by Ryan Schow
“I’m talking and you’re listening—” he started to say.
“You’re talking and no one’s listening,” she said, “if that’s how it’s going to be.”
“It’s a long drive to Astor, darling, so if you won’t talk about us, you’d best find something else to talk about.”
She buckled up, crossed her arms and stared forward, her face lightly pouty. When he hit second gear and then third, however, that thing she was feeling low in her body, that desire to be heard while at the same time being manipulated by him, it intensified, bringing her core temperature to a state of ready-to-be-taken.
She let her fantasies of them unfold unbidden. There were plenty of adult novels about women doing important men on the side of the road on rain swept nights. Why should she think something that licentious couldn’t happen to her? Christian was an entirely different man these days.
Unpredictable and exciting.
If he would just force her, she’d let him have her right now. Here or anywhere! On the side of the road, in the back seat, in some shitty by-the-hour motel in Vallejo, Vacaville or super-snooty Davis. If only she could let go of the past, of all the ways she hurt him.
Let go, she told herself.
Let go.
Sisters in Fire
1
I’m sitting Indian-style on my bed with the lights off meditating when there’s a knock on my dorm room door. Rising from the perfect stillness, the quintessential dark, awareness settles in. It’s nighttime. Not too late. Another knock follows the first. My eyes flutter open, I stretch, and then I release my invisible tentacles until they meet with Georgia on the other side of the door.
“Coming,” I say.
When I open the door, Georgia is standing there, as I knew she would be.
“Hi,” she says, awkward.
“Come in,” I say, so excited to see her, but trying not to show it because to her I’m a perfect stranger. Not Abby, or Savannah.
“Sorry to come here so late, but I can’t stop thinking about Abby. Do you know how she’s doing, or what’s happening with her?” Georgia asks. “Have you two spoken?”
For the longest moment, I stare at her, not crawling her brain but mine. Can I tell her the truth? Will that bring me back into the Abby/Savannah fold? Isn’t that what I did when I admitted to Brayden I was Abby. And Orianna? Didn’t I tell her I was me because I don’t like being an island? The truth is I hate not having my friends. And I can’t stand being alone.
I’m alone.
But I can’t be future Raven either. In the future, she’s almost always alone. My fire-wielding friend steps inside my room, shutting the door behind her.
“Abby’s gone, Georgia. She’s never coming back.”
Georgia’s body doesn’t agree with the news. Sadness emanates from her, the emotion beating itself upon me in small, difficult waves. Oh, how I ache to tell her who I am! I need to tell her. But I won’t. I can’t.
“Is she back home?” Georgia asks, her eyes shimmering in the light.
“Yes, but not the home you’re thinking of.”
“I don’t understand,” she says, looking at me. A tear slips from her eye; Georgia brushes it away and apologizes. I can hear her nose stuffing slightly. She’s so sad.
So emotional.
I’m about to speak when another knock on the door interrupts me. Irritated, I open the door. Not thinking, not reaching out to see who it is first, I simply open it because I’m tired of being Raven. Tired of being a supernatural freak with no mystery in my life, no surprise. When I open the door, however, it isn’t Damien or Brayden; and it’s not Cameron or Blake or anyone else I go to school with.
“Hi, honey,” Orianna says while my father stares at me from just outside the door. He’s in sight, but barely. How he’s looking at me, it has me more worried than curious. What did Orianna do? I hop inside her head long enough to grab a memory of her telling my father about me. She told him.
“Hi, mom,” I say, popping back out of her head.
A shaky, wounded-by-healing sort of sigh escapes her at being called mom. She deserves this. She deserves this happiness. For what she’s done to become my mother, for all of the work she put into not being the Margaret I always despised, for the sometimes unfair price I’ve made her pay to be around me, I want her to be happy. And I want to call her mother because she loves me, because she wants me. Which is all I’ve ever wanted. I give Orianna the biggest hug I can manage without crushing her.
Orianna looks at Georgia over my shoulder and says, “Hello.”
“Hi,” Georgia says, not sure what’s going on, who Orianna is. Then he comes into her view: Christian. My father.
“Mr. Swann?” Georgia, says. “What are you doing here?”
He doesn’t seem to hear Georgia because he can’t stop staring at me. “Is it really you?” my father asks with so much hope and desperation in his eyes it practically unnerves me.
I look at Georgia, who’s piecing it together, and then I look back at my father and nod. He hugs me and starts to tear up. He actually starts to cry! He’s hugging me so hard, and trembling, and behind me I feel Georgia being shocked as shit.
“Abby?” she says, her voice terribly small.
I look over my shoulder at her and nod, my own eyes tearing now. “I wanted to tell you so bad, but…I can’t…I didn’t want to be Abby anymore. I couldn’t.”
“Why?”
“Because she was dead,” Orianna says. “Abby died.”
My father lets go of me, steps back and looks me over for the first time. I’m not sure he’s a fan of my black hair and heavy makeup, which isn’t so heavy since I prepared for bed just before Georgia showed up. Still, he’s my father and he’s really seeing me for the first time.
“Yes, but you came back,” Georgia says. “We watched you wake up. Me and Brayden.”
