by TylerRose.
The light beside her bed was on and Julian was sitting in the chair pulled close, looking on with mild concern that passed to relieved acceptance.
“Not this time,” he said. “But it was close.”
“Not this time what?” she managed, taking the glass of water he offered.
“One of these times you’ll need my help to get back. It’s my job as your Adjutant.”
“What if I don’t have your help?”
“You could die. Certainly it won’t go well. You could be permanently brain damaged.”
“Why should I believe a word of that bullshit?” she challenged.
“Because it’s not bullshit. You’re fine. You’re up. It’s Monday morning.”
“Monday morning?!”
“Yes, you slept completely through Sunday. I’ve been checking on you periodically. Your deeper REM sleep cycles trigger your psychic abilities. They always have. Now that you’re getting closer to your Widening, any dream you have could be the one that sends you into the full Widening. I will be listening for you. All you have to do is ask me to help.”
He vanished from the chair the same as Alen had vanished from the pier. Turning it over in her brain time and again, she went for a shower. Within a couple hours she was lying on the sofa with a fist full of Ibuprofen and the television remote, another of those headaches fast coming on..
“Yes, Thomas?” she answered the phone.
“Who was the man that answered your phone five hours ago?” he demanded.
“His name is Julian. He’s a friend. He came over to check on me. I was asleep a long time.”
“Is he a lover? The one you spent the other night with?”
“Not everyone is my lover, Thomas.”
She hung up on him. When he called again two hours later, she wasn’t in any better a mood.
“I’m sorry, love. Are you free?” he opened.
“No. I cost a fuckton of money and I’m not available. Leave me alone for a couple days.”
She hung up on him again and took another two ibuprofen with an acetaminophen. In the dark, she flipped the channel to one of the premiums. She toked her bowl and watched Terminator 2: Judgment Day, hoping the pot would help her pained head. She fell asleep after Sarah Connor escaped the mental hospital, and dreamed about enemies who continually hunted her down. She would kill one and there would be another. On other planets and they came after her. On Earth and they came for her, as relentless as the tide coming onto the beach.
She woke with a start, a different movie on the television and the drapes drawn against the sunlight. Julian in the chair.
“You again? How many times are we going to do this?” she asked, getting up to head for the toilet. “What time is it?”
“We do this as many times as we have to,” he said when she returned.
She shot him a perturbed expression.
“I’m not going to ignore you when you’re in crisis, Tyler. I can’t. Any event could be the one and I have to ride it out just as much as you do. You at least get to sleep through it,” he smiled. “I have to sit and watch and wait and worry and wonder if it’s time to step in or if I should wait.”
He watched while she stood at the refrigerator and stared into it.
“Let’s go to breakfast,” he suggested. “You need to get out into the sun. Vitamin D is very important to Sistarians.”
“I don’t even know you.”
“You know me enough that I’m in your dreams and I’m always your friend. Come on. There’s a place a few blocks away that has great waffles.”
“Fine. Gimme ten minutes to shower.”
“You can shower when you get home. Put on a bathing suit and something simple, comb your hair and let’s just go. The stink of horny bachelor man in this place is intolerable.”
She chuckled. “I’d think it’s horny young woman you smell.”
“You may jack yourself a lot, but no. It’s not you I smell.”
“Is that appropriate? To remark on how frequently a woman masturbates?” she asked, heading for the bedroom.
His voice followed, the body coming with it. “I’m far too old to worry about what’s appropriate and what’s not. Give me the opportunity and I will be wholly inappropriate. I guarantee you.”
“You don’t look more than thirty,” she said, taking a bathing suit, shorts and t-shirt into the bathroom.
He let the issue of his age drop. They walked three blocks in one direction before turning walk another three blocks. In a booth, sitting across from each other, and he didn’t let her do any ordering.
“One Belgian waffle with two scoops of chocolate ice cream, whipped cream, strawberries and two cherries on top. An order of sausage links and an order of bacon very crispy. Two ice teas.”
Tyler stared at him dead-eyed. “I only wanted toast.”
“Yes, I know, but you’ve not eaten in three days. You need something more substantial even if you don’t know it this very moment.”
“I haven’t?”
“Not since your flight home from Japan. It’s easy to do, easy to lose track of time, forget to eat. This guy Thomas. He pays you a lot of money, but he doesn’t do much by way of actually taking care of you.”
“I don’t need taken care of.”
“Which is totally why we’re not here,” he shook his head with an expression of perfect innocence.
She shot him a look between a smirk and annoyance. “You’re not going to give up, are you?”
“Give up what?”
“Never mind,” she muttered, getting out her cigarettes.
“Please don’t. Smoke makes me ill,” he said quietly.
“I smoked one on the way here,” she pointed out.
“We were walking and there was more air to diffuse it. Now we are in an enclosed area and it will make me very ill indeed.”
She glowered but put the pack back into her purse.
