Renegade

by Rachel Starr Thomson

  “You can’t force my help,” she said.

  “In fact, we can. Because all I need you to do is die. And you will find you cannot prevent that.”

  April closed her eyes as two of the black-clothed men took her roughly by the arms. There was no point in fighting them, not here—she was as thoroughly trapped as it was possible to be.

  I should have told someone where I was going, she thought as the men shoved her forward.

  Outside the cave, blocking the path back to the hermit’s cottage, a creature stood—half again the height of a man, hunched, and dark in colour. April tried to take in its features but found she couldn’t look directly at it—like a shadow, it shifted. She could make out massive claws, the defacers of the cave.

  The old man led them along another path, going south along the edge of the sea. It angled sharply upward and moved out onto a sheer cliff hundreds of feet above the water. Gulls and other sea birds dashed out from nests in the cliff face, circling and calling and then coming home. It was a dizzying sight.

  Dizzying, blue, and free.

  It only took April an instant to decide. Her captors’ grip had loosened on her arms as they toiled up the steep path.

  She wrenched herself free of them and threw herself over the cliff.

  * * *

  Melissa was stepping over the kitchen threshold when something washed over her so strongly that she stumbled and fell nearly to her knees with a cry. Richard dashed to her side, catching her arm and stopping her fall, as Mary came to her other side—

  And Melissa called out, “April!”

  April’s name hammered through her heart as a vision of blue sky and water blotted out her view of the house. She could feel spray and wind sucking the air out of her lungs. She reached out, feeling Mary and Richard on either side of her like an extension of her reach, all three of them forming a net—

  And she came back to the room. Richard and Mary lowered her to the floor as she fought to catch her breath.

  “What just happened?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” Richard said. “What did you—”

  “April . . . something about April. I saw sky and water. And felt like I was . . . falling?”

  “Where is April?” Mary asked. “Richard?”

  “I thought she was here.” His words hung in the air for a moment before he dashed away, and Mary sat with Melissa, rubbing her shoulders and offering silent comfort, while they listened to him searching. He was back in minutes.

  “She’s gone. And so is my car.”

  “She didn’t tell you where she was going?” Mary asked.

  “If she had, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Melissa, tell us exactly what you saw.”

  “I—” she stopped and thought. “I didn’t see April, but I felt her. Like her name was just in my heartbeat all of a sudden. It hit me like a weight. And then I saw blue—sky and ocean. It felt like all the air was being sucked out of my lungs.”

  “You reached out,” Richard said. “To catch her?”

  Melissa thought about it. Everything had been so instinctive, she hadn’t thought about what she was doing in those terms. “Yes? That makes sense.”

  “April, where are you?” Richard asked.

  But no one expected an answer.

  * * *

  “Get down there now!” Bertoller shrieked, his eyes riveted on the water where his prize had disappeared. “Find her!”

  The creature had already begun to vault down the cliff face, its claws giving it a way down where there was no path. But Bertoller had no interest in trusting April to the beast. It would likely find her first; his men needed to be there to stop it from ripping her throat out prematurely. Damned bloodhound.

  “She won’t have survived that fall,” one of his men offered, nervously.

  “Don’t you tell me what she won’t have survived,” Bertoller spat. “Fool. She’s a fool. Get down there, I tell you. I don’t want the beast to find her and kill her before I have my way.”

  “But sir—”

  “She’s a great saint,” Bertoller said, tearing his eyes away from the water and fixing them on his lackey. “Do you know what that means?”

  “I . . . no, sir.”

  “Then shut your mouth and do what I tell you. She’s survived. Find her, take her, and don’t let the beast kill her. Understood?”

  The man saluted. “Sir.” He turned and started barking orders, the men picking their way around the cliff in search of a way down. Bertoller restrained himself from picking them up and pitching them over the side. Much as he wanted to, he knew his men wouldn’t survive the fall—and he needed every last one of them, thanks to the ripping away of his powers he had suffered at the hands of those insolent thieves.

  The Oneness. How he hated them—how he longed to tear every last one of them limb from limb, to tear them from each other, to rip them out of the heart of the Spirit and cast them into the chaos that answered to his call.

  For now, he would settle for recapturing the girl and killing her properly. He grimaced—the closest he could come to a smile—at the thought of how the others would react. Of how her death would hurt them, tear at them. It might even finally turn the girl called Reese, if he could only find a way to make her feel responsible for it.

  That shouldn’t be too hard. The girl was keeping company with Jacob. She already carried enough guilt to destroy her. He just needed to unleash it.

  Franz Bertoller’s hatred of the Oneness went deep, far, and hundreds of years back. He had battled them for centuries before realizing that simply fighting them did no good. That if he truly wanted to inflict damage, he would do it by infiltrating their ranks and turning their hearts. He would do it with guilt, and condemnation, and hatred, and fear, and greed. Everything that had kept the rest of the world locked in the destructive patterns of warmongering for millennia. The Oneness might be well shielded against all of those things, but they were not immune. He had proven that with David and Jacob and nearly the woman called Melissa. And Reese had almost gone down with them all.

