It was a peripheral observation. Data filed to the recesses of her attention just as the softness of the sheets, the plushness of the mattress, the temperature of the room, and the conversation going on in a whispered hush around her, were.
She buried her head to subdue sensation beyond the crawling clawing of despair that welcomed her attention.
She might have noticed the lapse in conversation her movement prompted, the unsure pause that pressed on the already stressed air.
But it didn’t matter.
Even the disgusted words of her inner-voice couldn’t reach her in this darkness.
That didn’t matter either.
The doctor’s touch anchored Dee’s attention to a point on her back, but she gave no response. Whether she needed her wounds tended or they were already healed was another point beyond import.
Dee’s minimal attention on the doctor slid to Kanchi, whose presence at the end of her bed, rifle raised in readiness, seemed as obvious as if she was looking at him. That her sense of her surroundings was amplified loomed on the outskirts of consideration.
It didn’t matter either.
“I need you to respond to me, Desiree.” Doctor Blackwell’s voice filtered through the fog of her mind, briefly coherent before shattering to disjointed sounds unworthy of attention.
Nothing mattered in the dark.
It was relaxing in the dark.
Quiet.
As a thought she might ponder floated towards perception, the darkness sucked its life until there was nothing.
Only blessed indifference.
32
Suffocating heat pressed the air from her lungs. She didn’t need to see to know it was fire. It was always fire; always flames that threatened her perilous hold on a reality far removed from what she imagined.
Gunshots replaced the strangling heat as her number one concern. The echoed reports filled the searing air, creating a trembling resonance around her.
She spun, twirled in place to search for attackers, but the thick darkness would not be penetrated, even by her heightened sight. There was only the reverberated sound of gunshots and the heat of flame to fill her senses.
Compelled to move, she sprinted forward, still blind, arms outstretched to catch herself from connecting with some obstacle. Gentle hands found hers, her fast-forward movement stopped short as could only happen in a dream.
She shook the hands to judge their truth, gripped them like a lifeline. She opened her mouth to ask who was there, but no words came. Panicked, she shook harder as if this motion might convey her questions.
Wrenched away, she fell forward. Long steps caught herself from stumbling. Sweat trickled from her hairline, down her spine, pooling in the fissures of her form as blazing heat continued to blast her, as the darkness threatened to steal the last of her sanity.
An iron grip seized her from behind, a villainous hold that clamped her upper-arms so she was pulled straighter, shoulders squeezed towards the center of her body. Too shocked to resist, she stood in the foreign grip, immobilized.
You should not be! The voice shouted so loud in her mind, her blind eyes clenched against it.
The cold metal of a pistol barrel cut into the back of her scalp, stealing her breath, distracting her from the voice’s words.
She tensed to pull away, to dodge the shot she knew was no bluff, but not even she was fast enough to outrun a bullet from point-blank range.
The dream shot her awake in a violent spasm that propelled her to the edge of the bed. Heaving around her panic, she rolled her eyes upwards to find herself staring down the barrel of Kanchi’s rifle.
Her attention narrowed to the gaping hole of death before shifting to meet the Soldier’s steady gaze. His typical indifferent expression showed hints of surprise at Dee’s sudden transition, but his shoulders were loose, telling he was prepared to let her live or die. It was her decision.
Her arms shot upward to catch the barrel and push it towards the ceiling. Kanchi didn’t fire. Instead, he twisted the rifle so the stock connected with her face.
The blow sent her spinning off the edge of the bed.
She continued her roll as she fell, her momentum throwing her across the floor to confuse Kanchi’s targeting. But he didn’t fire, so she stopped moving.
Rather than come to her feet, she remained crouched on a knee, one hand pressed to the ground. She looked up under a half-lidded gaze. Blood trickled down her face from where her skin had opened across her cheekbone. The cut, already healed, itched just enough to pull her attention so the sensation of falling moisture ground her to the room, forced the remnants of her nightmare to evaporate.
