by Franc Ingram
Anger came flooding back, her light mood shattered. “What’re you doing here? Do you finally have something to say? Not sure I care what it is.”
Nadir sat down beside her. His eyes slid to the empty bottle with a look of yearning, as if he wished he was the one who had polished it off. “For the first time in my life I didn’t know what to say then, and I’m still not sure what to say to you now.”
“Let's start with why in twenty-three,”
“Twenty-five,” he corrected.
“In twenty-five years you couldn’t be bothered to tell your own son he might be one of the three?” She looked up at him with a disbelieving look.
Nadir shook his head. “I didn’t have the heart to disappoint him like that when I was so sure he wouldn’t turn out to be. First his mark being incomplete, then when he started… He uhm… when the seizures started, that sealed it for me. He’s had them since he was a child. They are mostly under control now but as you have seen they are terrible when they occur. I’ve worked very hard to keep them a secret so they wouldn’t affect his future in the rangers, but I knew no Heir of Eternity could have a body that was so defective.”
The raging emotional storm brewing inside Oleana burst free. She swung at him, which only succeeded in toppling her over onto her back. What was worse, she couldn’t tell if she’d actually landed. “You're an idiot, for more reasons than I can list. That defective boy saved me, saved my son, and you have the nerve to suggest some seizures could ever hold him back! Did you never stop to think that it’s because your son is enhanced, that he’s having these seizures?” Oleana heard herself talking and it sounded right, but the truth behind them was clouded behind a layer of alcohol. She hoped she’d remember her revelation when it would matter. She heaved a big sigh and looked up at Nadir with sharp eyes. “Our reunion wasn’t supposed to go like this. You couldn’t even be bothered to even acknowledge my exist…my whatever! I’m not some curse you ward against. I knew coming back that you would have moved on, thirty years is a long time, but writing me off as some bedtime story is cruel.” Oleana was shaking from hurt, exhaustion, and an overdose of alcohol.
“I wasn’t trying to dismiss you,” Nadir said staring off into the horizon. His shoulders were slumped and his head low. “I was just trying to save my son. You’re here less than a day and he’s come closer to death today than he’s ever in his life.”
Oleana craned her body forward to get a clear look of Nadir’s face in the dying daylight. The anger in his eyes scared her. Hurt her. “You were saving him from me? One night you’re telling me you love me, the next time I see you I don’t get so much as a hello. I may have a new face, but my heart still cares for you. You should know me well enough to understand I don’t wish bad on anyone. If I had any choice, my path would have never brought me here, to your son. I tried to keep my own son as far away from this life as I could, but instead, he went running into it with arms wide. It’s unfair of you to even suggest I would want this.”
“Mira, listen I just…,”
“Oleana! By the Twelve why can no one remember my name is Oleana now. New face, new name, same crap task. But its not about me. What you did wasn’t just unfair to me, and trust me when I say I now hate you enough for that, but it was a disservice to your son. You treated him as if he wasn’t good enough. There’s no way he didn’t pick up on that. You had a rare opportunity to prepare him for what was ahead, and you failed because you couldn’t see how great a person he is. So why don’t you do me a favor and go disappear,” Oleana finished, curling up on the cold hard roof.
She didn’t have the energy for any more disappointment tonight. What should have been the greatest triumph of her multiple lives – finding the fourth Heir – quickly morphed into a disaster. Oleana didn’t know what hurt worse, the fact that her son almost died because she was distracted, or that she may have failed again. Instead of facing it head on she once again decided to crawl down into a bottle and lose herself in its warmth.
Oleana tried to hide behind her defense of Lysander, but she was yelling at Nadir for reasons much more personal. It killed her that he failed where, of all people, he should have succeeded. More importantly he stood as a reminder of her own failures to protect Daycia, to protect Leith and Lorn.