  She would still, he promised himself. When he finished destroying Jacob, Reese would be there to unravel with him.

  April had been the wild card, the one who stood in the way of success. The Power had told him that she was a great saint, though unaware and not yet unleashed. He could not wage his war while she had a chance of rising. So he had sent his men to kill her before she could take her place. Cowards, they had left her to starve instead—and she’d been rescued.

  But it was all for the best after all. Stripped of his powers, Bertoller needed something truly grandiose to get them back. Sacrificing a great saint to the Power would suffice.

  He growled. His men had not yet found a path down.

  He could not afford to lose her again.

  * * *

  April hit the water and plunged into the cold, salty world beneath with more awareness than she expected—somehow she’d thought she wouldn’t hit conscious. But a moment before her body hit the surface she felt as though arms came beneath her and caught her up, buoying her just enough to break the fall and lower her into the water gently.

  Gently, she thought as she sank, and laughed underwater.

  She’d thought to die when she threw herself off that cliff—just to do it in some way that would thwart the old man.

  She hadn’t thought to be caught, to live, to experience the unexpected beneath the waves.

  But as she continued to sink, straight down like a diver rather than buoying up again, she found herself following a purpose she hadn’t known about it until now; answering a call—

  Something was drawing her down here.

  She had cast herself off the cliff because she heard it calling.

  She remembered that now. She could feel the aftereffects of the voice, like an echo, too faint to make out the words but undeniably there. It had summoned, and without consciously hearing the summons she had answered it.

  Still she wa
s sinking—diving down, watching the water world pass in patterns of light and darkness, the way surprisingly clear before her. No fish, no fronds, nothing but water and light and shadow.

  And before her, below her, shadows that were darker and deeper still.

  She was aware of pressure growing as she dove ever deeper, but not of pain nor of panic.

  She did not need to breathe, she realized.

  It wasn’t as though she was breathing. She simply didn’t need to.

  Her surroundings washed black, and then darker even than black.

  She hadn’t known the ocean was so deep here. She thought the bay was shallow . . . certainly this close the cliffs.

  But she was not close to the cliffs.

  She knew that in the same way she remembered the voice summoning her. It was an echo, something someone had told her and she had forgotten.

  And then, below her, she saw a light.

  Just a pinprick at first, then growing. White light. And now it was pulsing, slowly, like a thing alive.

  And she was suspended somewhere in the deep darkness, upright (she thought), still not needing to breathe. The water was not cold; if anything, it was overly warm. And the light reached out like filaments in the dark and wrapped itself around her, One-ing itself with her until she could see it glowing from her fingers and hands and feet and the strands of her hair that floated in front of her face.

  Where am I? she asked, though she did not open her mouth.

  In the deep places of the earth, a voice answered. She heard it clearly this time, in the present—not as a faint memory from the past, though it was that too. Now that she heard it so clearly, she knew she had heard it a thousand times before. It had spoken through the Oneness, and even before then—she had known it as a child.

  The deep places . . . April answered.

  You have been here before.

  I would remember.

  You do remember.

  Oh . . . yes. All at once, she did.

  You tell me, the voice said. Where are you, Child of Light?

  In the womb, she answered. But I don’t understand how that can be.

  In the beginning, the voice said, the earth was without form, and void, and it was swaddled in the waters. Like every human being created in the womb of its mother—the soul is a universe brought forth from the darkness where I knit it together. In the dark place—the deep place.

  Where you . . .

  Yes.

  April turned herself slowly, searching the shadows for a form, somewhere she could locate the presence that spoke. But there was nothing, and even as she tried to see, she knew she was looking in the wrong way. That the darkness itself was the form of this being, that these shadows were alive.

  I thought darkness belonged to the enemy, she said.

  Nothing belongs to the enemy.

  Is this darkness you? Is this what you look like?

  No. The darkness shrouds—conceals. As the womb conceals the life being formed in it and the waters conceal the earth.

  Then what do you look like?

  There was a smile to the dark.

  Must you ask that, Child of Light?

  She thought again, letting time pass—if time had meaning here. The voice seemed in no hurry.

  This . . . deep place. This is a womb?

  This is the womb, the voice answered.

  Then something is being birthed here.

  Being formed. Before the time of birthing comes.

  What something?

  The smile again.

  What is here? she asked, and then thought, I am.

  And so am I.

  You are the Spirit.

  Of course.

  She could think of nothing else to say, but: I didn’t know.

  April awoke on the sand.

  She was wet, soaked through, but nothing hurt, and her breathing was relaxed and regular—no water in her lungs, no desperate need for air. Birds were circling overhead and the air smelled like wet sand and fish and salt water.