“Easy there. You startled me, is all. I apologize if I startled you in return.”
Dee barked out a laugh, her posture unchanged. “I wake up to a rifle pointed in my face, and I startled you?” Her voice croaked from a throat long unused.
The Soldier’s eyes widened, and she got the distinct impression it wasn’t from her brave words. “What do you think happened?”
His question washed stillness through her, a complete void of motion as she searched her memory to answer the question. That he would ask could only mean something had happened she didn’t remember. Something she had done that had put a rifle in Kanchi’s hands.
A wall of blankness met her internal probing; That same void that accompanied her memories of the fire and the accident that had killed her friends. The same blankness that had stolen a year of her life.
Dismay took her breath. Her stillness morphed to tension, so she clenched the carpet until a dull ache moved up her arm.
She remembered Zosma’s holographic appearance, his hack of Zibanitu’s system, but it hadn’t been Zosma that caused the chaos. Porrima’s entrance had triggered the degradation of calm.
Dee had never seen the Rishi, only heard her words, felt Porrima behind her. Something about taking their security seriously. That’s when the first shot rang out.
Dee clenched her eyes, willed remembrance of what happened next. Not even the recollection of pain from bullets piercing her body could be conjured. There was nothing. Just an emptiness in time she couldn’t explain.
She opened her eyes. “They shot me.”
Kanchi’s expression showed no pity.
“How long have I been out?”
The Soldier lowered his weapon, pointed it at the floor instead of her face. “You were unconscious, healing from your wounds for a day. You’ve been in some kind of self-induced oblivion for five.”
Dee pressed herself back so her upper-body aligned over her crouched legs, her motion slow so she wouldn’t alarm Kanchi into shooting her.
Self-induced oblivion?
They’d meant to show her how weak she was. To show her that despite the fantastic things she could do, the many ways she matched this group of Beings she still struggled to understand, she wasn’t one of them. Zibanitu meant to show her that there was nothing she could do but bend to their will. His will.
Kanchi explained, “You were shot multiple times from close range.”
There was more. Something in the way he answered told her that, but whatever that more was, Kanchi kept to himself.
So, not only did he show her, but Zibanitu proved to the other Rishis what he was willing to do to keep his status quo. Dee’s life meant nothing in the face of this greater responsibility.
She felt herself fall. A freefall into the darkness that had gripped her in sleep over the last few days. Whatever she thought she’d been learning, whatever becoming she’d been moving towards, was all for nothing. She was no one. With all the strength she’d been gifted, it didn’t matter. With all she’d learned, all she might continue to learn, she would never get her life back. Any lingering hope she’d held that that was a possibility was gone. Without that, without hope, there was no point. No reason. No light at the end of her long, dark tunnel of despair.
She slumped, exhaustion wrenching her energy. She didn’t even care about th
is new blankness in her memory. What good was it to remember when it would only be more to drag her down?
33
“What did you do this time?”
Kanchi met the doctor’s pointed gaze with zero expression.
On any other day, the interaction would have had Daniel smile. The commander’s gaze made it clear it wasn’t his job to keep the girl safe or cared for, only contained under whatever parameters given him.
The doctor’s return look expressed how she wasn’t content with that attitude.
It was comical, but today was not a day he would find humor in anything.
The call for Daniel to join today’s watch was met with excitement. Surprised, but not looking a gift horse in the mouth, he’d floated to the morning’s briefing on cloud nine. Not even Nathan’s tense attitude could defeat Daniel’s eagerness to see Dee again. His teammate’s guarded expression should have warned Daniel what he was walking into. Nathan had been a part of Dee’s personal guard since the beginning, and the Soldier’s growing solemnity should have warned Daniel that something was wrong.
But no matter what Nathan might have said, or what Daniel should have extrapolated from his teammate’s mood, would have prepared him for what he learned.