It took a few moments for Oleana to realize Nadir was gone. She regretted not telling him to send her up some food. She wasn’t leaving the roof until she spoke with The Twelve. Her stomach started rumbling, and Oleana decided nighttime was too long to wait. Talking to the Twelve during the day always came with its problems, the sun caused some interference, but Oleana would just have to deal with whatever problems arose.
Oleana levered herself up in a sitting position and did her best to clear her head, concentrating on her breathing. In and out, in and out, until she felt stable enough to actually be productive.
“Open channel one, priority message to particle cloud, care of The Twelve. Authorization code omega, foxtrot, tango, four. omega - mike - ginger - four.” Oleana waited in silence, staring up at the outline of the rings the Twelve called home. She got the all too familiar feeling, as she had the dozens of other times she spoke to The Twelve, as if she was no longer just in her body, but spread out over the entirety of Euphoria.
Oleana wanted to stay frozen in that state of mind forever. It was in those moments that she felt connected to the people, and the world around her. She felt the pains and triumphs of others. During the day to day she tried to hold that feeling close to her heart, to remember what all her efforts were for, but it was too much for her fleshly brain to keep track of, and she got mired in her own selfish desires.
“You have found all the Heirs,” Three said. Oleana wasn’t sure, but she thought a bit of happiness could be detected in the disembodied voice. “Now you must get to Evermore with all haste.”
“Yes, except there is a slight problem with the Master of Earth. His powers are defunct. He has seizures every time he tries to use them. What good does that do me?” Oleana could hear her abrasive tone and she didn’t like it, but couldn’t stop it either. There was a pause, static in her head which Oleana recognized as The Twelve conferring amongst each other. “Ha, you don’t know either. This wasn’t part of your grand plan. What are plans good for anyway, nothing but useless talk to satisfy the mindless masses.”
“You’re rambling,” One said, making Oleana jump. “The Master of Earth is incomplete. You must reset him.”
“What’s that even mean?” Oleana said, fearing her inebriated brain couldn’t keep up.
“When the particle cloud that makes up each one of the Heirs takes over a host body, it blends with that body so the two become one, forever altering both. In this case the blending is not complete. The host is somehow resisting the cloud. He must be reset so the blending is complete.”
“How do I do that?”
“We will upgrade your knowledge,” Three said.
Oleana was slow to comprehend exactly what that meant. “Wait, no, I don’t …” her objections fell on deaf ears. Ones and zeros fell from the sky like shooting stars in the heaviest meteor storm Oleana ever witnessed. The heavens filled with neat lines of numbers as they descended on Oleana like a tidal wave. She had just enough time to inhale sharply before she was overcome.
Her brain felt like a thousand angry wasps were rattling around inside her skull. Oleana clutched her head, her strained scream filling the twilit horizon. Then things went haywire. Oleana tried to curl up into a ball but her body refused to obey her. Her nervous system seized up and she couldn’t even expand her lungs to breathe. Panic set in, and she tried to scream but nothing came out.
“Breathe,” One ordered, his calm, stern voice cutting through whatever vice was around her.
Oleana sucked in air greedily. Her mouth tasted like she’d been licking the train tracks. Her vision swam. Oleana doubled over and vomited out what alcohol hadn’t already made it to her bloodstream.
Once her stomach settled Oleana spi
t to clear her mouth of the foul taste. She wiped her mouth, and laid back staring up at the sky. Behind her eyes swam a wealth of new facts and figures. She couldn’t search through it all. She was given several lifetimes worth of data in the matter of seconds.
Her head felt twice as big as it did a moment before. She knew the pain would ebb over time, and things would become clearer as her body accepted the download, but for the moment the thought of moving was too painful to contemplate. All she had to worry about was how to fix Lysander. If she concentrated on that question, the solution would come up.
“Oh no,” Oleana said once things cleared up for her. “I’m not using my son to shock Lysander’s system into a reset. What if he uses too much juice? What if Lysander never wakes up? I won’t put that on my son.”
“You are the guardian. You cannot put the feelings of one over the life of another,” Three scolded.
