recognizes us now as that. Please, just let them go.”

  “Are you begging? I never would have expected that of you. I never would have expected tears, either.”

  “Well, I am not crying, but I am begging, you are right. Are you disappointed?”

  “No. I am not at all. Quite the contrary, actually. I am relieved to see that. It proves that there is hope for you still.”

  “There is no hope for me, Tyre. I will never accept what it is that you do. I will never accept your God.”

  “Do not say that, Brynna. That is the quickest way to get yourself, your lover, and your little girl put in front of a gun.”

  “You would kill a little girl?” I hissed, and all signs of weakness had evaporated quickly. “You would shoot an innocent child? A six-year-old?”

  “I will do whatever is necessary to make you understand that you are wrong to have lived this way. I will not lay a hand on you. I will not let anyone else lay a hand on you.”

  “But you will shoot me.”

  He looked at me, seemingly taking a moment to stock up his reserve of patience. Anyone who was acquainted with me or even had heard of me knew that he would need years’ worth of patience for just one conversation with me.

  “I know how difficult your life has been.” He said finally, and his voice was perfectly level, almost soothing. “Your father has spoken extensively of the abuse you suffered. I want to spare you from having to ever experience that again, so you will receive no lashings, no beatings, and no forcible intercourse.”

  “You mean rape.”

  “I mean forcible intercourse.”

  “You are a joke.” I snapped at him, even more venomously than before, “You will not even refer to it as what it is, because you are too weak to acknowledge your own sadism, and yet at the same time, you are unwilling to stop doing it. You are not sorry for it.”

  “No, I am not. Did Mary Bachum not tell you that she has suffered it?”

  “Yes, she told me about her past. Not to sound overly childish, but boo-hoo.”

  “No. That was not all. She suffered it here.”

  I kid you not, my jaw fell and stayed open. Tyre actually chuckled.

  “Yes. She had sins in her past for which she had to pay dearly. I will allow her to confide those sins to you once you and I have negotiated. I truly believe that you two will be close, Brynna. I believe that she will be the mother you have not had for fifteen years.”

  I snorted through my nose.

  “Yes, and then I will marry Paul.”

  “No, you will marry Adam.”

  My jaw fell and stayed open again, except this time, the muscles cramped painfully because they were stretched to their farthest reaches.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I have use for Adam Elohimson yet. To keep both him and you pacified, I have decided that you will be his bride. You will remain under vigilant guard, of course, but you will be free to roam as you please.”

  “And Penny?”

  “Penny will be with you. If you agree to my terms here, it will be you, Penny, and Adam.”

  For a long time, I gaped at him. He stared back, unfazed by my gaze’s fixation on him. My silent confusion was not provoking in him a desire to explain, so I would have to recover my voice and ask for further details.

  “May I ask, just to settle my own curiosity, what marrying me off to Adam accomplishes? Apparently, it is so indecent that I am with James, who is merely twenty-some years my senior. Adam has been around since the dawn of time, it seems. Thousands upon thousands of years. Is that not indecent?”

  “Of course it’s indecent. But there is much about you that is indecent besides your strange fetish for older men.”

  “A finer compliment has never been paid to me.”

  “Well…” His grin broadened, “We will see if you feel that way once you are married off to Adam and your love is married off to Adam’s wife. Yes, I can see that that idea hurts worse than the idea of your own marriage.” He leaned forward, and his voice was soft, “You know, don’t you, that James Maxwell will be unable to resist the second queen? You will not succumb to your old feelings for Adam. They are gone, I know. Forget about him accidentally shooting you, as if you could or should. He has insulted you, threatened you with countless violent acts, all of which, I should inform you, he is absolutely capable…”

  “So, what? This is entertainment? This is punishment for my various indecencies? Adam is my punishment?”

  “It is certainly not entertainment!” He snapped in indignant rage. The way he took immediate offense to my insinuation that all of his means were for jolly sport was ironically similar to his greatest enemy’s reaction when I had insinuated the very same to him.

  “But it is certainly punishment, Brynna, and I believe it is a fair and sound one. It is what you need. It will change you. I would say that you should be happy that your punishment is not of the physical sort women like you normally suffer. But believe me when I say that Adam is worse, by far. Now, Paul has already explained these terms to Janna. She has agreed, not that she needed to; it would have happened either way.”

  “Of course she has.”

  “He is now explaining these terms to James, whom I know you know deep down will also agree. Was that not the theme of your earlier conversation? Do whatever is necessary to survive, even if it means renouncing your love for one another? Renouncing all of your beliefs? Adam has no choice in the matter: If he objects, he will be killed, and if there is one thing I can say about him besides the fact that he is far more ruthless and sadistic than I ever have been or could be is that he will do anything to live another day. He fears death more than any of us who fear the true One God do. Adam’s God is fluff, and still, he fears meeting him in death.”

  “And me? What if I don’t fear death?”

  For a moment that stretched through ages, it seemed, his blue eyes stared into mine. There was a blithe gaiety and heavy amusement in his gaze, and the fire that my own sent back did not dissolve it. When he leaned forward, the bright light reflected off of his harshly angled cheek bones and hard, chiseled, prominent nose to cast black shadows that ran from his eyes down his cheeks like weeks-old blood.

  “Oh, Brynna… But you do. An
d you should certainly be thankful for that. There is a certain floating vessel where we put those who supposedly do not fear death. That is no place for a woman like you. So bright. So much potential. There is much good that you can still do. All you have to do is forget these childish ideas fed to you by Don and Adam that we are evil.”

  “You are evil. The things you do are evil. Murder, torture, rape, and brutal, sadistic domination over an innocent yet mindless populace are all the favorite things of evil people.”

  “No. Evil people do those things for themselves. We do those things for good. You know better than anyone that evil is not black and white, my child. Good is not black and white. What you don’t know is that evil must sometimes be done for good. Adam knows that, but he will not exert that force over his own people, and look at the disastrous consequences that have been yielded as a result! My people have survived since this war began, three thousand years ago. If we truly were evil, would God not have struck us down by now?”

  “I don’t know what your God or any God would have done. But I know that no matter what James or Adam say, I do not agree to your terms.”

  His smile faded slowly. He had not been expecting that at all.

  “You know that I cannot allow you to live here amongst us if you do not agree to my terms. I cannot allow you to poison the minds of my people…”

  “And I will poison the minds of your people, Tyre. It will start slowly, with just whispers in our pathetic little Submissive Wives’ Clubs, and that will spread to the men who lived under the laws of Adam and Don, and from all of us, the children will know, and while it might not be us who rise up, it might be our children. Maybe it will be us, maybe it will be them. I can see Penny as a leader, can’t you? She has my fire in abundance; in fact, I think she has more of it than I do. Perhaps she and Idan will do what we could not, and they will gather up an uprising of us immortal, evolved folk, and together, we will change things back to the way they were. You better believe that if I cannot convince them, then I will manipulate their minds to accept my reasoning. I am weak now, but when I get stronger, I could manipulate your mind, if I wanted to. I could manipulate Rich’s mind, and make him bite off the other half of Mary’s face. I could manipulate Paul’s mind, and make him free us all and slit your throat while you are sleeping. I could manipulate every one of your thugs’ minds, if they have them, and make them turn their guns on themselves. You think Adam is dangerous and sadistic and ruthless? You think that you are dangerous and sadistic and ruthless? Oh, Tyre…” I shook my head slightly, “You have not seen anything yet.”

  “Then you choose the Lapsarian? You choose the prison?”

  “Absolutely, I do.” I was the one beaming widely and brightly now, “I absolutely adore the sea.”