“I promise you that I will not be one of those people who demands you perform for them,” he reopened more serious conversation. “Or conform. I don’t want a single thing from you but your friendship. And my friendship is what I have to give you in exchange. Has it been so long since someone offered only that? You seriously can’t accept it as is?”
“I find a lot of things hard to take at face value recently,” she admitted. “I distrust before I trust.”
“And a person has to get through numerous defensive layers to get a peek at the gentle girl inside.”
“I don’t know I’d call myself gentle,” she smirked.
“I would. I’ve seen it already. More than once. You can be a very sweet soul when you’re not battling your inner demons and the demons of those around you. The sort of sweet soul that little birds land on your finger to talk to you.”
The waitress brought their food. Waffle and ice cream mounded up on one plate, bacon on another, sausage on a third. Julien put half the sausage on the bacon plate and took half the bacon onto the sausage plate and pushed one toward her.
“That’s all yours.”
With a fork stabbed into the waffle to hold it in place, he cut the waffle, ice cream, whipped cream and fruit across the middle.
“Okay, that half is yours and this half is mine.” He pointed his melty chocolate ice cream covered butter knife at her, one eye narrowing in mock seriousness. “Stay on your own side of the waffle.”
She ate much slower than he did. He adjusted his own speed to more closely match hers so she wouldn’t stop eating if he did. He didn’t talk either, wanting her to fill up on food, not conversation.
“Okay, that was good,” she admitted, finally putting down her fork and reaching for the stem to eat the cherry last.
“Can you do that thing Earth girls do with the stem?”
Staring at him, she finished chewing and swallowed. A mouthful of tea to rinse cherry bits away and she put the stem into her mouth. A bend this way, a bend that way, a roll and she opened her mouth to stick her tongue out, the stem tied
into a knot. He blinked at it.
“Good to know.”
She froze for a second, giving an audible sniff.
“I smell fire.”
“The cook burned something.”
“No, it’s not here,” she said. “There is a fire somewhere and someone is afraid.”
“You do that a lot, don’t you?” he asked.
She only nodded.
He left money on the table and took her outside to start walking. In a blink, they were walking on the beach she favored. She glanced around to see if anyone noticed two people appearing out of nowhere.
“Why don’t they notice us?” she asked.
“Because people are so wrapped up in themselves that they don’t notice things like that. A low-level psionic suppression from me and their brains don’t register a new pair of people on the already crowded beach.”
She glanced around again, seeing exactly how oblivious the people really were.
“I guess so. Do all of your people teleport?”
“No. Very few can do it on their own. Most use a little bracelet booster thingy.”
“Thingy? Is that a technical term?” she teased.
“Yes, it is. Every booster logs its activity on use, showing where it started and where it ended up. Only authorized personnel within the Celestial Congress are permitted to use them. Everyone else either uses the transport hub teleporters or space ships.”
“Actual space ships?” she questioned.
“Mmmhm. The real deal. Look up. Thataway,” he pointed. “In that direction is the planet Pluto, taking forever to get around the sun. Behind it is a small moon. Hidden, never seen by Earth telescopes. Ships come and go from it all the time. It is much more convenient when it’s on the side closer to Gamma quadrant, of course, and darned annoying when it’s on the far side of the solar system. It goes unnoticed by Earth.”
“What about the Hubble telescope?” she asked.
“It was a concern for a time. We did come up with camouflaging technology ships employ as needed. The telescopes are largely pointed out into deep space. Scientists, backyard astronomers? They’re too busy trying to find planets in other galaxies to notice the ones within their own. They’re too busy looking at Andromeda to care about what’s in their own backyard.”
“As humans usually do.”
“This little planet is so backwards it’s going to be centuries before it’s ready to know there’s an entire galactic society at its doorstep. Five hundred years at least unless something is done to wake it up,” he said. “Or it destroys itself first.”
“Hey, you two.”
A familiar voice coming up behind. Alen.
“You brought me here to pass me off to him?” she accused Julian.
“I do have to go, Tyler. There’s nothing underhanded in it. Ask him any questions you want about what we do up there on that space station. He’ll answer to the best of his ability. He went through all this about a year ago.”
“Fifteen months,” Alen corrected. “I was three months away from my nineteenth birthday when it happened to me. Always near the end of the teen years, they say. You’re a couple months into your eighteenth year, right?”
“I’ll leave you two kids to talk,” Julian said. A pause and he took her hand to capture her full attention. “I know you don’t trust. That’s fine. Earthlings never do because they weren’t raised with the knowledge of where they come from. We’re not lying to you about anything. What you’re going through is serious and real. All those times you dreamt something and it happened? All those spirits you see every day and night. Those are real too. You’ve had abilities all your life. Now they are coming to full fruition. Trust me when I say you cannot do it alone. We are here to help. I swear it to you.”
She saw the truth in his eyes and then he was gone.