  A dark shadow lurched above her field of vision, and she slowly drew herself up and backed away, toward the water, trying to take in the sight. It was the beast from the cavern, throwing itself down the cliff from landing place to landing place as fast as it could. They were after her.

  But beyond the creature, and the men she could just make out coming down a path some distance away, the cliff itself and the sky and the sun and the water in her peripheral vision was pulsating with light.

  The light she had painted while Melissa played.

  The light that was the answer to her question in the deep place—“What do you look like?”

  And she smiled up at it, welcoming it, laughing into its golden reality.

  What else could she do?

  The beast was close. Checking on the whereabouts of all her pursuers again, she made a fervent wish that none of them had spotted her and turned and dove into the bay, holding her breath and swimming underwater.

  Light from above sparkled off her skin as she swam—and light from within radiated from it.

  Chapter 11

  Reese stood frozen against the rock face, sword in hand, staring at the apparition as it drew closer across the desert floor. It was a hundred yards away now, passing through cloud shadows and seeming to lose itself in them, only to re-form when it stepped back into the sun. Its eyes were fixed on her—it seemed not to need to look at the ground.

  The sight of the ghost sucked all the fight from her lungs. She couldn’t battle this.

  Could she?

  As it came nearer, she lifted her voice and called, “You aren’t dead?”

  It couldn’t really be him—couldn’t be David, dead and part of the cloud. A demon in the form of her worst enemy she could face, but she couldn’t stand an encounter with the man himself.

  The cell had been right not to assign her to him. To send her after Jacob, make her remove herself far from the man who had exiled her.

  The man who had watched her friend die with a smile.

  The man who had torn her spirit apart.

  He did not answer.

  She closed her eyes for a moment, hoping frantically to find something inside her that would tell her the truth. She found it, in the form of her sword hilt—more solid and heavy in her hand than she had ever felt it. It would not so form itself in the presence of Oneness.

  Even if she hated the one connected to her.

  When she opened her eyes again, its feet were drifting away, like smoke being blown in the wind. It seemed to struggle to hold itself together. No wonder, really—there could be nothing in this barren region to fuel it, to give it power to take form. This was not the warehouse.

  It would have been far easier to find some desert creature to possess. So the demon meant something by this—this was strategy.

  Strategy for a different sort of fight.

  Reese drew a deep breath and let her sword dissolve.

  “What do you want?” she asked.

  The demon drew level with her and looked into her eyes with its unnervingly familiar ones—with the face of a man who had been like a father to Reese for most of her life.

  “I should ask you that,” it said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You called me here.”

  Reese jerked back as if she’d been slapped. “I didn’t. You’ve been tracking me.”

  “I have been answering to your summons.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “Is it?” The familiar face smiled, and David’s voice lapsed into tones Reese knew as well as her own—ironic, comforting, convincing. “We’ve been here every time you’ve needed us. You’ve been searching for answers. We have them. You fell, we caught you. You think that’s all coincidence?”

  “Why are you . . .” she choked, and kept going. “Why are you wearing David’s face?”

  “Because you want to face him.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Don’t yo
u?”

  And she did . . . that was the problem. She did understand. She knew the creature was right. She had been calling to them, wanting what they had to offer. All but asking for their help. Not consciously . . .

  But not entirely unconsciously either.

  “Where is David?” she asked the demon.

  “In jail. Awaiting trial.”

  “Do you know how the trial will go?”

  “We have looked into the future, yes.”

  “And?”

  “He’s found a good lawyer . . . Bertoller has paid for one. Most of the men who could have testified against him are dead or clearly insane. He’ll be judged mentally unsound and released.”

  Reese swallowed hard. She didn’t want to hear the words. “And then?”

  “And then Bertoller will find him, and they will begin rebuilding the hive.”

  “Can I stop them?”

  “What do you think?”

  She drew another deep breath. She had closed her eyes without realizing it—she opened them again. The being had changed. It was more indistinct now, still in the shape of a man but no longer bothering to ape David.

  “Where am I?” she asked.

  “Lost.”

  “How far will it take me to reach civilization? To get back to Jacob and Tyler?”

  “You’re assuming you will.”

  “Are you telling me I won’t?”

  The demon might have smiled—she couldn’t see its features clearly enough to know. “People die in deserts. All the time.”

  “I can’t die here. I have to get back to Jacob. I have to help him.”

  “You can . . . but not alone.”

  “I’m not alone,” she answered, automatically, the words turning to ash even as she spoke them. It was the watchword of the Oneness—not alone.

  But who was with her now?

  The Spirit, whom she could not touch?

  Her cell, who had exiled her?

  Tyler, Jacob, Richard, even Chris? Anyone? She was alone, alone in a desert where she could reach no one and might well, as the demon suggested, die.

  The only help, the only companion presenting itself, was the demon in front of her.