Searching for the Kingdom Key

by TylerRose.

  Half an hour later, unable to fall asleep, she left the room. She went to the living room, feeling his location with her mind and finding the sofa bed frame with an extended hand. He was on the far side of the bed. She gently lowered herself to lie down on the near. If she woke him, he made no indication. When she woke hours later, Chen was sitting on a corner of the foot of the bed. Not watching her but with eyes closed and in Lotus position. When she sat up, his eyes opened.

  “Good morning,” he said. “Will you allow me to look you over and assess what damage has been done to you and see what I can do?”

  “Nothing’s broken. He made sure of that. Im Reesana? Are you in here too?”

  “I am,” came from the television.

  “Are you in contact with Jerome at all?”

  “No. He is completely off the grid.”

  “Where?”

  “In Mexico. Deep into the mountain country,” Landra Ahr said, not correcting her on the name she called him. It didn’t really matter.

  She moved slowly to the side of the bed to hang her legs over the edge, muscles hurting all over.

  “Let me examine you,” Chen said, moving from the corner.

  “I don’t want help. I’m fine,” she refused, and rose to stand with winces and held breath.

  He stood in front of her, stopping her progress. “You are not fine and I see it plain enough. Your energy is very low and your spirit has been beaten up as much as your body.”

  “What makes you say that?” she asked dully, the pain taking the edge off her usual wit.

  “Why else would you come here?” he asked in return. “Lie down. Let me do what I can do.”

  Gentle hands urged her, coaxed her, into returning to the bed. When she was on her back, he performed a brief exercise that ended when he slammed his hands together in a thunderous clap in front of his chest. Hands warm as hot lava rocks slid over her ankle and massaged up around her calf inside the pajama leg to the knee. Something about it jolted her. His hands switched to her other leg, having retained their heat. Up to the knee and then outside of the pajamas to continue up her thigh, to warm the bruising on the outer side. She whimpered with the pain of the touch but didn’t try to pull away.

  He switched again to the other and moved up as he had on the left thigh. Over the outer curve of her hips simultaneously several times, then firmly up the plane of her lower belly. He found the small thing that pulsed deep in her belly, and pressed circles down in, on and around it.

  “Your chi is very strong but I can feel here, in this small spot, how constrained you are. Breathe through the discomfort. Exhale it out.”

  With each gaspy breath, the cloud lifted more, until it released her. At once she could breathe freely, easily and without pain. He let her be a moment to rest and catch her breath.

  “Shall we go make pancakes and bacon for breakfast? Then you should rest again.”

  She got the bacon ready and into the oven while he rinsed the blueberries to get them going for a sauce. She set the table while he mixed the batter and started to cook pancakes.

  “Chen? Are you home?” came a voice rising up the stairs.

  Tyler froze. Im Reesana had said no one else came here. Chen looked to her, stuck to the spot with the forks in hand.

  “Yes, Demitrius. I had forgotten you were coming today.”

  Forks clunked onto the table, she fled up the corridor to Jerome’s room, teleporting the last few feet. Demitrius saw her hurrying, saw her vanish, heard her gasping for breath in a panic attack.

  “Who was that?”

  “Do you remember the night of the blizzard in March? Jerome called you to ask if you were using the Pickle Road apartment?” Chen asked in return.

  “That’s her? The blonde jail bait?”

  “In a condition your mother would have recognized from her first husband.”

  Demitrius understood the reference.

  “I recognize her kind of stubborn,” Chen said. “And her shame for her current condition. She won’t come out. Sit and have breakfast with me.”

  “Gimme a minute, Sifu. I have a message for her.”

  He strode up the corridor and tapped on the door. “Tyler, I’m Demitrius. I’m a friend of Jerome’s. I have a message from him.”

  “What?” she asked from within, some feet from the door.

  “I’m not going to talk through a door, hon. I need to you to open for me. We’ll smoke a doob.”

  He was about to give up and walk away when the door clicked open. He went in to see her sitting on the edge of the bed in Monica’s old pajamas with a joint between her lips and lighter sparking up. She toked it deep and held it out for him. He shut the door for privacy.

  “Do you know where he is?” she asked, exhaling and keeping her face turned down while he toked.

  “I know he’s in Mexico on his cousin’s farm,” he replied honestly, handing it back.

  “What’s the message?”

  “Not so much a direct message as something you should know,” Demitrius said. “Soon as he knew you had run away, he regretted not letting you stay at the apartment. He regretted not bringing you back here. Regretted it hard.”

  “He didn’t come out to find me,” she said. “Didn’t even try.”

  “He regretted that too, until the invasion came and he realized you’d probably have died. He loved you enough to not want you there.”

  “We had one night together. How is that love?”

  “When it comes to the right woman, it only takes one night,” he told her, two fingers lifting her chin to make her look at him. “You were the right woman.”

  Her eyes were brimming with tears, cheeks and forehead flushing pink around the purple bruises.

  “You’ve obviously had a rough time of it recently. I know your mother died that day. I’m sorry things didn’t work out differently. So is Jerome. He did everything he could to stop the invasion and stop Adamantine. He regrets you and he’s very sorry he didn’t do more.”

