Maybe she could do something about it. Maybe that was why she was there.
She held her hands out, palms first, and touched the storm.
Incredible pain lanced through her hands and into her arms. Her skin was being flayed off, being melted from her bones. She screamed and let go, jerking her arms away.
She looked at her virtual skin. It was still whole.
It’s only pain.
She tried again, plunging her hands into the seething gray mass, and once again was forced to pull them out as the pain built quickly to a burning crescendo.
Breathing heavily now, she glared at the cloud. How could she let the inanimate mass of nothing get the better of her?
Then it hit her. She shook her head, laughing at herself for missing the obvious.
None of this was real.
She was only constrained to a human body because she believed it to be so.
She closed her eyes and imagined herself drifting apart like a mist, growing to encompass the storm like a cool spray of water.
She felt it when she made contact. It hurt, but not like before. Instead, it was like a hundred small aches, spread out over her whole body.
She concentrated on smothering the cloud, opening her awareness to it. The dim light faded to a uniform gray.
The storm was all around her now, was a part of her. It seemed to be growing stronger, though, not weakening. She started to panic, clawing at the oily gray air, but she couldn’t get hold of anything. It slipped out of her grasp, and she was drowning in it, sucking it in like black bile.
Was this how Jayson had succumbed to whatever had been done to him?
She tried to draw herself back together, but she was too dispersed.
She tried to scream, but she had no lungs. If she had, they would have been drowning in pain.
There was nothing she could do.
Marissa let go.
Jayson lay on the rack, stretched to his limit. It was a fiendish, ancient form of torture, combined with a hypnotic flow of images on the screen above created to break him down. To rip his self, the core of his being, off its moorings.
Pain flared through his body, from his feet up along all the muscles of his legs, along his spine and up to his bound hands.
Who were these bastards? What did they want from him?
There was no one to tell him. Only pain, endless pain.
Then something cool spread across his body, starting at his core and making its way up and down his form like a chill mist. Wherever it touched, the pain abated.
He sighed, tears running down his face as his calves stopped aching, as the mist covered the screen above, darkening it and muting its sound.
His bonds dissolved too, and he drifted down onto something soft, something that gave underneath his weight.
Something warm touched his cheek, and he opened his eyes to see a young girl, her face blue like the sky, smiling down at him.
He closed his eyes again, finally at peace.
Marissa opened her eyes, finding her body laid out flat on the ground.
The cloud was gone, and in its place was a golden glow. She stood up, back in her human form, and looked around.
The light shone on a white plane that extended a few meters in each direction, a bright spot in the otherwise dim world of Jayson’s mind.
In the distance, there were other storms.
She understood now why she’d felt compelled to come in search of her father.
She wasn’t there for answers, though she would likely find them, anyway.
She was there to save him.
EDDY LOOKED in on Jayson. He was still unconscious and still tied down firmly to the cot. “Are you two ready?”
Danny and Delancy nodded. They’d spent the better part of an hour talking with Aaron and Andy through Eddy’s loop, getting advice on how to proceed. Andy thought Jayson was still in there somewhere. Aaron wasn’t so sure.
It had been decades since Jackson’s younger son, Jayson, had been abducted, apparently by Chinese intelligence, forcibly recruited to their cause. Aaron thought Jayson’s mind was irreparably broken.
He hadn’t seen firsthand what Andy had done to help these kids and everyone else who had been imprisoned in Agartha.
There was a dull rumble and the whole room shook. “Kids, come here!” Eddy shouted, pulling them under the doorframe into his arms.
The noise roared to a crescendo, and something crashed in the living room.
Then it was over.
“Everyone all right?” His old earthquake training paid off. Foreverquake?
Danny and Delancy nodded.
“What was that?” Danny asked, his eyes wide.
“I don’t know. Go check on Marissa and Matthew.” Since when did Forever have earthquakes? Or were they Ariadnequakes? Eddy peeked out of the hallway to find Sven and Sandra lifting a bookshelf that had fallen during the shaking.
“What was that?” Sven asked. The poor man looked spooked.
Eddy scowled. “I don’t know. Nothing good.”
Sandra laughed darkly. “That’s an understatement.”
Whatever was happening out there, it was quickly getting worse.
Danny returned from the master bedroom. “Marissa’s still sleeping, and Matt’s fine.”
“Okay, let’s do this, then. The sooner we can help Jayson, the sooner we’ll get answers.” He hoped Jayson had the answers.
Delancy sat on one side of the cot in the small room, and Danny on the other.
Dust floated in the air from the quake, lit by the single luthiel lantern on a small wooden table next to the cot. Miraculously it hadn’t broken.
Eddy sneezed, trying to knock the dust out of the air with his hand.
Danny and Delancy looked at each other across Jayson’s unconscious body, a spark of understanding passing between them.
Eddy wondered what it was like to be able to do the things these kids could do. To be both blessed and marked as different at the same time.
Santi watched over his shoulder. “You’re right,” he said softly.
“What?”
“They’re good kids.”
