by Lisa Lace
That got a tiny smile out of me, but it disappeared immediately.
"It's not just him, Neesa. We're not working. Do you remember how I tried to get his attention? That just made him upset. He hasn't let me in until today. He told me about a woman he's supposed to fall in love with."
"Yes, I've heard about that too. The human."
"As it turns out, I'm the woman." I watched her, wondering if there would be an adverse reaction.
She frowned. "You can't be. I always thought you were Susohnnan."
I laughed. "That's what Airik said. Doesn't anyone on this planet know the origin of the word Terra in TerraMates?"
"But you're sophisticated. How can you be human?"
"Maybe humans aren't what you thought they were."
"I'm not prejudiced," she said, holding up her hands. "But that means that you're his true love. Isn't this good news? It's what you wanted, isn't it?"
"But Neesa," I said, feeling my tears spilling out again. "He doesn't love me. I can see it in his eyes. When the year is up, I'm filing for divorce."
"Divorce." She stared at me. All traces of amusement vanished from her face. "Why would you want to do that?"
"He doesn't love me, and I know now he never will," I said, crying in earnest now. "It's stupid to keep trying when it's not going to work."
"I agree that it doesn't make sense to keep pushing something that isn't going to happen. But Quinn, you can't give up. He had a vision he would love you." She took my hand and put her other hand on top. "Airik's visions are incredibly accurate."
"Not this time, Neesa. I'm one of the mistakes."
She looked at me with an eyebrow raised.
I smiled. "You're right. It wasn't a mistake. In many ways, this has been the best year of my life. Now that I have Koccoran citizenship, I'm staying. This is the only place I've ever fit in. And having you for a sister, well..." I started crying again.
"That's right," she said. Her eyes were tear-filled as well. "Even if you divorce my idiot brother, we're still going to be sisters. I'm not giving you up."
"You already have a lot of sisters, Neesa," I said.
"None of them are pale little human Precogs that have blown up Precog testing machines."
I shook my head. "I didn't destroy that machine. It was going to break eventually. It needed maintenance."
"Whatever you say. The way I hear it, you're one of the most powerful Precogs the Division's ever seen."
"I'm going to focus on my career. That will have to make me happy."
"You're going to knock them dead at the Division," she said, putting her arm around my shoulder. "Are you crashing here tonight or are you going home?"
"I guess I'll go back. Airik might be worried. I didn't tell him where I was going."
"He'll be freaking out." she said, frowning at me. "I'm contacting him right now to tell him you're here and okay, but I'm also saying you are leaving to go home now. He may not love you, but he cares about you, Quinn. Don't worry him for no reason."
"I'm sorry," I said, feeling contrite. I grabbed my cold-weather clothes and got dressed. When I returned home, Airik was at the door the moment I walked through the threshold.
"Quinn, please don't worry me like that again. I didn't know where you'd gone or if something had happened to you." His eyes were troubled. "You were so upset when you left."
I stared at him and knew that his heart was hurting nearly as much as mine was. He swept me up into his arms and kissed me until I felt like I was going to melt into a puddle on the floor.
"Please, Quinn. Let me show you how I feel," he said, his eyes begging for forgiveness.
I didn't say anything, but I nodded my head. Sex was the only way we could get close to each other. I wouldn't fight it again. I loved him. I wanted him to make love to me and help me forget all the pain I felt.
It was slow, passionate, and exquisitely pleasurable. I thought I would explode before he finally let me come. When my orgasm finally hit me, the mind-numbing sensation seemed like it would never end. Finally, we both lay still, our bodies twisted up together.
"Have you ever had an orgasm like that before, Quinn?" he whispered.
"Never," I said, almost unable to form words.
"Me neither," he said.
Then I saw a change come over his face.
"What is it?" I said.
"A vision's coming." He started to untangle himself, but it was too late. His eyes were looking right at me, but he didn't see me. In a different voice, he activated his computer to call his Recorder.
"Precog," he said.
I lay still. I couldn't move now, or I might break his vision. At that moment, I felt a vision coming to me. "Precog." I activated my computer and called my Recorder. After that, I was lost in the Precog.
I was walking by myself in a snowy forest that seemed vaguely familiar. I came to a log cabin. I had been sent to help a woman who was sick. I was a nurse. Her daughter had just died. The woman was hysterical and running a fever. We had barely been able to get her coordinates before we lost contact.
The silence in the cabin was stifling. The girl and her mother were already dead. I walked over to the bedroom and saw the two lying side by side. My stomach heaved. I got to work, preparing to bring them back on the stretcher I pulled behind me. The cabin was deep in the northern mountains, far from any towns. I packed up the bodies and headed back to civilization.
The vision jumped ahead. I was dying in the hospital where I worked. My supervisor was asking me to tell her everyone I had contacted.
"Keela, we need to quarantine them. It's important."
My supervisor looked frantic, but I felt as hot as a volcano. Whatever she needed to know didn't matter.
"Please try and remember," she said, but my eyes closed.