“Don’t ask me to be the best of humanity then judge me for being human,” Oleana snapped back.
“You will serve as the bridge between them. That’s what you were designed to do. Your body will release the necessary amount of energy.”
Oleana still questioned the safety of such a plan, but it was the only one she had. “What about Leith? The damage he took was extensive and there is no way we can stay here and wait for him to heal. Cornelius will have the way blocked before that. There has to be a way to help him.”
“The tower at Evermore was built to refresh and repair the bodies and minds of the Heirs of Eternity. You get him there and the tower will heal him much faster,” Three offered.
“The journey there would most likely kill him.”
“There may be another way, but the consequence will not be conducive to the conclusion of completing your mission.”
“Listen, my head is spinning and my mouth taste like the bottom of a trash barrel, so please speak simply, or don’t speak at all.”
“You can use the regeneration energy to restore his body, but that means he will lose a life and you all have only one left.”
“What? What does that mean? Last one?”
“We are not gods,” Three said.
“I know that,” Oleana shot back. She didn’t need to be told that. Cornelius called himself a god, and some worshipped him as such, but his power was in destruction not creation. The Twelve were advanced, sure, even beyond what Oleana could easily comprehend, but even they had limits, ones that Oleana had run into before. She knew God existed, and knew as certainly the Twelve weren’t it.
“Which means,” One finished, “that we don’t have the ability to make something that is truly immortal. We programmed the information bank that created you with the best recuperative program we possess. If you were completely machine your lifespan would be thousands of years or more. Blending with the biological system of your human body puts a strain on the computer system that we only had partial success in overcoming. The bank that stores your memories and gives the others their powers can only last through one last blending.”
“That makes no sense, Cornelius is much older than we are, so is Daycia and her mother. Why aren’t they falling apart?” The news was startling, and Oleana struggled to understand what this meant for her future.
“It is the storage and transfer that requires an amount of energy your primitive scales of measurement would not even be able to chart. Repairing the same body over and over costs much less, but even they are not as immortal as some claim.”
A feeling of vertigo threatened to send Oleana’s stomach over the edge once again. She couldn’t tell if it was some residual effects of the download, or the result of the new-found fear hanging over her head.
As far back as she could remember, Oleana never feared death. She feared the weight of failure that another death brought her. She feared pain, and loss, and suffering, but she never thought about what her own death - permanently this time - would mean. She had no reason to fear something that would never come. Half-drunk and still in pain, Oleana didn’t know how to process her newfound mortality.
Instead, she pushed it back into the furthest reaches of her mind, hoping if she ignored it long enough it would go away. “Why is it that every time I talk with you guys, I leave with more problems than when I came? Next time I run into an issue, I will just yell it to the wind and get a better answer.”
“We are not gods,” Three repeated.
“You keep saying that.”
“We are not gods, so we cannot manipulate things to suit our will. We can only put things in motion and hope they turn out the way we have predicted. We have put our best into you and the other three. We are sorry if you feel it isn’t enough. We too know what it means to taste defeat. We were once twelve strong, but the ravage of time has reduced us to six, with three of us remaining dormant for centuries at a time to prolong what time we have left. The Heirs of Eternity are the only chance we had left to do the one thing we were hardwired to do, preserve humanity.”
“Ha, Heirs of Eternity what a stretch!” Oleana sniped. “More like Heirs of a Century and a Half. Three lifetimes I have wasted following your orders, sweating and bleeding for a future that even if I do it right this time, I still won’t live to see play out. Why should I even bother continuing to fight this impossible war?” Oleana threw her hands up in surrender, looking up toward the heavens for their answer.
“This version of you has a propensity toward selfishness that surprises me,” One said. He delivered it so coldly Oleana felt like she’d been smacked in the face. “As you said, you may be an enhanced human, but you are still human. You do this not to satisfy us or our pride. You do it not to be paraded around as the immortal hero of legend. Do it because hundreds of thousands of people on Euphoria want to grow up, fall in love, raise children, explore the world. Instead they are enslaved under the rule of vicious ultras, or forced to live in fear and poverty by the violent, greedy warlords that roam their realm. Do it because you are the only one that can save them, and that’s more important than anything else.”