He nodded. That didn’t mean Santi’s earlier argument was wrong. But there had to be a better way to deal with potential problems between Homo Sapiens and Homo Liminal.
Danny and Delancy took each other’s hands on one side and put their other hands on Jayson’s forehead.
They both slumped forward onto his chest.
“Is that… normal?” Santi’s brow was creased.
Eddy laughed ruefully. “None of this is normal.” Eddy took two blankets Sandra had brought in and laid one over each of their forms.
“What do we do now?”
“We wait.” He led Santi through the living room, where the Olafs were cleaning up after the quake, and onto the porch outside.
It was the normal darkness of night, but Eddy couldn’t help but compare it to the suffocating blackness they’d experienced earlier in the day. Maybe the world was ending. Or worse. Maybe there was nothing they could do about it.
They sat next to one another, looking out into the darkness, little pinpoints of light here and there like stars marking other farmholds along the Verge.
He was sick of being alone.
“Santi?” Eddy said after a long moment.
“Yeah?”
“Do you… do you want to be with someone?”
“You know I don’t want to—”
“Not like that. I mean, just be with them.”
“Ah.”
Eddy wondered if he’d said something wrong. He’d never spent this much time with Santiago before, and he was starting to feel something… good. The whole ace thing was new for him. But the potential impending end of the world was having a wonderfully clarifying effect on his perspective.
Santi took his hand. “I think I’d like that.”
Eddy smiled in the darkness. They sat in companionable silence for a long time.
> COLIN SAT back in the silver box he was trapped in.
He’d completed his survey of Jackson’s memories, integrating them with his own. There was nothing there to help him.
Maybe his abilities had been a physical byproduct of whatever wetware update he’d applied to himself all those years before.
Maybe they were a part of his soul, the thing that had departed with him from Forever ten years earlier, or from his physical body when he’d died.
Perhaps no one could bottle lightning.
Colin opened his eyes and looked around. He was still trapped in his box.
He sighed. While he was stuck in here, who knew what the hell was going on out there? Was Trip okay? Were his friends in danger? Aaron, the plucky Andy and her charges?
If only he had some way to reach them.
He beat at the ground in frustration. He. Felt. So. Fucking. Impotent.
There was a crack.
He looked down at the ground, startled.
The place where he’d aimed his blows had split open, and a small green vine was questing its way through the opening from below.
As it grew, it spread the crack wider.
It extended into the sky, growing rapidly larger, until it had the girth of an oak tree and then a redwood.
It’s Jack and the fucking beanstalk, Colin thought in amazement. He reached out his hand, and the tip of the vine bent down from the top of his box to touch the tips of his fingers, sending a little shock down his arm.
“I did it. I damn well did it!” He jumped up and down like a ten-year-old, waving his arms. Somehow he had figured out Jackson’s abilities, after all.
When he calmed himself down, he stared at the vine, which waited patiently for him.
Not up, then, like the storied Jack, but down.
He wrapped his arms around it, feeling its cool touch.
The vine responded immediately, pulling itself into the crack at a breakneck pace, carrying a screaming immortal with it.
Chapter Ten: Cages
MARISSA LAY on her back, watching the third cloud dissipate. This one had been worse than the others, a memory of Jayson’s, seeing his own brother Aaron across the bay at Transfer Station just hours before the station’s destruction.
Not being able to speak to him, to reach out to him in any way. Forced by the imperatives laid upon him to destroy the station and everyone inside.
The guilt of that one had almost killed him and had helped to burn out the little remaining bits of Jayson Hammond that had existed in his head.
Marissa wept for him, for what he’d been put through because of what he could do. His grief reverberated through her, leaving its mark on her heart.
Never before had she so clearly understood what a threat people like her could be to the world. How she might one day be used against the people she loved. How those not like her might come to really hate her and her kind.
The pain Jayson had endured was beyond comprehension, forcing him to shut down almost entirely to escape it.
She began to understand, too, how he had been capable of the awful things he’d done to her peers and their mothers in Agartha.
Jayson Hammond was a hollow shell.
And yet….
There were still bits of himself locked inside. Pieces that might be freed by taking away his pain.
Marissa sighed. She didn’t know if she could do this.
She sat up, wiping her eyes, and tried again to wake herself, to search for an escape hatch from this dark place.
Nothing.
“Hello?” she called, as if a search party might be right over the next bend in the strange landscape of Jayson’s mind. She laughed ruefully at her own stupidity.
“Marissa?” a voice called back.
“Delancy?” It had to be wishful thinking—her friend couldn’t be here, could she? “Over here!” She stood in a white patch in the general gloom of Jayson’s mind, staring out into the darkness.
When Delancy’s face appeared, Marissa grinned, and her smile stretched even broader when she saw Danny right behind her. Delancy hurtled into her arms. “We were so worried about you.”
“How did you know I was here?”
“Eddy found you slumped over Gunner. Jayson. Our father.” Danny frowned. “I don’t know what to call him.” He looked around. “Quite the place you have here.”