The briefing began with no preamble. The lights dimmed, and a television flickered to life where security footage showed a large communications room inside Zibanitu’s property.
Daniel watched open-mouthed as the week’s chaos was explained. They’d all heard of an attempted hack into Zibanitu’s system, but few had been privy to the particulars. Those particulars changed everything.
He was still reeling from what he’d seen.
Now, in the very place he’d wished to be, Daniel could barely bring himself to look at her.
Standing behind the doctor, Nathan beside him, he stood stiff, heart wrenched. What he’d witnessed Dee do; what she’d become—
Whatever he’d felt before, whatever feelings had grown for the anomaly, were taken over by a disgust so absolute he trembled with the effort not to pull his weapon and unload the clip into her skull. Whatever he’d thought she was, he’d had no imagination for the destructive nature of it. How the Rishis allowed her to live was so confounding it made his head spin.
The doctor’s sigh and subsequent steps farther into the room brought his attention back to his assigned task.
Besides showing him the crazed monster that lurked inside Desiree, he’d been told that Dee hadn’t left this room, had barely been out of bed since the incident. He hadn’t thought to ask if that was of her own volition, or some induced state Zibanitu commanded.
Daniel watched the doctor move towards the girl still crouched on the floor. His fingers twitched near his weapon. His breath caught with the instinct to call the doctor away.
He caught Kanchi’s watchful eye, knew the commander cataloged the tension that flowed through him, marked by the clenching of his hands, the tightening of his jaw, and his slow rock from foot to foot.
Daniel stilled. Kanchi would pull him off this duty if he knew how compromised Daniel’s thoughts were. As much as Daniel despised the monster crouched on the floor, he wanted to be close, ready to take her out if she moved even a pinky out of line. Few knew what she was capable of. There were fewer who seemed to take the risk seriously. Daniel didn’t trust the others would be willing to take the next needed step, a step he had already decided he would be capable of handling. He’d even argued with himself against the prudence of waiting. If he took her out now, it would erase any future problems she would certainly cause.
The doctor’s quiet voice spoke to Dee as if she were some regular girl in the aftermath of some common trauma. If only the doctor knew it was her who’d caused the trauma. He’d seen the list of casualties that had come out of the communications room. He’d known many of the Soldiers who didn’t walk out of there; trained with most of them.
“Desiree? Let’s get you back to bed, okay?”
On any other day, Daniel’s gaze would have lingered on the camisole and panties that was all that covered the fit form of the monster in the girl’s body. Today, he was only appalled. Appalled at what Zosma had created, and most especially, horrified that Zibanitu allowed her to continue to breathe.
The doctor noticed Desiree’s lack-of-dress, as well. She shot a look of annoyance at the Soldiers who made no move to help her get Dee back to bed.
Daniel didn’t care. He didn’t feel bad or guilty for not helping the monster. He knew Kanchi felt the same, though his reasoning on the matter differed. Kanchi was there to fulfill a specific role, and helping the girl pick herself off the floor was not one of them. Caring how much clothing she wore was certainly not.
Nathan stood stiff, clearly uncomfortable, though whether he was on Daniel’s side of the fence, or Kanchi’s, Daniel didn’t know.
The days of Daniel helping Dee were long past. Not just because of the casualties at her hand, but because of the way she’d created those bodies.
Fear like he’d never known twisted in his gut. From the moment the video had begun, this terrifying feeling had burned through him. He knew, with every fiber of his being, that they should have just killed her.
34
The thing about despair is that, no matter how the logical part of your brain tries to rationalize the idiocy of wallowing in darkness, it’s not enough to shake one loose from it. In a sick kind of feedback loop, there is no way to rise above.
There’d been a moment when lucidity had come over her, when she’d looked up and met Daniel’s eye, asked silently for him to speak to her, talk to her about anything, just say hello. The blankness in his gaze that overshadowed some profound emotion she couldn’t interpret pushed her back to the void.
