by RMGilmour
“Breathe,” he whispered into my ear. “Please, trust me.”
I looked up at him, feeling foolish for hesitating. He wouldn’t take me anywhere, or do anything that would lead me into danger. I couldn’t say the same for Mason, but Jordan I trusted completely.
I smiled, and leaned my head against him.
“Ready?” Mason asked, when we stopped.
I couldn’t answer. I had no idea what I was supposed to be ready for. My last visit had been vicious, painful, and I wasn’t ready to be confronted by those memories. But he didn’t wait for me to respond. He opened the door and I was ushered inside.
After one step in, I stopped. In the center of room, sitting upon a table, similar to the one I’d recently vacated, was Grid.
Jordan nudged me forward another step, and the door closed behind me. I didn’t need to look back to know neither Jordan nor Mason were with me, and I realized he hadn’t promised he wouldn’t leave me, only that I wouldn’t be alone.
But all I could do was stare across the room. And when Grid looked up at me, the color drained from his face. He froze, waiting for my reaction. And my heart broke once more, seeing him doubt my friendship for him, but I couldn’t blame him for reacting this way.
He mouthed my name as though he’d lost all volume upon seeing me.
“Grid,” I choked out the word, and ran to him.
He pushed himself off the table and caught me in his arms, whispering over and over how sorry he was, but I told him to stop. He had nothing to be sorry for.
“I should have known better than to be around you,” he groaned.
“No,” I stopped him. “If the Guardian wanted to get to me, it wouldn’t have mattered how far away you were.” I looked up at him and placed a hand upon his cheek. “It’s over now. You didn’t hurt me. It wasn’t you. It’s ok.”
“It’s not ok. It wasn’t ok. Why did you say that?” he breathed, and I knew he meant during the attack.
I sighed, moving my hand down to rest upon his chest.
“Because it was you,” I whispered. “And because I knew you would never hurt me.” I hugged him again, listening to his heartbeat. Sounded normal, as did his breathing. Maybe Mason was right. But still, I hoped to never personally find out.
“I have a question for you,” I said, releasing him. “Or two.”
“What is it?”
“The ward said he couldn’t feel anything. Yet, Jordan could…” The mention of his name tied to those painful thoughts, cut off the rest of the question.
“Of course, he could feel it, I’m not sure why he said he couldn’t. Perhaps he was in too much of a rage to notice.”
Perhaps. But there was a new part of me that didn’t want to shrink away from this. I didn’t want to let it wash over me as though the details weren’t important. Details were knowledge, and I needed to pull it apart and turn it inside out before I could file this one away. Perhaps Mason was the one with the answers.
“That last morning,” I began. Not even sure if there was a question I wanted to ask.
“The Guardian was testing us,” he said, knowing anyway. “But then I sensed Jordan. I wanted to say something, but for his sake and yours, I couldn’t.”
“And when we were in the valley and I told you about Gia,” I began with my next question, before I could stop myself from voicing it; I was certain of the answer he would give me.
“And I tried to stop you.”
“But you said…”
“It wasn’t me,” he murmured. “I should have seen even then, what he was up to.”
“The ward?”
He nodded.
“So, it wasn’t all the Guardian?”
“Not all of it. You were his prey. He thinks he owns you. He has this insane need to hurt you.”
“H-has? As in he still does?”
“He can’t get out of the Spire. Didn’t they tell you?”
“Well, yes, but from what little they’d said, I thought maybe he’d been… erased from it, or something.”
He looked at me for several moments then pulled me back into his arms. “That would be murder,” he whispered.
I wanted to argue that it couldn’t be murder if he was already dead, but I caught myself before I did. I couldn’t be so insensitive to Grid.
“Thank you,” I eventually said to him. “For everything. For keeping me alive. For feeding me…”
He laughed at this, and I was grateful at least, for those few memories that we had. The good to offset the bad.
“For being there,” I finished, looking up at him.
“You’ll always have my heart,” he whispered to me. I was sure he meant it. And if Jordan and Gia hadn’t been real, Grid would have made me happy, and I him. My mind then wandered in an unexpected direction, perhaps in another plane of existence, we had ended up happy together. But I minutely shook my head at that thought, for it didn’t matter what universe I was in, Jordan would always find me and my soul would always be waiting for him. What Grid and I had was different, completely.
I then responded to his statement, “No I won’t, I never did. But neither of us have any family, and we are both from Earth. So, from now on you are my family.”
He smiled like I hadn’t seen him smile before, and he nodded. Words no doubt, escaping him. I then asked him if he’d found Gia while he was in the Spire. And his answer overcame every inch of his face, his smile etched deep within.
