by Jalex Hansen
They sat on the couch holding each other, not talking, just drifting drowsily off to a safer place. His last thought before he fell asleep stroking her hair was that he hadn’t told Tom he was sorry about Maria. And he was. He really, really was.
But not sorry enough.
Chapter
Seventeen
White in her mind, white beneath her eyelids, white surrounding her, curving with the sand, wrapping around the sun, holding every molecule still in its orbit. She could see them, a billion little suns frozen in their spinning. The desert heat had been replaced by a more nurturing warmth, like bath water, or amniotic fluid. In the tunnel of her mind, a rushing roar pulsed the wind of her thoughts, of life and energy, the heart beat of the world, of the universe. She was enthralled with this view of existence, with the pause button she had the power to press.
Vaguely, she could hear Gideon’s voice urging her to interact with what she saw. She reached out her hand and captured one of the little balls of light, cupped it for a moment before gathering more into her hand and swirling them gently around like leaves at the bottom of a tea cup. Tenderly she pressed them closer together until they seemed to pull towards each other, not touching, but hanging in the same space.
“Now,” Gideon said, “Let them all go.”
Lissa released them and was blown out of her meditation and off her feet onto her back by a bright and blinding flash of light.
She sat up rubbing her eyes, blinking stars. “What was that? I think I’m blind.”
“You’ll be okay in a minute. That was your power, just a taste of it.”
She felt him place a bottle of water into her hand. Around her, the darkness was replaced by a watery haze of gray filled with little spangles as her eyes tried to recover from the shock of the light. “Just a taste?” She took a drink and rubbed at her eyes again. “It knocked me flat on my back.”
“You will learn how to control it. Did you notice anything about the balls of energy, any differences between them?”
She shook her head and tried to make out his face, it wobbled into view slightly out of focus, like she was looking through a dirty lens. “Round and shiny, kind of spiky... like little stars.”
“Hmm.” Gideon leaned back onto his elbows and closed his own eyes. “It’s different for each of us I guess. Next time, see if you can see anything unique about them, a color, a heat, maybe just some feeling. Once you can tell them apart you’ll have more luck making them do what you want them to.”
“Next time?” She choked on her water. “I think I’ll pass. Let’s go for a run.”
He laughed. “When we first got here you wanted to meditate instead of exercise.”
“Well, I had no idea meditating would be so dangerous.” She got to her feet. “I think I can see well enough now to beat you,” she said.
“Since you’re handicapped I’ll give you a head start.”
She wouldn’t argue with that. She took off toward the horizon which was now reasserting its usual depth and lack of blurry edges. Behind her Gideon was already gaining ground.
In six weeks she’d grown strong and healthy on days full of running, boot camp-style calisthenics, and feats of endurance. What had practically broken her in the beginning, now gave her a rush. But she felt that on some level she hadn’t reached her potential yet.
Gideon passed her and gained even more ground, kicking up sand like small sprays of gritty water making wings at his ankles. She had an idea. Trying not to be afraid, she summoned that whiteness again, called up the light from her veins, her brain, her spirit. Ahead she saw Gideon wrapped in those little balls of energy, surrounded by a cloud of them like cosmic mosquitoes.
Lissa was running through them, but they were parting to let her through. She studied them as she ran, seeing that some moved differently than the others, some glowed brighter or more dully. Not knowing what to do she simply imagined them clinging to her, giving her push and momentum. Suddenly she couldn’t feel her legs, or feet, or the rush of her hard working heart. She felt like she was being carried.
She looked down and saw her legs still pumping away, but they didn’t impede her. She was gliding over the sand now, catching up to Gideon and passing him. She laughed wildly into the air, free and fiery. The light was everywhere, as she ran it parted and closed back in behind her, some of it catching to the balls that already hung like an aura around her body. In just a few minutes she reached the base of a small mound of rocks, a talus of red sandy blocks leading up to a plateau. The top was flat and spread out above the land around them, scoops and hollows of orange and yellow and black and gold running like frozen lava over the crust of the earth. She came to a sudden stop at the top and the light dissipated, melting away from her like fog. Moments later, Gideon came up behind her.
“Like that,” he said.
She was staring off into the distance where the sun was making a gooey mess in the sky, slowly melting down to the horizon. She remembered that other plateau, so different from this, when she didn’t know who or what she was, when she was weak and frightened, her parents dead behind her, her own death in front of her. Then Gideon had come and lifted her up to this.
He followed her gaze and the timbre of her thoughts watching the sunset.
“Who am I?” she asked.
“You are Lissa Trent, child of the Lux.”
“I am forgetting before.”
“You’re just seeing it differently, filtering it through what you know now. Are you sad?”
“No. I’m almost nothing, or too much. I can’t explain. I don’t recognize myself at all, but at the same time I feel more aware of who I am. Does that make sense?”
“It does to me.”
Without thinking, she leaned her head back against his shoulder, aware of his heartbeat against her back. “Thank you,” she whispered.