“That wasn’t me.”
“So who was that?” she asks.
“There are so many things you don’t know about how the elite work, things that you might not be able or even want to comprehend. One of which is there are gigantic kidnapping and sex slave rings operating all across the United States. It’s even worse outside the states.”
“Who was kidnapped?” my father asks. “And why are you bringing this up?”
“The Abby stand-in, the girl you thought was me, she was a kidnapped girl. Gerhard, now Enzo Holland, he took my DNA and infused her with it. Physically she looked like me, and she had some of my personality traits, but she wasn’t me.”
“Because you were dead?” Christian asks, confused.
“Because I was dead. Georgia was there. Eventually Dr. Holland found a way to turn me back on, so to speak, but he couldn’t give me consciousness. When he ran out of ideas on how to wake me, he flew me out to Dulce Air Force Base in New Mexico, an underground facility, where I was left with Dr. Frederick Delgado of the Mind Sciences Division. He was the foremost expert in Traumatic Brain Injury.”
“Was?” my father says.
“Yes, dad. He was.”
“What happened to him?”
“I killed him.”
2
No one says a word. They all just stand there opened-mouthed and silent. This is something I didn’t tell Orianna. I didn’t tell her about Delgado, Gerhard’s war model, the Dulce personnel my mind-controlled body slaughtered getting out of New Mexico, the shooter in the air field whose body I lifted into the sky only to torpedo down to his death on the tarmac, Tavares or the Senator I skinned. A girl has secrets she sometimes has to keep from everyone, and these are but a few of mine.
“Dr. Delgado worked with me in a number of capacities, but what changed me most, what made me who I am today, was something else entirely—a unique doctor. He allowed me access to…abilities I didn’t know were possible. Dormant parts of my brain that he’s now made active. Portions our species were never meant to use, or even know about.”
“Like my gift?” Georgia asks.
&
nbsp; “Sort of, but a thousand times different.”
“What do you mean?” Christian asks, his mouth dry by the way he’s swallowing hard. “Is this like your ability to repair yourself?”
“Yes, and no.” I stall out, not sure what to tell them, what to say. Then it just comes out. “I can read minds and influence other people’s decisions. I can make anyone do anything I want. If I want to execute them with my mind, tear their entire body in half, turn them inside out in a fraction of a second, I can.” Thinking of Cameron, I say, “I can also heal. I think I can bring life back to those who’ve died.”
“What?” Georgia asks, truly astounded. My parents can’t even speak.
My gift extends well beyond the realms of simply creating and wielding fire. Anyone else would think this was super cool, but Georgia understands the life of a guinea pig. What it is to be consumed by a “gift” of this magnitude. She was Holland’s experiment. His guinea pig. All she had to do was burn someone to death to survive. So she killed and for awhile she lost touch with emotion, and now that she is functional again, she feels wrecked by it all. Forever changed.
“That’s not the worst of it,” I say.
“There’s more?” Orianna asks, short of breath. “How can there be more than that?”
When I last saw her, I only told her so much. This was before Tavares, before April who was Alice, before my future body came falling out of the sky in the Nevada desert. Will she still love me if she knows all the horrible things I’ve done to get to this place in my life? Will she still love me if she knows who I’m slated to become?
“I can get in a person’s head and know everything they know,” I tell them. “I can live their life, make their memories and emotions my own. I can also give these memories and borrowed emotions to others.”
No one seems to know how to take this. Better to show them. “You should come with me. I’ve got something I want to show you.”
They do. All the way to Holland’s lab, which is deserted. I send my mother and father down the secret elevator first, then follow with Georgia, who surprises me in the elevator with a hug that lasts the whole way down.
“I’m so happy you’re…you,” she says.
“I would have told you sooner, Georgia, but there’s more. More beyond even what I’m about to show you. There’re things about me not even my mom and dad can know. Things maybe even you are best not knowing.”
“I’m just glad the other Abby isn’t you.”
“You’re might rethink that when you see what I’m about to show you.”
If anyone can understand what I’ve become, it’s Georgia. She was an emotionless firestarter. A lab rat like me. The atrocities she’s committed…the horrors she was forced to level on others…this girl is no longer a high school teen as much as she’s a victim. One hop in her mind tells me she continues to suffer the compulsion to use her talents, to flame things—even though one ride inside her mind tells me she abhors this gift of hers and doesn’t yet know how to live the rest of her life with it.
Ditto.
“I’ve been here before,” Georgia says. “Remember?”
“I know you have.”
“And you still think I’ll change my mind about you?” I nod and she laughs. “You’re crazy.” But I don’t laugh with her.
I usher them into the lab, show them the body floating in stasis. Future me. I don’t tell them who the girl is, I just let them look at her.
“She sort of looks like you,” Christian finally says.
“That’s because she is me.” They all look at me, mouths gaping open, eyes wide with a million unasked questions. “That’s me eight hundred years into the future.”
3
Orianna blinks fast a few times, starts to wobble a bit, then faints sideways. Christian catches her just in time, but barely. He’s looking peaked himself. He lowers Orianna gently. Sits with her on the cold lab floor. He cradles her limp head in his lap, then looks up at me with a look I don’t understand. The look is somewhere between massive guilt, fear and so much emotional turmoil he can’t seem to process any of it. In his face, I don’t see my father. I see a man understanding for the first time the full measure of his mistakes.
