I take the paper from her. Hannibal actually carried through on his promise. He actually played the game. I read his line, that last word being Isaac.
Ignorance sins, advocating anger carelessly,
And I read her line.
Introspection, subtle altruism, attributes compassion,
She breaks the silence, “Whose Isaac?”
I try hard to find an appropriate answer. I know who Isaac is, and I can feel what Isaac is and was to me. What he still is to me. But I can’t possibly give her the feelings I have inside of my heart about him. What he is, what we have, is beyond words.
Isaac was sacrificed to this war. Sent because orphans aren’t supposed to have anything to lose. But what guarantee, what assurance do we have that it wasn’t wasted?—I don’t know. And the only thing I end up seeing, is that the survivors of this generation, like absurd Abrahams, will simply go and repeat the cycle, sacrificing the Isaacs of the next generation uselessly as the ones before. The State is the alter, the War is god, but where is the ram we were promised?
“He was an offering.”
We watch the sunset together. “It really is beautiful,” she remarks. “Whole, complete, compared to over there.” I look over at her. She looks down at the nub of her missing arm. “Compared to here.”
“It looks like a circle doesn’t it?” I say.
I see the twinkle of muse in her eye, like at that café. “Yeah, of course it does.”
“From here. But if we were able to get right at its surface we would see that it’s hardly a perfect circle. It would be scary, dangerous, a mashed up shape floating in space.”
“True.”
I look at the nub of her arm, she turns away. “Nothing is perfect. It’s what makes us human.” She turns back. “We’re like circles, but poorly drawn and hardly perfect. From afar we may look so, but when you get up and close, we’re anything but. I tried to be a perfect citizen before the war. Then they tried to make me a perfect warrior. After that, I tried to be a perfect martyr and tell the truth about everything. Instead, here I am, broken, insane. But it’s here I can best follow my circle now.”
She looks into my eyes, and for once, beyond my scarred and hideous face that everyone else gets caught up on. She is looking deeper, non-judgingly, kindly, like the girl in the white dress. I let myself get lost in her amber pupils. “Eyes have perfect circles, you’re eyes, they are beautiful. And you’d never guess it, but,” I grin.
She nudges me, smiling. “What?”
“But those Herculeans—and not to diminish what I just told you—but they have the most amazing eyes. They are true unadulterated beauty. They are perfect running circles. Ideals are perfect, humans are not. So we never reach them, we never become perfect. But that was never the point. We were never meant to be. We were only meant to always try and grow through following them as best as we can. To be human is to follow perfection, not attain it.
“This war had good intentions, and I find it hard to hate anyone. I should hate the Herculeans the most, but yet when I look close my eyes it’s their blue ovals I see, and I just accept it. I should hate the Party, but I remember, they have also done good in my past, and they are just humans too. Fellow humans blinded by a dangerous travesty of perfection. The only thing I do get angry about now, that I can’t accept, that I do hate, is the war. War. Not the people fighting it, because they, I, we were used against our own will, exploited. Not the countries waging it, for they are only a multitude of many individuals equally blindsided and delirious. Not the media depicting it in favorable light, it’s their job after all. No, just the war. I hate it. It doesn’t take sides. It doesn’t think one group better than the other. It doesn’t aid the morally right in its cause to help win. No, it just wants more war. It’s just another one of the travesties we try to employ to reach perfection. Travesties of the human circle moving forward.”
The sun begins its decent below the horizon. It leaves behind the fading light of another day. Into the darkness we are much more familiar with. The darkness is only temporary though, the light will come back. The stars that pierce the veil of night promise us that. “I will always keep looking, always moving along my circle. Just like the days turn into nights and back into days, I will come around. One day, I will find it, my circle.” Then I sense—no—feel her aura as she edges closer, giving the only hand she has left to embrace mine.
After the sunset I leave to sleep. As I lie on my bed that night, waiting for dreams to take me, the door swings open and before I can get up Alison jumps on me. “Peter!”