“Anything you want to ask?” Alen asked her.
“Not at the moment.”
“Then let’s just walk.”
Long walk and eventually she asked about what kind of people were up there. How different they were or how similar.
“They all have the same problems. Population, money, food, territory. The Celestial Congress tries to smooth things over and get people who have the resources together with the ones who need it. Doesn’t always work, but they’re trying,” he said. “Like any Congress.”
He teleported her to a spot around the corner from her building and walked her to the doorman. There he left her.
Thomas was on the machine five times asking where she was. She called him while making herself a small supper, and agreed to be there the usual time in the morning.
For several weeks, things were as they had been in her life. She went places he told her to go, made obscene amounts of money mostly for talking to rich and powerful men, and felt more and more hollow with each passing week.
“You’re not as eager,” he commented early in October. “Care to tell me why?”
“I hadn’t noticed a difference,” she replied.
“I have. Has something happened?”
“Nothing of importance. Are you going to fuck me or what?”
He burst a small chuckle at her attitude. “But you haven’t noticed a difference. No, I’m not. We’re going out. I have meetings in Mexico and you’re going with me.”
“Cool,” she replied. “I didn’t bring anything.”
“You’re already packed and the bag is in the car with mine,” he said.
A hot few days they were, in the tropical Mexican sun. She kept to the shade during the day, enjoying the pool once the sun was far enough behind the hotel that she wouldn’t be burned. Thomas emerged from negotiations for supper and spent the evening with her. Breakfast together in the morning and he went for the next round. She slept in, did the tourist thing with the local sites, read a book in the shade of an umbrella beside the pool.
Looking up, looking around, she saw emptiness. Little meaning in anything. Julian was telling her the truth and somehow it made all this…less.
“Will there be anything else?” the waiter asked as he put down her fruity drink, his thoughts continuing with “I would so fuck you.”
Not an imagining of her ego, she really heard his voice say those words. That was happening more and more often. What had been few and far between in childhood had become a daily event. Nearly every interaction had her listening with ears but hearing with her cinmind.
October fifth,they flew back to California. Sinus pressure building in her face, she drove down to the church to light the candles. This time it didn’t help. She was just as muddled as she had been on the flight home. She drove to the beach to walk the pier and watch the water. No help. In fact, it was worse. All those people with their incessant internal chatter. She’d been hearing it more and more and was finding the intensity of the noise exhausting.
Sitting on a bench to rest a moment, the pressure in her face turning to pain in her brain, she lost track of time. A hand on her shoulder brought her back and she looked up into Alen’s eyes.
“Do you hear it?” she asked.
“Not like you do,” he replied. “In my own way, yes; but not as loud as you do.”
“Why is it so loud?” she asked.
“Because it’s so new and you’re rather powerful. You hear it more closely than others do so it’s going to be louder.”
Blinking incessantly, looking out over the beach but not seeing the sand and waves. Colors, vibrations of energy forming pulses of color.
“It’s in everything,” she said, feeling like she was looking at the world through eyes not her own. “Absolutely everything.”
“We should go, Tyler. It’s only going to get worse if we stay here.”
His warm hand around her upper arm, then they were in what looked like a hospital room.
“I meant my apartment,” she said.
“I know. This is safer,” Alen said.
“It’s cold here. There’s no life.”
“There are thousand
s of people, I assure you,” he replied.
The door opened, a woman not quite human coming in with a pile of folded bedding and blankets.
“You’ll be more comfortable with these,” she said in stilted English.
Tyler looked at the pile, absorbing all of this. “I’m on that space station.”
“You are,” Alen said.
Eyes widening, she backed away from him. “I never said I was willing to come here.”
“No, but it is the safest place for you right now.”
“Take me back. Now.”
“I can’t. The booster was programmed for there and back. I cannot use it again.”
She made her decision and thought hard, focused harder, felt herself inside her apartment, felt herself travel the millions of miles to be there, wanted it so badly there was no other want in the universe.
Opening her eyes, she was there. Under her own power, she had teleported from a moon behind Pluto back to her own apartment. Dizzy and disoriented from the exertion, she lowered to her knees. Shaking from deep inside that she could not stop, a whirlwind of color and sound crashed through her head in an endless, deafening hurricane.
The pain of an ice pick through her right temple, through her eyes, blinded her to everything except the cacophony trapped in her head. She heard everything, everyone in the world, saw everything. Groaning out her anguish, hearing nothing but voices and everything those voices could hear. She saw through a thousand eyes at once, felt her brain splitting in two.
An eternity trapped her in this place in her mind that neither was nor was not. Waves of nausea, pain and numbness rolled over her, incessant and intense. Hands sinking deep into her hair to grip her skull, she could only whimper her distress.
“Julian.”
His calm energy was there at once. The warmth of a solid body with gentle but insistent hands pulling hers from her head. His quiet presence entered the chaos and her reaction was as instinctive as it was violent.