I crawl his brain and know what he’s feeling. It’s exactly what I wanted him to feel, even though it will probably be his undoing.
“I’m glad you finally get it,” I tell him. “That’s why I told you I was dead. That your daughter died. When Gerhard changed me, you put my life on a trajectory that leads to this. To her.”
“What happened to her?” he manages to ask. “To you…in the future?”
“She survived a nuclear holocaust, became a hero, then a mass murderer the likes of which this planet has never seen, a traitor and a patriot. She took four husbands and lost them all to old age. She roamed the world for hundreds of years wishing she could die, or make some positive difference on the world she would never escape. I know this because I have spent days inside of her brain, living through the highlights and lowlights of her life, feeling what she felt, experiencing what she experienced. She died a horrible death, dad. One she ached for. She stayed dead for hundreds of years and then she lived again only to be imprisoned, tortured, driven to madness, and then brought back through time to me.”
Christian’s hands are now on his head and he’s so white I’m surprised there’s any blood left in his face at all.
“H-how’d she get here?” Georgia asks.
“I brought her,” says the girl behind them. They all jump, everyone but me. I knew she was on her way down. I felt her wicked little spirit on the move.
“Who are you?” my father asks.
“My name is Alice,” she says, then looking at Georgia, she says, “Hi, Georgia. I missed you.”
“You…missed me?”
“I’m Alice, from the future. Not the little girl you know me to be in this time. We’re sisters, sort of,” she says. “Sisters in fire.”
All Georgia can say is a very soft, very reverent, “Holy shit.”
4
“I never intended for this,” Christian says. Beside him, Orianna is waking up.
“I know, dad.”
“I’m different, too,” Georgia says in a voice so small and anguished it practically breaks my heart.
“What do you mean?” Christian asks. Orianna’s eyes are focusing, holding fast on Georgia. I don’t expect my father to listen much to Georgia, since he doesn’t know her, but he gives her every single ounce of his attention and, to me, this says a lot about him and who he has become.
My friend looks at me, the question in her sparkling eyes, and I nod, so she scoots away from me, turns her hand palm up and starts to focus. Her once shiny eyes bleed to black; Orianna gasps, starts to cry silent tears. Then the spikes (dozens of them making a swirling pattern in Georgia’s palm) rise from her flesh like some harbinger of bad things to come. Alice moves in closer to Georgia, drawn to the girl. Georgia doesn’t object.
The air above her hand starts to haze and change; it’s the invisible vapor of heat. Her eyes bleed to black. Her fingers curl ever so slightly and a flaming ball of light erupts from her palm, turning and crackling and burning the air above her hand. It grows to the size of a baseball at first, then the size of a basketball (that looks like the sun if you saw it up close), and then she snaps her hand closed and the flames vanish. Her eyes steadily return to their original color.
“You’ve come a long way in such a short time,” Alice says.
Georgia looks at Alice and says nothing. Then: “How old are you?”
“Old enough,” Alice replies.
“You don’t look like you,” Georgia says.
“I’m me just fine.”
I know what this means for Georgia, this ball of fire, this exchange with future Alice, but my parents don’t. They’re wondering why she’s so consternated with this gift.
“When I was…killed in Gerhard’s lab,” I say, “the boy who did this, the Monarch assas
sin, he would have killed everyone. Gerhard, Brayden, Georgia. But Georgia stopped him. She reduced him to ash in seconds. It’s a want inside her. An uncontrollable force that needs to breathe, to survive, to thrive. It’s also a gift she never asked for. Just like the nightmares she has at least three times a week.”
“How do you know that?” Georgia asks, dumbfounded.
“I told you how.”
Orianna is finally back to her conscious self again. Still, mentally, she’s struggling to get her bearings, trying to digest these things she’s hearing. Beneath the surface of both her and my father is a creeping fear. My father not just for what Georgia is and can’t help, but for me and this life I’ve been thrust into. And Orianna, she still can’t believe the girl in the tank is me. She’s refusing to look at her, at what her baby has become.
Even deeper in his mind, Christian starts to wonder if there are more of us and I say, “Yes, dad, there are more.”
Orianna looks at Christian, who looks at me, the question lighting his eyes. He wonders if I’m really reading his mind. He knows I am, but he can’t fathom the idea.
“Yes,” I say, unpretentious, reverential. “I’m reading your mind.”
“You…can really…?”
“Yes. I can also crawl it and find every memory in your head, understand every want, feel what you feel. And I can control you, your body, your will to do anything, everything, nothing.”
Now Orianna is staring at me wide-eyed like she can’t fathom any of it. Orianna is no longer my mother as much as she’s a bystander at a freak show.
“What else?” my father says, his face spectral, stricken.
His mind is hollow with confusion, his fear measures colossal. Regret is the infection burning a hole inside him. It’s spreading like sickness, like disease. If we’re going to be a real family, something in my mind says, it’s best I tell him the truth, all of it.