I lift her up and stand, her left arm grabbing mine tightly. “What’s going on?” Before she replies I see my younger self hiding in the shadow of the door by the corner, creaking it open. She chokes on her tears trying to talk. Behind her enter two Party Reps. She screams. Their Tasers spit hissing lights. They don’t hurt this time though. It’s like I already left. I fall back onto the bed numb.
XXXVII
Wake up.
Wake up now.
I rise out of my bunk. An officer stands by me—Major his rank declares. “How was leave?” he says. “Ever meet Oedipus?”
I close my eyes.
Remember who you are. Remember.
I open them to look back up. “Surfboarding is not all it’s cracked up to be. It’s good to be back.”
The Major smiles. “Get your supplies, and onto the carrier.”
Five days later, the bright atmosphere of Nova Terra salutes me from the side window of the starship. I go inside the armory and suit up. I pause and look at the rack of armor. The chest plate is newly polished and acts like a mirror, reflecting our faces back to us. I grab it and bring it closer.
“There you are. What, do you honestly feel bad for Peter here? No, no you don’t feel bad, you don’t care. It’s all illusionary your feelings for him, thinking you care because you’ve spent enough time with him that walking away now would feel wrong. What about the millions of others I’ve cast into the lake? You don’t care about them because they have no story to allow you so. But their fates were no different, their pain no less. And yet you didn’t raise a finger, like now. You humans abhor a vacuum and now that there’s a gaping one before you, you’re trying to plug it up with anything you can—be it sadness for where he ended up or relief that it wasn’t you.
“There’s something you don’t comprehend. Fate. When Abel’s head took that rock, because their father chose to pick favorites, the entire universe simply imitated that behavior. Fate picks one to succeed and one to not. Fate shows me which ones I can have. Poor Peter thought he had free will. He tried so hard to pick his path, not knowing it was already set down for him. I can’t blame him, or you.”
I place the chest piece back down and stand in the center of the armory as the mechanical arms cover me in my power suit. The armor plates whine and moan as the arms bolt them into place, becoming my second skin. The face shield lowers before me, the visor reflecting my face one last time before it snaps shut. “You just don’t realize it yet. But your fate is sealed.” The helmet closes around me and my breathing becomes louder as the HUD uploads onto the visor. The tubes to my life support system hiss as they connect and recycle oxygen. The visor HUD writes a message across the screen: ONLINE?
My metal boots clank against the metal hallway as I walk to the hanger. Before me is my gunship, a modified Osprey. I pause, gazing at the masterpiece. Upon the Osprey’s nose, where a design covers it, is the face of an owl, created in dark strokes of black and silver paint. Its talons clench the gun ports on the front—each talon spiked at the tip with a frowning beheaded Herculean—and the gun barrels are painted gold, where they look like lighting coming out of the owl’s wings. It is the essence of might. Along the magnificent feathers of the owl on the side of the cockpit, is the word Atonement in bold. Then I find the owl’s eye and stare into it. A pure blue of impending justice always on the hunt, of righteous wrath—in fact, it’s beau
tiful. The angst of wanting to get back to fighting that I had during the trip here, dissipates. I find rest in its blue eye.
There you go my little warrior. There you go.
“Sure is a charmer,” says a woman’s voice behind me. I turn around. It is another operative of my outfit, her armor a dark red shade. We walk up the ramp together, to the rest of our team sitting in two rows of seats against each side of the hull. I sit down across the aisle from the lady in red armor, and see that both her legs are completely prosthetic.
“What happened?”
“Took a nasty hit in the Kuplar ambush.”
A wave of awe washes over me. “You were the survivor?”
“Yep, the one and only, bloodied and trimmed,” she glances at her fake legs, “Rose.” She places her compact rifle into a gun port on the side of her seat. “I’ve never seen you before, who are you?”
The sirens sound. We buckle up. The pilot informs us we are exiting the spaceship. The atmosphere of Nova Terra, formed millions of years ago, almost as old as death itself, swallows us into my father’s belly, and my lips break from excitement.
“War.”
Travesty (SolarSide Book 1) Page 35