I knew she was dead then, but the Precog went on. Millions of people would die of the same disease the nurse contracted. The planet-wide catastrophe could end the whole Koccoran race.
Suddenly I was back in my body. My Recorder's voice kept asking me questions, drawing more and more details out of me until I couldn't answer anymore.
"That's great, Quinn," she said. "Would you mind coming into Headquarters as soon as you have dressed?"
"Right now?"
"Yes. We need to speak with you and Airik."
"Okay," I said, feeling curious.
I opened my eyes and looked into Airik's. We were still intimately wrapped around each other. The feeling of him inside me made my hips buck.
"If you do that again, Quinn, we're not going to make it to Headquarters anytime soon," he said. The look in his eyes made my hips shift again.
I could feel him hardening inside of me, and I quivered at the thought.
"We can't be slow this time, Quinn," he whispered before he kissed me deeply.
We were at headquarters within the hour. We moved rapidly, all things considered. Airik's wink made me blush as we walked through the doors. I was going to miss him. I wondered why they were calling us to the office at midnight.
Airik's Recorder, Miroll, met us as we walked into a room where the on-duty Recorders worked. They were all doing different things. All were wearing their earpieces, but they were either walking or curled up on the couch while talking to their Precogs.
"Airik, will you and Quinn come this way, please?" she said, leading us into a glass room.
"What's going on, Miroll?" Airik asked.
She hesitated. "We've never had this many details from either of you before. Your numbers were off the charts, double what you both usually get. And they came in simultaneously."
"Double?" Airik said, frowning. "That can't be right."
"This is the report," she said, scrolling through page after page of details.
"That's long, yeah, but there were two of us."
She cut him off.
"That's just yours, Airik. You've never done anything like this before. I would know. I've been your primary Recorder for over a decade."
"Nothing like this has happened before?" she asked, looking back and forth between us.
"Well," I said, looking at him. "There was that time when we found the apartment."
"That's right," he said, remembering.
"You've had simultaneous visions before?"
We both nodded.
"What was different about this vision? Did something change between this one and your normal Precogs?" she said. "We need to know if we can reproduce this level of detail.
Airik turned to look at me. I knew my face was turning bright red, and there was nothing I could do about it.
Miroll looked back and forth at us. "What is it?" she said.
"You know we're married, right?" Airik said.
"Yes, but what does that have to do with anything?" She broke off. "Oh."
Somebody had to say it what we were all thinking, so I did. "We had just finished making love, and we weren't separated yet," I said, feeling my face burning up with embarrassment. "The visions occurred before we could move apart."
"Really," she said, sounding fascinated.
"It's hardly reproducible unless the Precogs involved are married or dating," Airik said drily.
"It's good to know. You'll have to make a full report of the circumstances."
We both had our mouths open to object when Rob came running into the room, interrupting us.
"Thank goodness you're both here," Rob said, as he spotted us. "Come on. We're having a meeting in the main boardroom."
Airik and I looked at each other, shrugged, and followed him. When we entered the room, everyone was looking at a wall that followed all the Precog events happening in our Division. The wall made it easy for upper management to keep records of who was having visions at a particular time. There were a few other higher-ups in the room. In fact, it seemed that all the senior staff was here.
"We have a situation," Rob said.
"I'd say so," Airik said, monitoring the board. "I've never seen this many Precogs at once."
At the moment, the room looked like Christmas. Every light on the wall blinked furiously.
"Holy shit," I said under my breath.
"There's no way we can handle this volume," someone said. "We have to call all the Recorders we have, active or inactive. They need to answer from wherever they are. Even if everyone responds, we still won't have enough people."
"I'm on it," Rob said. "I'll send a message to every Recorder."
"What the hell is going on?" Airik said, looking around at his colleagues.
"It's a mass Precog, Airik," a short woman said.
"What does that mean?" I asked, speaking for the first time.
"It means that the Precog will affect a large number of people."
"You mean, like a virus that will start an epidemic, causing untold numbers of deaths all over the planet?"
"You had the same Precog, didn't you?" Airik said, looking at me.
Rob shook his head as he finished sending his message.
"Everyone's having the same Precog, Airik." He looked around at everyone in the room. "Look at the numbers from the other divisions. We're having a planet-wide emergency. Get the President on the phone. I need to talk to her right away."
Chapter Fourteen
QUINN
"Rob should take you, Airik. He's not making sense."
"He says you're more versatile than I am. You have unique abilities, and they need me here."
I shook my head. "I won't do it. I won't take your spot."
He smiled warmly at me, then kissed me on the forehead. When he touched me, he accidentally brushed my third eye.
A vision of us in the snow passed through my mind and I slowed it briefly, knowing time was critical.
Airik, looking down at me. Airik crying. Our arms wrapped around each other, holding on for dear life. Me being unbelievably happy.
I didn't bother getting a timeline on it, because what I saw was unbelievable. "That's one of the inaccurate predictions," I said, pulling away from him.
He studied me as if he didn't recognize me. I couldn't stand it. He looked like he was trying to figure something out. "You'll go," he said. "Because they need you, not me."
