What the Heart Desires

by Jaime Derelle

  “I have to warn you," Vanda said, “that I was once a very accomplished fighter. I even won some competitions in my youth in the colonies. Plus, I have two seconds on you.”

  “We know how good you are at fighting,” Zilo remarked, standing between the two. “I’m sure Neon has informed you of our previous interest in you, but O here is our best fighter and if it weren’t for your two seconds, I would be in fear of your life; competition fighter or no competition fighter.”

  With that, Zilo moved to the side and Vanda saw O jump back and let out a kick. Vanda instantly blocked the kick that came two seconds later, but as he did so, O threw out a small stun grenade while she was still in the air. Vanda threw himself to the side to avoid it, but as he landed on the floor, another shell hit him on his back and he was trapped within its plasma field, its energy pinning him to the floor.

  Zilo began to laugh out loud.

  “It appears that two seconds isn’t enough,” he grinned.

  “She’s got stun grenades,” Vanda cried from within the plasma field that had him held hard on the floor.

  “Yes— and so too do the government shock troopers. You must learn to listen to the temporal field and not to what you see. Feel what her next move is and adjust your own accordingly.”

  O switched off the plasma field and Vanda gingerly got up.

  The two carried on fighting for the next hour, Vanda improving as time went on; feeling his way into the fight. He was hugely impressed by O’s fighting technique. He had studied several fighting techniques himself while out in the colonies; they could be dreadfully dangerous places and you needed to learn to fight hand to hand if you were going to survive. But the way that O fought, he realised that she was combining many different forms of fighting style; intermingling and revolving each with consummate ease. He was glad to have two seconds on her but felt that perhaps he needed more.

  After their fight, Zilo signalled the end of training for the day and the two retired to the showers. When they were inside, O immediately began undressing and Vanda wasn’t sure where to put his eyes. O giggled to herself at the sight of his embarrassment.

  Naked, she sidled up to him and took his hand, leading him into a shower cubicle. The whole time he blushed as she gently undressed him. He was very self-conscious of the state of his emaciated and scarred body. He blushed as he stood there naked next to her, the whole time not taking his eyes off of her face.

  “You know you can look at my body,” she said measuredly.

  He lowered his gaze and saw that she had a beautiful, curvaceous, and athletic body. There were several scars on its surface, but far from deforming it, they gave her beauty something more profound— as if there was a universal truth within it.

  O turned the shower on and began washing Vanda’s body, moving her fingers upon his scars. As she did, she looked up at him and their eyes met. They took each other in their arms and embraced under the flow of the warm water, O’s head nestled on Vanda’s breast. They made love.

  After that, the two began sharing quarters.

  The next days saw Vanda’s training become more and more intense. Zilo took him under his tutelage and taught him how to control the flow of time that existed around him. With his mind, Vanda learnt how to bend it to his will.

  “Time is like a raging torrent,” Zilo informed him as they were meditating one day. “It is everywhere, but most of us cannot feel or see it. But a shifter can; he can learn to see and feel it as if it were physical. Once he can do that, he can control it.”

  Within three days Vanda could stop time with his mind for up to ten seconds. After six days, Zilo moved him on to opening up vortexes. This procedure was very dangerous, because if he opened one up that was too large, he could end up swallowing the whole room, Zilo and himself included.

  Zilo had been very impressed with Vanda’s abilities. In under a week they had moved from time lapse combat, through to temporal control and now he stood to the side as Vanda prepared to fold space. In front of him was a block of granite. Vanda had to concentrate his mind, feel the temporal flow with his hands and then push it into the block; thus, opening up the temporal field and casting the block to the other side of the galaxy.

  “Eventually,” Zilo informed Vanda as the latter prepared to open up a tear in space, “you’ll be able to control where the vortex leads to and will be capable of jumping into it yourself, and travelling across the universe.”

  Vanda stood in front of the block and began controlling his breathing and emptying his mind. He began to feel the stream of time moving around him. He moved his hand forward and felt the temporal field as one would feel the force of water if they were submerged in it.

  However, as Vanda began to move the flow forward, the ground which he stood on began to tremble. He instantly stopped and looked over at Zilo, who had a worried expression on his face.

  “Did I do that?” Vanda asked.

  “No,” the old man cried, “it’s something else.”

  The room began to shudder as if a great earthquake had just hit it.

  O and Neon suddenly burst into the room, armed with photon rifles.

  “It’s the government,” Neon shouted to them. “They’ve found us.”

  The walls of the room began to shake and then crumble. A huge hole appeared at the side of the room and great flashes of light burst out of it. O threw Zilo and Vanda a weapon each and they turned them onto the hole as shock troopers. Battle droids began emerging through it, wave after wave emerging and being struck down by the constant stream of photon energy that shot out of the four’s weapons. The shock troopers spilling out and landing dead on top of each other. Outside of the room, Vanda could hear the rumblings of battles going on throughout the base, screams and explosions ricocheting everywhere.