“Mason was giving me time to recover before he brought her out.”
“When were you…” but the rest of the sentence remained stuck in my throat. It just didn’t sound right in my head.
“I’ve been here a few days,” he answered. “I wasn’t sure if I wanted to come back, but I needed to see you, be sure you were ok.”
“I’ll always be ok,” I reassured him. “According to Lena, anyway.” I loved that I could make him laugh once more. After all we’d been through, it felt good to bring him a few moments of happiness.
We sat side by side on the table as he explained how the Spire felt from the inside. How communicating with another soul was as simple as a thought going through our minds.
As he talked about his time in the Spire, memories of us filled my mind, and I finally understood that all of his warnings to me about Jordan, even from the start, wasn’t jealousy, it was protection. And he’d kept me mostly at arm’s length, not only at my insistence, but also at his. He had his own reason for living… or rather for wanting to die to return to the Spire.
∞
We were both smiling when we walked out of the room, but I stopped when I saw the distance between Jordan and Mason. I thanked Mason for bringing Grid back, and hugged him, but only briefly. Jordan looked away when I did, his mouth tensing as though he was holding back a remark.
Any questions I had for Mason would have to wait. I couldn’t let them continue like this. Mason had been brave enough to tell me what needed to be done, and courageous enough to risk his friendship with Jordan. And after all the pain and suffering he and Aleric had witnessed over the years, risking my life and his friendship to save countless others, could not have been an easy choice.
I sidled closer to Jordan and clasped his hand in mine. The tension that was on his face also ran down his arm, as he squeezed my hand a little too forcefully. I turned my hand to interlace our fingers, releasing my warmth into him, sending it up his arm to spread through him. Then reaching up, I brushed my lips against his, and whispered my thank you. Immediately, his body relaxed and his fingers loosened their grip on mine.
Mason had been like a big brother to him, and I couldn’t bear the thought of Jordan not having that again. I had time to work on him though, and plenty of it.
Mason turned to Grid and asked if he was ready.
No! I whipped my head back in his direction. “You’re not going back in.”
He looked at me the way he had when I’d first arrived, and he sighe
d, smacking his lips, smiling, waiting for the slow person to catch up to the conversation.
I exhaled and grinned. “Sorry, panicked.”
“I’m bringing out Gia,” Mason reassured me.
“Come on.” Jordan picked me up and swung me onto his back. I wrapped my arms around his chest and leaned my cheek against his neck.
“Where to now?” I breathed into his skin.
“You’ll see.”
∞
Before long we came to a familiar house. I was sure, if remembering correctly, that it was his. And once the door opened he pulled me around to cradle me in his arms, smiling as he stepped in. Then lowering my feet to the floor, he gently coaxed me down the hallway.
Upon the walls I saw his paintings, and we stopped in front of the newly finished one of Sam.
I studied every protective line of my brother’s face. The deep, grey-blue shade of his serious eyes, the playful smirk always at the corners of his mouth, ready to spring to action whenever I’d looked his way. Every detail was identical to the portrait that had hung above my TV.
Jordan moved behind me, wrapped his arms around my waist, and hooked his chin upon my shoulder.
“Thank you,” I whispered, leaning my head against his.
He kissed away the moisture on my cheek, whispering back, “You’re welcome.” Then releasing my waist, he enclosed my hand in his once more, pulling me away from the picture. “Come with me.”
He led me through his house, calling it ‘our house’, and I felt a surge of happiness at his harmonious tone, unifying us even there. We then stepped through a wide doorway that opened up to an enormous round room. Upon the floor wound a carpet of soft, green grass around small trees and flowering bushes, and then I looked up. The ceiling was covered in familiar clouds with tiny droplets falling from those clouds, which stopped just inches from where they began.
“Oh…,” I gasped, astounded at the sight. He made the rain!
“Now you can feel it whenever you want to.”
“But, it’s not…” I wanted to say, ‘not real’, ‘not falling on me’, but before I could finish my sentence he looked up at the ceiling, and upon his unspoken command, cool rainwater drizzled down upon us. But he stopped it moments later, sending it back up to fall once more, just inches from the clouds.
I glanced over at him, only to see him beaming back at me, proud of his artwork and my appreciation of it. But when his gaze was drawn back to the ceiling, I detected a hint of darkness behind his smile. I wanted to question him, his thoughts in that moment, but instead my eyes followed his back to the ceiling. And I studied the movement of the clouds, their colors and the slow drip of each drop of painted water. It reminded me of how I used to view rainy days on Earth - the tormented sky, breaking open, releasing its flood of withheld emotion. The morose grey and bleak white hues he’d used gave his sky the appearance that it was in pain.