“My best judgment is to kill you and eliminate the risk you pose.”
Dee blinked to refocus her attention. She tried to meet the Rishi’s gaze, to show she was paying attention, but it was all a lie. She wasn’t sure what he was talking about.
She couldn’t even remember how she’d gotten there.
The frown that seeped into every feature of Zibanitu’s face should have worried her, but there wasn’t enough of her to interpret this as dangerous.
The smallest part of her that did recognize her peril, that knew she should pay attention, that knew her very life was on the line, forced a deep breath in an effort to relax. She compelled herself to blink, to move as a normal person might. She fidgeted, purposefully rearranging her position in the chair simply to show motion, but that feeling of surrealism, like she was separate from herself, continued. She watched the room as if from the side, noted how her squirming only enhanced how little care she had for what the Rishi said, rather than lessen it.
A deep breath.
Another.
She blinked, one slow movement of eyelids to anchor her. “Who won the coin toss? Who will I visit next?”
Dee’s adventure continues in WISH’S CURSE, coming Christmas 2021
Snow covered the world in a shimmering blanket that stretched to the towering mountains in the distance. It was cold. Colder than the high mountain retreat of Asellus' estate. Where there the air was thin and brisk, here it bit and stung.
Still, it might have been beautiful if it wasn't so ill-received.
Dee's forced travel sat like a bitter pill at the back of her throat. After a cursory glance at the white desert, she ignored her surroundings to huddle further into the fur-lining of her jacket. With barely a glance, she followed her guide into the ground, the hidden entrance a marvel she failed to note in the fog of her despair.
The similarity of the camouflaged entrance with another set of stairs that had led her into the belly of the Earth was too obvious to ignore, even in the haze of her despondency. That time, a red-gold desert had surrounded her. That time, she'd felt like she was progressing forward rather than crashing down.
This idea that she stepped to her doom flickered like the last vestiges of a dying candle. It forced her
to stop, to turn and look over her shoulder towards the exterior world. She imprinted the crisp, cloudless expanse to memory, ignoring the nagging feeling that it would be a long time before she saw it again.
The thought sat indifferently in her mind. An idea that might have caused panic on another day, might have conjured simmering anger or even a claustrophobic attack, was cast minimal attention. Her continued despair allowed no such emotions. Her continued isolation from anyone she might call friend meant there was no one to drag her out of her misery. Daniel had continued to ignore her, his cursory glances filled with an animosity she had yet to decipher, and Hamal had never shown his face. Dee didn't even know if he was alive.
Mike would know how to get her out of her head, how to pull her back to the world, to find the things that mattered more than her self-pity. So would Steve.
At least Mike was off living his life. If she believed their last conversation, and there was no reason not to, he was doing great. Finally unburdened from watching over his strange friend, he'd fallen into the life he might have made for himself if Dee hadn't been there to hold him down. There was no reason to think he was lying to her as she was to him, keeping him in the dark about the strange twist her life had taken.
Then there was Steve. Steve, who she thought she'd lost years ago, along with Kim and Ray. But Steve was alive. It was a piece of information she'd buried in the back of her mind until she could act on it. Only now, after waking from the attack Zibanitu had staged, did she think that time might never come.
The thought clenched in her stomach. She stumbled. Only Boots' hand on her arm kept her from falling forward down the wide staircase.
The color-scheme of the snow-filled world maintained its monotony as their descent evened out into a wide corridor. Farther on, past sentry stations that were nothing more than alcoves on either side of the hall, where Soldiers watched them pass with blank expressions, when the corridor opened up into a cavernous room, did the snow-white motif change. Not so grand as the spacious underground of Zosma's sanctuary, this natural cave stretched ahead, illuminated with multi-colored lighting that matched the bright pinks and neon-greens of the decor. After the stark whiteness of their passage, this colorful contrast seemed—wrong.
We Are Forever (Rishi's Wish Book 2) Page 21