  Suddenly, O was struck on the shoulder and sent hurtling back. Vanda felt a well of anger rising through his body and he instantly became aware of the temporal field around him. In the midst of his rage, he grabbed ahold of it violently and thrust it forward at the forces piling into the room through the hole. A huge wormhole opened up around the hole and the forces that coming out of it. The vortex flashed like an angry electrical storm around them and then removed a whole circular section of the building; government troops included, folding it up and sending it to oblivion. The others looked on in amazement at Vanda’s great show of power.

  The opening up of the wormhole gave them a little time to collect themselves. Vanda sprinted over to O who was rubbing her shoulder. He helped her up. It was only a slight flesh wound and he felt an infinite relief at it being nothing life threatening.

  “O,” Neon shouted over to them, “get Vanda out of here.”

  O immediately got up and took Vanda by the arm. She began leading him out of there. Behind them, more shock troopers and droids had entered and Zilo and Neon held them off, showing great skill in doing so. O led Vanda to a metal hatch just outside the room. A beam of green light shot out of it and scanned her body. The hatch then opened. She entered and Vanda began to follow her in, but as he got to the door, he turned back.

  He saw more and more government forces streaming into the room, overwhelming Neon and Zilo.

  Zilo turned back and, seeing Vanda standing by the opening of the hatch; he cried, “GET OUT OF…”

  But he was cut short. Just then a massive photon beam burst through his chest and split him in two. At that moment, O grabbed ahold of Vanda and dragged him to the hatch. The door shut behind them and they stood inside an escape capsule.

  “We've got to get back to them,” he hollered to O in frustration.

  “They’re dead,” O said, trying her best to sound nonchalant. “But you are alive and that is all that matters.”

  With that, she commanded the capsule’s onboard computer to get them out of there.

  In a second they were hurtling away through the water, watching a series of explosions coming from the base that lay behind them. O sat back and began crying, her head in he
r hands. Vanda sat down next to her and put his arm around her. She looked up at him and then embraced him in a hug, sobbing on his breast.

  Where were they to go? What now for the Cause? How had the government found them?

  These were some of the questions that echoed within their heads as they drifted off in the capsule towards an uncertain future that even Vanda couldn’t fathom.

  Part Three

  In a dark room somewhere in the heart of one of the many government buildings that litter Earth, O sits strapped to a chair, wires coming out from a chrome cap-shaped device that sits upon her shaven head. Interwoven in her arms are transparent tubes that pass liquids in and out of her body. Her face looks worn and anaemic. Black rings surround her eyes like the outer edges of black holes. Dr Kelvin stands in front of her, holding her chin in his hand, looking into her face. Tears leave her dead eyes and pass down her cheeks. She stares out blankly into a void that only she can see. Kelvin wipes away a tear with his finger and then brings it up to his sight. He studies the tear upon the end of his finger.

  “Where is the shifter that goes by the name of Vanda Kline?” Kelvin asks O, as he holds her face.

  “Fuck you," she spits out at him.

  Kelvin turns to a technician in a white plastic gown with a plastic surgical mask on his face and says, “Give her another dose.”

  “I’m not sure that she can take another, sir," the technician nervously replies, his voice slightly muffled through the mask.

  “Just do it,” Kelvin barks and, turning back to O whose head he still held in his hands, tears falling from her dead eyes. “She knows where he is— if she doesn't tell us then she will die and if I know him, as I believe I do, then he will come to us,” he adds.

  The technician turns to a device with flickering red and green lights mounted on a small trolley that stands at the other end of the wires and tubes. He turns a large dial on the instrument's face, and O’s body immediately convulses in the most terrible spasms. Her face contorts and throws itself out of Kelvin’s grasp. He stands back as her body arches up as if something was pushing her out of the chair from underneath. On a large, greenish monitor behind her are some flickering images of her and Vanda. Kelvin looks at them with curiosity. They were of her and Vanda fighting.

  “This is good,” he says. “You like these memories? Good times, huh? But not what I’m after," and then turning back to the technician, he instructs curtly, “Wipe them.”

  The technician presses a button on the trolley console and the screen scrambles and then becomes blank.

  “Oops,” Kelvin utters. “Looks like that one's gone too— along with all your love-making. If we can’t have him, then neither shall you.”

  Blood begins to trickle out of O’s ears and nose. Kelvin turns back to the technician and nods. The technician switches the dial back to zero. O’s body immediately drops back into the chair and she slumps forward. Kelvin takes ahold of her head once again and lifts it up so that their eyes meet.

  “How about now?” he asks.

  An enormous globule of spit comes bursting out of her mouth and strikes him in the face.

  He turns back to the technician and sneers, “Erase the bloody lot.”

  The technician shrugs and switches the dial on full. Her body instantly convulses, making an awful groaning sound as all its muscles spasm. The monitor again fills with O’s memories; memories of her childhood, of her time in the government military, on the colonies, her redemption through the Cause, her love for Vanda. With each passing memory, the monitor scrambled and they are thrown away forever until O is no more than a shell; her face dead and a line of drool falling from her mouth, her eyes up in the back of her head so that all that is visible are their whites.