  Her mother. The many millions of people dead. Earnol sending her away, denying her the chance to be there and fight for Earth. Solomon. Hades.

  Pain, physical and emotional, hit her at once and she went into a convulsive fit of sobbing that took the strength right out of her. Demitrius dropped the half joint into the ashtray and lowered to his knees to capture her in a big bear hug. She was small in his arms, emotionally raw and physically battered. He shed a few tears himself for everything lost. His sister, his cousin, everyone who had been at the Safe Haven building.

  “It’s okay. You’re safe here,” he said when she was starting to calm a bit. “I don’t know what happened and I don’t need to know. You stay as long as you need to.”

  “He’s never coming back, is he? Jerome?” she asked.

  “No. The Feds want him. He is still protecting one of the alien women. He’ll never come back to the US so long as she’s alive.”

  “What do I do with the bacon?” Chen called down the corridor. “It’s going to burn.”

  Wiping tears away with her shirt sleeve, she returned to the kitchen to rescue the bacon. Taking the baking sheet out to drain off the grease, she turned the strips over.

  “They need a couple more minutes,” she said, closing the oven door.

  She got out a third plate to set a place where Demitrius was sitting at the table. Chen had made a pitcher of orange juice already, and she poured out. He put the hot blueberry sauce into a dish and took it with the margarine to the table. The bacon smelled done. She got it out and onto paper towels to drain.

  They worked well together in a kitchen, both aware of their own space and how to work around each other.

  She sat next to Demitrius as Chen brought the pancakes. Plate compiled, she ate while they talked about their various coordinated recovery endeavors. Chen cleared the table into the dishwasher and left for his day of assisting refuges.

  Alone to talk, they sat in silence for a long moment.

  “Where do you
live now?” she asked.

  “Camberly Drive. It’s up near West Bancroft and Holland-Sylvania. Quiet, country-like neighborhood that doesn’t even have sidewalks. I moved my mother up there the week before it happened. Glad I did.”

  “Is Pickle Road even there anymore?” She hadn’t been able to see behind what was left of the hospital.

  “No. The whole area is gone. Vaporized, burned, rubble. The blast took out most of St. Charles Hospital, that entire stretch of Navarre. The aliens destroyed all the bridges across the Maumee except the High Level and started their march south. So the northern and western neighborhoods are still there. So is most of the south side. I made the mistake of allowing snipers to shoot from Safe Haven. The aliens homed in on them and blew the building to hell. I barely got out. That’s the guilt I get to live with.”

  “It’s not your fault you lived,” she said.

  “No. It’s my fault all those others died.”

  “It’s not, Demitrius. It was going to happen whether you were there or not. Whether snipers were there or not. The Earth force just wasn’t enough. You were a broom trying to sweep back all the oceans simultaneously. Did you even know exactly what day it would happen?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “All this alien technology and you had no warning?” she questioned. “I just can’t believe that. I was told the Celestial Congress was evacuating and going silent two days before the invasion reached Earth.”

  “If I may,” Landra interrupted. “I had accessed satellites around Earth and was watching as best I could. Adamantine approached from the opposite side of the sun and then used Mercury and Venus as shields to get as close as he could. When he could no longer hide behind Venus, I spotted the ship’s exhaust signature. They were here in an hour. We had no warning and no time to put ourselves into place to mount any kind of defense. The Celestial Congress did nothing.”

  “Would a couple days’ notice have helped?” she asked. “Really? In the long run?”

  “We might have had a chance. Jerome would have been able to pick his spot and let the fight come to him rather than having to catch up to the fight. He might have been able to defeat Adamantine the first day and, thus, minimize the damage done and the lives lost. Two days would have been invaluable. As it stands, even if we’d had a substantial ground force, it would have been late arriving.”

  “Celestial Congress?” Demitrius questioned. “What’s that?”

  “A space station in a moon behind Pluto,” she said offhandedly. “It’s been there for something like fifteen hundred years now, happily ignoring Earth. Excuse me.”

  She went out the back door and onto the patio for a breath of air and the expanse of the quiet city. The day was bright and warm with a nice breeze. Felt like July sun. That would be about right. She’d been with Thomas in early June. Then she worked with Alen for a few weeks. Then Solomon.

  [Julian] she said.

  [Tyler?]

  [Tell no one you spoke to me] she replied.

  He appeared beside her to grab her into a hard hug that hurt.

  “Thank the gods,” he breathed. “I’d almost given up. I thought sure he’d killed you this time.”

  “How long was I missing?” she asked as he let her go.

  “Two weeks. Damn, what did he do to you this time?”

  “Nothing I couldn’t survive,” she replied, pushing his hand away.

  “Let’s go inside.”

  “No. You know I’m alive. Please go. Leave me alone. Don’t tell anyone you saw me.”

  “What? Why? Shestna is going insane worrying,” Julian told her.

  “If you tell him and he suddenly stops worrying then Earnol will know I’m fine. I tried searching for information when Alen and I were on Sistair. I’ve been shut out. I can’t even look up the name of a congressman. Why am I not allowed to ask about why the alleged scouting team allegedly came here?”