He rested his chin on top of her head in acknowledgement.
She grinned at the sun, now low enough to look at directly. “That was totally fantastic back there,” she said. “It didn’t feel like running at all. It was like flying.”
Gideon laughed low in his throat. “It surprised me. I didn’t think you would do that.” He took a deep breath. “Everything about you surprises me.” He cleared his throat uncomfortably, but didn’t move away. “I thought you would keep going right off the edge and fly away.”
“We can’t do that can we, fly?”
“I have no idea what we’re capable of. I wouldn’t suggest trying it just yet.”
She smiled. “It would be nice to be so free.”
“Here,” Gideon urged her gently toward the edge, “I’ll show you the next best thing.” He maneuvered them until her toes hung over the rim of the precipice. “Close your eyes,” he whispered.
She felt him lift her arms until they were straight out at her sides, her wrists hung from his warm hands. The desert wind picked up with the approach of evening and sent her hair spiraling in small tornadoes.
“Now, open your eyes.”
She slowly opened them. The sun lay on the horizon now, ready to die an honorable death, and she could see nothing but the desert floor rolling out below her. She leaned out into the wind and space, confident that Gideon would keep her from falling. It was like flying.
Only half of it was from the view, the rest was created by the sensation of Gideon’s fingers on the tender bare flesh of her wrists. The mark beat faster with her blood. She sensed every line of his body behind her and smelled his scent, of lightening and summer rain, and early dawn.
He pulled her back and laid his face up against the side of her head. She closed her eyes again and turned until they were pressed together heart to heart. She felt him tremble, saw his eyes filled with a strange luminosity, reflected by the disappearing sun, leaving stars, and she kissed him.
He tasted even better than he smelled, sweet and moist, but she was only aware of that for a moment before the light came again shooting through their bodies, filling and expandi
ng them, making of their kiss the birth of a star, the creation of a brand new universe. He lay her down in the crumbling embracing sand and lay looking down at her, his face unreadable, before he kissed her back, and they were sent up, up, up into the sky, past the blue and gold, into the black where there was no air, no light but the one they made, and a deep and promising infinity.
She was yanked out of this bottomless joy so fast she didn’t know what had happened. Gideon had pushed himself away from her, standing and putting a distance between them.
She felt her lips as though looking for proof that he had really kissed her. Maybe he was afraid of going too far, of hurting her. She got to her feet slowly and walked up behind him. “It’s okay,” she said, laying her head against his back. “I’m ready.”
She felt every muscle in his back contract as though her touch was revolting and when he spun to face her his eyes were full of despair. She staggered backward away from the weight of that look.
“Ready?” he said hoarsely his voice breaking. “Ready for what? You aren’t ready for any of this! Either am I!” He was angry now, an emotion she thought he didn’t even possess.
It took all of her will just to look him in the eye. “I think you and I are unique, like rare birds, that we understand each other like no one else ever will, and that we are meant to be together. That being together will make us stronger.”
His laugh was short and cold. “We. Can’t. Be. Together,” he said, his voice low and menacing.
“What, am I threat to you?” She felt her own anger rising to the surface, the strongest feeling she knew of. It had its own light, red hot and biting.
“Yes, that’s exactly what you are. What we are to each other. Don’t you realize that being together in any sense other than that as comrades in arms will be our undoing?”
“I think you’re the one that doesn’t recognize reality,” she said, her voice firm but soft, the anger laying just underneath the surface like lava under pressure.
He took a deep shuddering breath trying to get himself back to whatever cold and lonely place he lived in normally. “What do you think will happen when we are out there?” He gestured out toward the horizon, the sky, the world waiting. “Out where some day it’s very likely one of us will have to decide whether or not to risk ourselves to save the other.”
“I know what I’d do,” Lissa whispered.
He took a step toward her, almost touched her but then thought the better of it. “You can forget that. I won’t let this happen. You cannot let your emotions overtake you.”
The anger, glad to escape, shot out of her mouth. The air around her crackled blue and white. “You’ve spent your whole life playing Buddha in the desert. You’ve kept yourself apart, not feeling anything but the stupid light. And now that I’m here and you actually have to feel something real, something human, you’re afraid and you’re just going to run away.”
“I can’t let you and me be the reason something happens to endanger our cause.”
“The cause? Is that all there really is to you? Never mind me, Lissa the girl, or you-- because even though you pretend you aren’t, you are just a boy--but none of that matters? Only the damn cause?”
“Yes,” he said without even taking a breath. “That’s all there is.”
She stared into his gray eyes until he was the first to look away. “I don’t believe you,” she said.
“Well,” he answered her, “You’d better find a way. Because that’s the way it is. And it will never change.”
And he left her alone.