I turned to him, placed one hand upon his chest, the other upon his cheek, and he leaned into my touch. Throughout my need to destroy the Guardian, I hadn’t given a thought to what he would go through if I had died, unable to be brought back. I would have ripped his soul from him and taken it with me to my grave, leaving him adrift in a void of emptiness and pain. He may have been there before, but returning would be the end of him.
I couldn’t bear to think of him lost in the darkness I’d once known, and I wrapped him within my warmth. Then lifting myself up on tip toes, I inched my face closer to his and whispered my promise one more time, sealing it with my love for him.
∞
Epilogue
Signals
“Mason,” Aleric stalked into the room. Diaphanous, pale-white screens filled three quarters of the space, as they hung in midair; each running their own analysis.
Glancing at each of the screens nearest to him, Aleric could easily decipher the Guardian’s programming, as it was in the process of being broken down into organized chunks of data.
“Anything yet?” he asked Mason, indicating the screens.
“Not a thing. This is going to take some time.”
“How about the signal we caught?” he asked, planting his flask and two cups upon the table, and then filled a cup for each of them.
“Definitely human. But…” Mason paused, unsure how to describe his findings, and decided to join his friend at the table.
“But…?” Aleric prodded.
“They’re too far away,” Mason advised, with a shake of his head. “I need to get closer. I may need a sample.”
“How far?”
“About six-days hike.”
“You can’t go, you need to finish this,” Aleric told him, nodding toward the screens again. “I’ll go.”
“You shouldn’t go alone. But we shouldn’t spread the word about this either, not until we know for sure what we’re dealing with.”
Aleric agreed, and considered each of his friends, deciding upon who he would want to accompany him. Two of his Rathe friends he would definitely want, but he would need warrior strength as well. He wanted to say Haize, but if this was going to be dangerous, he’d want her as far away as possible.
“Take Castor,” Mason said.
He would have been Aleric’s second choice, but instead he chuckled, “That’s not going to happen, he’s busy torturing Connor.” And he mulled over the list of people he was closest to.
“What about Lena?” Mason suggested next.
Aleric couldn’t help the laughter that erupted from him, shaking the table.
“She’s one of their strongest,” Mason defended, puzzled by his friend’s reaction.
“No,” Aleric tried to explain, calming himself. “Good luck talking to her, or getting anywhere near her for that matter.”
Mason had obviously missed some piece of news, but waited patiently for Aleric to enlighten him.
“She found Dax.”
“Who?”
“Dagnija. Lydia refuses to call him Danger, so she named him Dax. He just doesn’t know it yet,” Aleric laughed again.
Mason missed his friends, and wished Jordan would see reason. He only did what was necessary to save them, and he’d saved her in the process, in more ways than she knew.
“Maybe Lydia could talk to her,” Aleric joked.
“You’re not afraid of Lena, are you?”
“You go talk to her.”
“No!” Mason was emphatic. He preferred his head upon his shoulders.
“I think Lydia is the only one of us that would, or even could.”
“That’s because she’s the only one Lena wouldn’t destroy. And besides, we’re not involving Jordan and Lydia, we’ve put them through enough,” Mason sighed. “Same goes for Grid and Gia, leave them out.”
“Seph would jump at the chance, and he’d want Phaedra. Maybe… also Haize,” but Aleric regretted saying her name the moment it was out.
“Might be wise to take Haize with you though,” Mason responded, understanding his friend’s hesitation. “You may need her.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Aleric mumbled. But he had to do what was necessary. He’d send her back if the danger was too great. “We’ll leave first thing. Tell any inquirers, we think a group of adventurers from the city may have gotten themselves lost in the wilderness.”
“I’ll bring the signals back up around the Colony,” Mason said. “Extend them around the city and modify the frequency to act as a border alarm.”
“No,” while it sounded like a good plan, Aleric decided it wasn’t the best plan. “Leave the signals, we’ll need them as they are.”
“And if it turns out our visitors are not friendly?”
Aleric could only stare back at Mason. They could activate all the frequencies they wanted, but if it was an invasion, another one, they would have no choice. And he didn’t want to say it, but he knew Mason was thinking it anyway.
“Isn’t that what the Guardian was for?”
∞
Thank you for reading THE COLONY.
I hope you enjoyed the story!
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short stories from THE COLONY,
please visit my website: www.rmgilmour.com