  “There’s no alleged to it. They came.”

  “How many thousands of years before the Congress ever existed? I went back into the records a thousand years from now and there’s no mention of any scouting team going anywhere. No record whatever of a team scouting a location for the station. The station existed a long time before the Congress ever moved to it. It’s lies, Julian. If a team came here, why did they come here?”

  On the spot as ever he was, faced with the demand for truth coming from her soul.

  “They were waiting for you,” he said quietly, plainly.

  “They were a little early,” she scorned.

  “Not really. You just took a very long time to come this far. You have referred to yourself as an old soul and you’re right. You’ve had numerous lives on several planets trying to make you happen. Many times you’ve been born but never Widened. On your death, your energy was either reincarnated through another birth or taken to another planet to try again. Taken to a world with another team.”

  She stared hard at him, hard enough he could feel the punch to his face and chest.

  “If my father knew I’d told you this, he’d probably banish me to a mountain on Ercoli. You must never let on that you know. He wants me to stall you out. Stop you from developing any further.”

  “What do you want to do?” she challenged.

  “I want you to fulfill the promise of your birthright. This is the first time you’ve ever had a Widening. Now you have to live to have another. And another and another. You have to live probably several thousand years to become what you’re supposed to be.”

  “What is that? What am I supposed to be?”

  “An Eminent Doyen. You have the potential to create worlds. If you live long enough and have enough evolutionary events, you will eventually go off with your mate to create your own planet full of whatever life you put on it.”

  “God said let there be light kind of shit?” she demanded, hot with skepticism.

  “Exactly that, Tyler,” he confirmed, not taking her fury personally. “My father is afraid you will do this and, in the end process, kill millions of people. He’s never wanted you to succeed.”

  “How does my succeeding kill millions of people?” she challenged.

  “You were Catholic. What happens during the Rapture?”

  “True believers rise with the resurrected dead and go to meet their god,” she said quietly.

  “Which means everyone who believes in you will go with you to whatever you create.”

  “Has that actually happened?” she asked bluntly. “Someone actually did that?”

  “It has. It did not happen when Fate went to Gethis, which proved she was not truly an Eminent; but it did when Isis and Ki went to Gethis 50,000 years earlier. One million, four hundred sixty two thousand, four hundred and sixty two people vanished from Sistair the moment Isis evolved and left to go make her own planet.”

  “Vanished. Not dead.”

  “They did not physically reappear on Gethis, Tyler. Isis used their energy to create humanoid and some other life on the planet.”

  “That’s the definition of reincarnation, Julian. What’s the big deal about that if they wanted to go in the first place? Their belief would have had to be extremely deep and strong.”

  “Think for a minute. If someone was driving a vehicle, how many people did that vehicle kill when it suddenly didn’t have a driver anymore? How many fires were started? How many babies were suddenly missing their mothers? Their vanishing produced a natural disaster on Sistair that took weeks to begin to recover from. Father is concerned the same thing will happen, but on a galaxy-wide scale, if you are allowed to develop and become known to the galaxy. But there is also a danger that you will burn out and kill a world along with yourself. That has happened as well. One Eminent, about 100,000 years ago, tried to force her next Widening. She didn’t have her catalyst or her team around her. She blew half a planet to hell when she self-destructed in her impatience.”

  “That’s why no one helped me learn anything when I Widened. Why no one helps me with
anything important. Why no one tries to save me from bad people. Because Earnol would rather I die. He won’t let others help me.” She nodded her own conclusion, not waiting for him to confirm it. “I guess that makes him my mortal enemy. Which also means the Congress is not a safe place for me because he all but owns the place and everyone on it. Consider this my resignation.”

  “Anyone who does help you is an exceptionally brave person. I hope you can recognize that through your own anger. Keep in mind that if you don’t work at the Congress, you cannot travel around the planets,” he told her.

  “Says who? Says no one. If I can teleport there myself, I don’t need any Congress to do dick for me. I do what I want from now on. Go away now. Leave me alone to live my life how I see fit.”

  “Tyler, please. Stop this,” he said, taking her hand. “I have made my own vows that I will help you in spite of my father. I have been all along, as much as I can without revealing myself. I swear it to you now. I will continue to do everything I can to help and protect you until he is no longer a threat. I do have to stay on the side of his law for now. If I get myself executed for treason against the Congress, I won’t do you any good. Shestna is your friend. You know that. No matter how angry you are at my father. No matter how angry you are at me for having to conceal things from you, Shestna and I are your friends So is Baener from Deek’Trai IV.”

  “Just—Stop talking!” she jerked inside of her skin, fists coming up in her frustration and outrage.

  He stopped, wanting her to believe maybe a little too hard.

  “Friends? I have friends?!” she turned on him. “Men too afraid of that one old man to actually step up and intervene and I’m the one paying the price for it. And Alen.”

  She had to stop, to catch her breath, struggled not cry for her friend killed for no reason.

  “Grow a spine and grow some balls. All of ya!”

  She turned around to stomp away into the house, slamming the door, and marched herself all the way through to Jerome’s room.