“Jayson’s been through some terrible things. He’s so shut down I don’t think he has the slightest idea any more of who he was.” Marissa pointed at the dim shapes. “Each of those is a terrible memory that holds him captive in some way. I’ve cleared three of them so far, but there are too many….”
“Cleared them?” Delancy frowned, staring at the closest one.
Marissa nodded. “I embraced each one, and… I don’t know how to explain it. Became one with it. Felt it. Found the bit of Jayson at its core and freed him from it.” The experience had left her raw, but it was worth it.
“Like Andy did for each of us.” Danny rubbed his chin.
“Yes. But there are so many.” Marissa sighed.
“Maybe we can disperse them together.” Delancy marched off toward the closest cloud.
“It’s not easy.” Marissa ran after her, and Danny followed.
Delancy reached the cloud and put her hand out to touch it. She jerked it back as if she’d been scalded. “Ouch, that hurt.”
“It’s fifteen or twenty years of pain, building on itself. I can’t imagine how he survived.”
“So how do we do this?” Delancy walked around the perimeter of the cloud, glaring at it.
“I reimagined myself as a cloud of soothing water. Here, take my hand.” She grasped their hands and surrounded the cloud. “Now imagine you’re water vapor, and… flow.” Her body expanded, like it had the first time.
Her friends followed her lead.
It’s going to hurt, like a thousand bee stings.
She was right. It did hurt, but this time the pain was shared among the three of them. They entered the cloud, and everything shifted.
JAYSON KNELT behind a garbage drone, panting heavily, trying his best to be quiet.
He was being hunted.
He’d noticed them trailing him on the way out of the Asteroid Strike, a dive bar in the grimy heart of Old Seattle.
Few folks lived there anymore, preferring the megarises up on Capitol Hill and Queen Anne. Sea-level rises had swamped parts of the lower city, but higher up the hill had become a refuge for those who couldn’t afford the high prices in the megas, with their three hundred plus stories.
He’d made the mistake of showing off his skills in the bar to impress a guy. A couple of guys, actually. He’d shown them how he could hack into the bar mind and procure the three of them free drinks.
It had been looking good for a bit, like he might be in for quite the night with Jacques and Flick. But Flick had gotten sick… rather fabulously… and Jacques… well, Jayson hadn’t been the hottest guy in the bar that night.
He lifted himself up to look over the curved top of the drone.
The streets were empty.
He stood, letting out a soft sigh of relief, and turned to head back to base. He had training at 6:00 a.m. sharp the next morning.
Something whipped around his neck and pulled tight, giving him a white-hot shock that slammed through his body and sent him falling to the hard pavement. As one of his teeth broke off, someone above him laughed and said, “Got him.”
Then his world dissolved into pain.
He floated in it for an eon or two. It became a part of him, permeating his soul, comfortable as an old coat. An old coat full of pins.
Then as quickly as it had begun, the pain dropped away.
He opened his eyes, looking up at the three children who had laid their hands upon him.
No, not kids. Young adults. Fourteen? Fifteen?
They looked so solemn.
He smiled at them, and one by one they smiled back.
Then they were
gone, and he was at peace.
“WOW.” DANNY sat on his ass, his hands splayed out on the ground behind him. “They hunted him. Roped him like an animal.”
Marissa sat up and wrapped her hands around her knees. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “Earth was a dark place by then.”
“Could they….” Delancy’s voice broke. “Could they do that to us?”
Marissa shook her head. “I don’t know.” She’d been thinking the same thing. She was starting to realize how sheltered they’d all been at the schoolhouse. It was time for that to end. For better or worse. “Are you guys okay?”
Her friends nodded.
“It’s easier with three.” Unspoken went the thought that there was too much pain for just one of them to handle. Or for Jayson. How had he survived it all these years? “Ready?”
“Sure.” Danny looked exhausted.
Together, the three of them got up and trudged off toward the next cloud.
EDDY RUBBED his eyes, checking his loop. It was about one in the morning.
He considered streaming a Terraterza trigsynth tune he had stored in his loop. They always calmed him down. It was a shame no one made music like that anymore. Another thing lost to the Collapse.
Sven had brought in piles of homemade blankets, sewn together from panels of old clothing and stuffed with Forever cotton grown on a nearby farmhold. The farmers traded for almost everything, Sven had told him, and had a good barter economy going.
Marissa had been brought in to lie on the floor with the other two kids, and Eddy and Santi were watching over them.
All three appeared peaceful, as if they were just taking a nap.
Santi was asleep. It had been a long day, and Eddy figured the poor guy needed a little rest. He got a warm feeling in his gut when he looked over at his sleeping deputy.
Nothing much was happening at the moment, and he figured a little walk would help him stay awake. He picked up one of the extra blankets—it had the logo of some long-dead Earth football team on it—and laid it gently over Santi’s slumped form.
The man was beautiful in repose, so peaceful. Almost angelic, with his dusky skin and the thin beard that ran down his jawline.
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