Chapter
Eighteen
The living room was a teenager’s dream apartment. Giant bean bags, red and green and purple lights, cardboard cut outs of Godzilla, and Darth Vader, and Captain Jack Sparrow, and graffiti on the bare brick walls. Even a giant plastic monkey hanging from the ceiling with a cigar in its mouth. There were computers of all shapes and sizes, some dismembered and leaking their guts in untidy piles, others running various unidentifiable programs. By the door, Kym’s collection of combat boots made a small mountain of black and purple and red and green leather.
Kari’s entire team was sprawled around seven pizza take-out boxes, looking worse for wear. They all stopped talking when she walked in, they even stopped chewing. She was half afraid they would stand up and salute her.
Hikari kept her arms crossed so that they wouldn’t all stare at the glowing mark.
“Wow, you got new eyes to go with that thing on your wrist.” Metti said.
Hikari breathed through her nose. Don’t let them tell me my eyes are glowing. “What do you mean?”
“You’re eyes are gray,” Dimitri said. “It’s kind of hot.”
Kym kicked him, hard.
“So they’re gray… effing whatever. Let me know if I start shooting lasers out of my ass.”
She glanced at Jason who was playing some first-person shooter thing with a pair of ear buds plugged into his ears, and he didn’t even turn around. At least that was normal. She had left him here at Kym’s while they were breaking into her dad’s office with strict instructions to call their dad if they weren’t back by morning. She sighed. “Okay guys, fill me in.”
“Did you know you could do that, that thing you did with the guns and stuff?” Shake asked, bouncing on the cushions.
“Uh, no. I still don’t know I can do that.”
Dave reached for another slice of pizza and took a bite as big as a manhole cover. “Well,” he said through the pizza, “Whatever it was, if you can do it again it’ll probably come in handy.”
“You saved our asses out there,” Metti said. “Thanks.”
The thanks ricocheted around the room echoed by the others.
“Anytime,” Hikari said. “Now let me have a look at those files.”
Kym handed them over, her face dark with seriousness. “I don’t think you’ll like what you read.”
Hikari took the folder as though it weighed five hundred pounds. “Have you all read it?”
“We peeked,” Jason said, turning around. The ear buds hung around his neck, there was pizza sauce on his face. So much for not knowing anything. “We stopped around the page where your adoption papers are.”
“My... what?”
Jason started crying, big baby tears that ran into the sauce and hung there. “I really wanted you to be my sister, even if you are weird.” He got up and ran back towards the bedroom, and when Kari started to go to him, Kym put out her arm and stopped her. “Let him go. Just go sit somewhere and read, okay.”
Nodding, Hikari retreated to the small kitchen where Kym had a black light over the stove. Food must have looked funky under that. She sat down at the table and forced herself to start at the beginning of the file, locking out what Jason had said.
As she turned pages, she wanted to squeeze her own brain until all of it was gone. Documents of atrocity, of murdered scientists and stolen children, doomsday devices, political plots, black market deals. She tried to tell herself her father would never have had a hand in any of that, he must not have known. But then, there was that other thing wasn’t there?
She thumbed through the print-outs looking for adoption papers and found them, but they didn’t make anything clearer at all. Here was a birthday just a few days before her own and her name Hikari, but the last name was different. Nowhere was her father’s or her mother’s name and the name of her birth parents was blank. “Papa,” she said out loud. “What have you done?”
On the next page was a scan of a handwritten note, a note that probably should have been destroyed, but her sentimental father had held onto it.
I know how desperate you and Kimiyo are to have a child. You have done me many favors, and so I will do one for you. There is a baby girl, her name is Hikari. Her adopted parents have met with an accident, and it is within my capabilities to have her delivered to you and your wife, if you desire. She is of Japanese extraction and will never have to know her origins if you don’t wish to tell he
r.
You will note, I am able to deliver blessings as well.
It was signed by Angine.
She crumpled the paper up in her fist, making a tight hard wad of it and shooting it towards the sink. She got up and ran the water down the sink and turned on the garbage disposer. Then she laid her head down and cried for everything that she had lost, and for what she had found too.
Yerik came up behind her and pulled her to his chest and held her until the last of the tears had dried.
“You’re still my Kari,” he said.
“I don’t know what or who I am.”
“You’ll figure it out. Most of us don’t know who we are anyway.”
She wiped her face and pushed him back a little. “When did you get so smart?”
“I’m not,” he told her. “I just watch Oprah.”
She slapped his chest feebly and pulled away to go sit at the table again.
This is how she would deal with the knowledge of her adoption.
She wouldn’t.
Right now there were bigger things to contend with.
She finished reading the rest of the files. Everywhere the date of August 20th was mentioned, but there weren’t any details. The papers referring to the internment camps, which they also called containment camps, gave specification for size and location, but not much else.
At the very bottom of the stack were about twenty pages of mathematical equations, things she’d never seen in AP Calc. It was like she was trying to read a book written in ancient Greek when she only knew five words. “I don’t understand any of this.” She slapped the folder shut and pushed her chair back with a harsh screech that hurt her ears.
She got up and marched into the living room where everyone pretended that they couldn’t tell she had been crying. “Anybody else have any idea what these equations mean?”