"Airik, it's not right."
"It doesn't matter what's right and what's wrong. They want you." He kissed me. "I know you'll do great," he said.
I scowled as he walked out of the room. It would be a lot easier to leave him if he wasn't so nice about everything. And, of course, if I didn't love him so much.
Rob was assembling a ground team to go out and save the child. Based on all the other Precogs that had come in, they had written down every last detail of the group vision.
The girl and her mother were off-worlders and had recently come to Koccoran. They were unwittingly carrying a virus they had picked up somewhere on their interstellar travels. The virus could not transfer itself until the host died.
In the future, she dies, and her mother dies. The nurse brings their bodies back to the hospital, unknowingly contaminating herself. She gives it to other people at the hospital who are unable to fight it off and die as well. After their funerals, the number of people who have come into contact with the virus starts growing exponentially. By the time the virus is under control, Koccoran loses nearly thirty percent of its population. Most of the people who die are of childbearing age.
The virus was going to wipe out an entire race. The Koccorans weren't likely to survive this blow on top of all their other population issues. I felt desperate at the thought. They were only my adopted people, but my life here would disappear along with their inhabitants. The future looked bleak. There was little doubt of our accuracy with over a thousand visions corroborating the same story.
I strolled across the big Recorder room and into the boardroom where the rest of Rob's team had gathered. I felt like a fraud because I was a new graduate. Everyone else on the team had plenty of experience and training. But if Rob wanted me as part of his group, I wasn't about to say no. It would be the chance of a lifetime. I hadn't done any field work yet, but I hoped it would come quickly to me.
It felt terrible for me to take Airik's place like this. It seemed as if I was bumping him out. If I weren't here, he would be on this mission, and I couldn't help but feel guilty about it.
I didn't know anyone on the team, so I sat down at the table and waited. Rob wasn't only an instructor for the Institute and ground crew leader. He was also in charge of the entire Division of ground teams. He liked to keep his head in the field by doing missions as well as being in charge. I liked that about him. It meant he still knew what it was like on the front lines.
He smiled at me. "Good to see you here, Quinn."
"I couldn't turn down your offer," I said truthfully. I hoped the others wouldn't be annoyed by a green cadet and off-worlder coming along on such an important mission. I looked around. There were five people on the team: me, a man named Bral, a woman named Deerva, another woman that I didn't know, and Rob.
"The plan is simple, team," he said, leaning over and putting his palms down on the table. "We hike to the cabin before the child gets too sick. We give her an injection that will kill the virus, and we make sure she doesn't die. No problem."
We all chuckled. It sounded easy when he put it that way.
"We will have no communication on the mountain. It seems that the woman had a one-time use emergency communications unit she used to inform us about her problem. You've all seen the vision or read the report. She lives in a simple log cabin without electricity or water. She may come from Dantin or another no-tech planet to be content with her lifestyle."
We all smiled again. You would have to be from a planet like that to live without any technology. Yikes.
"We'll meet in twenty minutes to get outfitted for the hike. There's a blizzard coming in, people. Hopefully, we can make it up the mountain before the storm hits."
We glanced at each other. His dream seemed unlikely. I might not have been on Koccoran long, but I knew the chances of beating a blizzard were slim to none.
"Say your goodbyes. I'll see you in building A2 in twenty minutes," he said, wrapping up the meeting.
I went to find Airik. He was in his office, and I knocked on the door. His Recorder smiled at me on her way out.
"I'm heading out. I have to be ready to go soon," I said.
Airik walked over to me. "Good luck, Quinn. I'm sure you won't need it."
I felt my nerves overcoming me, and I looked up at him. I was worried. "There's a blizzard coming in, Airik. I might need more luck than you think."
"This is your second winter on Koccoran. You're not that fragile flower who wilted when the wind hit her face for the first time." He touched my cheek, and I closed my eyes.
"I guess not," I said. "I want to say goodbye, okay, Airik? I don't want to draw this out."
I reached my hand up around his neck and pulled him down to me. Then I kissed him, feeling all the love in my heart until we were both panting as we pulled away.
He looked at me as if he didn't understand something, but I had no time to decipher his facial expressions.
"Good..."
"Don't say good-bye," he said, putting his finger to my lips.
"Long life," I said and turned to leave.
"Quinn," he called after me as I went out the door.
"Yeah?" I said. I didn't look back.
"For what it's worth, I'm sorry I can't feel the way you want me to feel."
"I'm sorry too," I said.
I squared my shoulders. I would forget about Airik and how he didn't love me, and focus on this mission. It was important that I get it right. The entire planet was depending on us, and my life was going to be all about my career.
My other option, the love of my life, didn't love me at all.
AIRIK
I watched Quinn walk down the hall and had a strange feeling this would be the last time I ever saw her. Everything was going to be fine. She was going to be all right.
Then a full-on vision hit me so hard I couldn't speak to activate my computer. I was in the woods watching a tree fall on Quinn and me. The vision flashed to a casket with Quinn in it. She looked even whiter than when she was alive. She was dead.