Oleana felt the connection between them snap like a too-taut rubber band. With only the cloudy night sky and faint hint of the rings above her. Oleana took a minute to appreciate her solitude. Nobody had told her off like that in a very long time.
She wondered if One was right? Had she gotten so full of herself she’d lost sight of what really mattered? Lorn mattered. She knew that for certain. The way he talked a mile a minute and said ‘goodness’ every five minutes, as if saying it would actually put some out into the world. He could irritate her to the point of screaming, and then turn around two minutes later and do something that made her so proud she wanted to cry. Her son was so kind, and smart, and funny, and curious.
And Leith, he was growing on her. That cocksure attitude and confident smirk of his clashed so strikingly with the unsure look that often flittered across his brown eyes. Oleana remembered exploring his home. She remembered how each piece of art there was not only beautiful, but had an attention to the fine details. Oleana got the feeling that Leith didn’t just collect art, he collected pieces of history, stories of moments in time. His broken speech may have caused some to write him off, but Oleana noticed the burning intelligence Leith hid behind his flippant nature.
Then there was Lysander, young, strong, proud. So much potential. So stubborn just like his father. and cunning like his mother. Through all that, Lysander held a pain at the core of him that Oleana so desperately wanted to ease. Lysander mattered and so did Nadir, Lillian, Tycho, Kaithlen, and Miriam.
Dear Miriam, and her unborn babe. What kind of life awaited them if Cornelius took control of the city? Would they even survive the attack? Oleana didn’t like the odds that things would work out for them.
The cool breeze that swept in from the coast cleared Oleana’s head enough for her to feel normal again. With the information still fresh in her mind, Oleana resolved to do what she had to for Leith and Lysander before all of her liquid courage faded away.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: HEALING
When Oleana got back to Leith’s room she found Lorn standing in the corner directly across from the door, leaning against the wall. His arms were crossed on his chest and his head was down. Oleana knew he was sleep. His occasional snort confirmed it. He looked weighed down by exhaustion.
Lysander was less stealthy in his sleeping. He was laid back in the widest chair the room had to offer, and his feet were propped up on the foot of Leith’s bed, shoes by the chair. Concern still wrinkled Lysander’s brow. His eyes darted back and forth under heavy lids, and his hands were curled into fist. Even in sleep he couldn’t escape trouble. Oleana hated to wake them, but she needed complete concentration for what she was about to do.
“Lorn, honey, gotta wake up,” she said, shaking his shoulder.
Lorn jumped, nearly dislodging the short sword at his hip. Lysander popped his head up and pulled his sword free of its scabbard in one smooth motion. Oleana found herself staring down the blades of two different opponents before she could blink.
“Very good reflexes,” Oleana said, nodding her approval. “Now kindly get those out of my face and get out.”
Lorn dropped his sword. His face turned a bright red. “Mom, goodness, sorry. Wait, what’s going on? Where were you? What are you going to do? Why do you smell like that? And look like that?” Lorn rattled off his question in his usual rapid-fire, staccato manner.
Oleana caught a glimpse of herself in a nearby mirror. She had dark circles under her bloodshot eyes. Half of her dreads had fallen out of their loose ponytail, and were pointed at odd angles. Her lips were dry and cracked, and the overall color of her brown skin was pale, and drained.
Oleana hurried to fix her hair, but nothing but a week of sleep and several good meals would fix the rest. “Lorn please, I’m fine, I promise. Its not like you two are the picture of health.” Oleana noticed the dark, puffy circles under Lysander’s eyes, and the drained look on Lorn’s. “I know how to fix Leith and I just need a moment alone to concentrate on what I have to do. So, please, the two of you out, now. We can talk about the rest later.”