  Kelvin nods to the technician and he switches her off. She slumps back and now there is nothing left of her.

  “I knew she wouldn’t talk,” Kelvin remarks casually. “But it was fun anyway.”

  With that, he takes out a pistol from his pocket and fires a plasma bolt through the temple of her head. In the corner, a black entity floats like some phantasmal shadow. It appears to communicate something to Kelvin and the latter turns around.

  Vanda woke up, breathing frantically, tears streaming down his face and his body soaked with a sheet of frosty sweat. He turned to his side and was relieved to see O fast asleep next to him. He ran his hand along the side of her cheek, scared that she wasn’t there. She slowly opened her eyes and, on seeing his tear-stained face, she rose out of bed and put her arm around him.

  “Another nightmare?” she softly asked him. “You gonna tell me about this one?”

  “It was nothing— just a nightmare.”

  “You’ve been having them a lot lately; are you sure that it’s not a vision?”

  “No— just a dream that’s all. Let’s just go back to sleep.”

  O kissed Vanda gently on the forehead and then laid back down to sleep, turning over so that her back was facing him. He watched her back as she breathed in and out and let out a sigh.

  They had been on the run now for nearly a month, going from safe house to safe house deep in the Neo York underground, constantly chased, constantly looking over their shoulders, waiting anxiously for the door to be kicked in any moment. His dreams had become more frequent over the last couple of weeks and he had slowly come to fear them as a child fears the darkness. Always the same; her anaemic, emaciated body going through the most terrible pain; her mind being tortured; memories removed; part of her soul being taken forever until she was no more than just a cracked shell, and then death. He had spent the night after night standing by her side in that room, watching her slowly fades to nothing in front of him, unable to do anything.

  And the black entity too; what did it mean? It was as if it knew he was there, watching them. It seemed to sense his presence, but Vanda couldn’t work out what it was. Another shifter? Possibly. But it was always distorted and never took the form of a solid shape; always an anamorphic shadow and no more.

  He felt helpless. All they did was run, but they couldn’t carry on running forever. The dreams of Neon— of the Cause— had become swallowed up by darkness and the future seemed to be a barren field in which everything disappeared. They spent their days locked inside rooms; Vanda meditating, attempting to see into the future, but something always blocking him; holding him off; until all he ever saw was O’s torture and eventual death. It had become an obsession and clouded his abilities. He couldn’t let go of her dead eyes as they stared out into the abyss. They stared out at him too, from every place; even when he looked into her eyes in the present moment, he saw those same dead ones that looked out into that room.

  Vanda and O were currently staying with a friendly family. Every day they would sit in the small habitation with them, the couple and their two children. They would sit on the floor, eating what little the family could provide for them. The two felt a small amount of shame at being such a burden on this very poor family; they barely had enough to feed themselves, let alone two extra adults. But they never complained, never showed a sign that they were being intruded upon.

  The two young children, a girl of ten and a boy of seven, would sit and watch the two strangers as they ate and then ask them all types of questions about the outside world: what it’s like in the colonies, in the upper world and the city. They were so inquisitive and their parents would often scold them for their interrogations, but O and Vanda would smile and say that it was okay. Children down there never got to see anything other than what the telescreens wanted them to see, as well as the overcrowded labyrinthine streets of the lower levels. They were trapped down there, unable to move, unable to breathe.

  Vanda would watch O with the children and smile. She was so good with them, a natural mother, he thought. When he saw her play with the children, his heart would be attacked with the most melancholic pang and more than once he had to hold back a flood of tears.

  They had been with the family for nearly two
weeks at this point. Ever since they had had to escape their last hideout when the government had swept down on them one night. Vanda had felt something within the temporal field that night which had disturbed him and they were able to flee just in time. They had come across the family by mistake and, without asking any questions, had been invited into their small dwelling that sat within one of the lowest slums of the lower city. It put this little household in terrible peril; taking in fugitives was a capital offence and punished by death; but often when one is cast into darkness, it is the most insignificant that show a person the light.

  The mother and father were secret Christians and had raised their children on tales of selfless altruism. They almost seemed grateful for the chance to prove their faith and were often dutiful to the pair to the point of obsequiousness.

  The children would watch Vanda meditate with looks of curiosity written all over their little faces, wondering what the strange man with the pure white hair was doing. He felt those children in those moments and remembered his vision of the great social purge that was coming; recalling the joyful children of the upper world rejoicing with their parents at the deaths of so many children like these. He wondered if those children up there shared the same wonderful spirit that seemed to inhabit these youngsters who sat silently watching him. He asked himself what heart could call for their murder and the murder of billions like them.

  Vanda and O were cut off from everything and had little information on what was going on with both the Cause and the government itself. The father of the family would return and give them what little news he could garner from the telescreens that littered the streets and the gossip that littered the local mouths. But it was always only official information relayed by the government and nothing more. They were celebrating the deaths of the evil terrorist leader Neon Kahn and his general Zilo Max and claimed that soon they would crush the last remnants of the Cause that had scattered into the dust like cockroaches fleeing from the light.