by R. K. Syrus
Sarge goes back to his seat.
The itching feeling on Sienna’s back gets stronger. And stranger. It’s all she can do not to reach under her flight suit and tug at the conductive gel. In a sec she’ll go forward into the cockpit to remove the experimental weapon. This is no normal discomfort. It’s like something that’s not quite there yet. A memory of a sensation… one that’s about to happen in the near future. Sienna flexes her back. She’ll deal. And get this thing off. First she has to have a chat with the girl.
She kneels down and says in Dari, “Anis-chan, you okay?”
The girl with the strange eyes nods. Sienna takes off her own RFID dog tags and puts them around Anis’s neck. Sienna tries to keep her hand steady. She feels like her own body is vibrating.
What the heck is it? An attack of hypothermia? In ninety-degree heat? She struggles to look composed so Anis won’t be scared.
“Here,” Sienna says, patting the dog tags down inside Anis’s clothes. “Keep these on, always.”
Sienna glances over at Sidewinder. His posture is upright and cocky. The murderous old scavenger has sharp ears.
“You have to go with some people for a while,” Sienna says kindly, but firmly.
The girl looks a little confused and shoots a glance at the hooded prisoner. “But I want to stay with you.”
Sienna cannot say any more. She wants to. She decides. She was wrong. This is wrong. It’s not worth it. The girl is scared. What was I thinking? I’ll turn the copter back to the Lee. Once he’s there, Sidewinder will talk. We’ll get Asrah another way.
Sienna wants to tell Anis she doesn’t have to go anywhere she doesn’t want to. That she’s safe now. In her mind she holds the intercom button down and tells Nightjar to make for the Lee at best speed. But she cannot.
She really cannot say anything. With growing alarm, Sienna realizes her muscles are not doing what her brain tells them. Not a one of ’em. Her vision suddenly blots out, as though her visor—the one she’s not wearing—has lost power. She’s facing a big, dull, empty screen. The inside of the copter, heck, the whole world, has gone blank. No. Not quite blank. The huge orb right in front of her face will not budge.
Is that some kind of eye?
Sienna’s vision snaps back on, but it’s different now. It’s more. In her new 360-degree periphery, Sienna can still see the copter cabin and the people in it. A girl looking at a woman. The woman has rad but impractical hair.
Oh yeah, that’s me.
The girl is Anis. She seems more frightened now than when she was being held hostage with a knife to her neck. Anis starts to scream. Or just opens her mouth in silent astonishment at something. There is a sound and the Sienna who looks down at Colonel McKnight hears it: a high-pitched squeal made by her own skull vibrating a million times a second.
Sienna fights hard against blacking out. She tries to keep her remote body upright. A fainting spell in front of Denbow. That would suck mightily. Sienna is a puppeteer in the roof of the hovercopter cabin, looking down, willing Colonel McKnight’s body not to collapse. She’s definitely having an out-of-body hallucination while feeling everything.
Sienna is kind of glad the feet of her body are frozen in place, as if by some kind of electric current holding her not just to the metal floor of the copter, but in a separate pocket of space which just happens to be traveling at a hundred miles per hour in the same direction as the aircraft. Sienna finds herself seeing too much. Too suddenly. She can see from a dozen angles. And it’s damn strange.
With an undramatic burst of brain static, the big 360 perception of many views collapses into one. Now Sienna finds her consciousness on a precarious perch on the back of her own right shoulder. She’s a tiny thing standing on Colonel McKnight, near the tattoo of a yellow rose. She sees through the vision of a creature whose entire body carapace is an infrared sensor. A creature about half as long as her index finger. A scorpion. The one from the interrogation room. Calmly, as an arachnid would, Sienna sees through the ten eyes of the scorpion and observes that there is a fire. Coming out of Colonel McKnight’s body.
Blue-white glowing fire spews a pulsating aurora up and out of her uniform. To her mind, it is an electric dawn as she sees her old world through the new eyes of the arachnid. From a distant point where logic holds truths, her intellect warns her the only rational explanation is the copter’s plasma jets have malfunctioned and turned the cabin into a blast furnace.
Sienna tells her intellect to shut the hell up. Colonel McKnight’s body is the only thing on fire and the flames feel like a cool breeze. Sienna is still connected to her drifting, floating body with eight spiny, gripping, night-vision-seeing legs. Skin and the fat underneath is not crisping, charring, or vaporizing. Not yet.
Next, reason tells her the cool fire bursting out of her could be some atmospheric effect, coronal plasma discharge. St. Elmo’s fire. A strange combination of the malfunctioning stealth field and ionizing atmospherics could have created for Colonel McKnight’s body a cocoon of corrugated light.
It really is all her. At some point in time, time, which is becoming a more meaningless measure by the…
Sienna tries to clear her head. Hard to do because she’s looking at the back of her head from the outside. One thing she’s pretty convinced of: St. Elmo’s fire does not lift things into the air. And that’s what the unknown effect starts doing to her. Colonel McKnight levitates in the wide-body cabin of the hovercopter. If no one else saw the human spark plug thing she was doing, this they gotta notice.
They do. The last thing she experiences of this suddenly unreal real world are Anis’s small hands reaching out to her. Other, larger hands, maybe Bryan’s or Whitebread’s, also try to grab her. These only propel her faster toward the open hatch. Her private, tiny cosmos obeys an exclusive inertia. She drifts. Sienna, the mind of a woman hitchhiking on the scorpion, the scorpion hitchhiking on the body of woman, and that woman bathed in a snug green-blue aurora, all drift into the rush of dark air framed by the gaping doorway.
Sienna falls into darkness, and she dreams.
Ever dream you were falling?
What if you really were
Falling
Into an endless blackness
What then
would you dream of?
22
INSIDE A DREAM OF FALLING
ABOVE THE WANDERING DESERT
A DAUGHTER
The dark brick wall of wind hits them like a ton of downy feathers. Still traveling, they are in freefall.
The scorpion is the first to recover his wits. He tests the air. Clean. He inhales for the first time in an hour. He bids goodbye to the big, noisy hot-bodies and their moving caves that spew foul air. With eight legs, he pushes off.
A daughter’s body frets with gravity and drifts down.
A daughter’s mind follows.
***
She is returned by the sky to this land. Not even knowing her own name yet, she knows this. Long departed, grown and changed, but remembered. Here. Remembered for innocence annihilated, blessings of purest hate bestowed through jagged iron’s kiss. Remembered here by taste of unborn blood, rain adulterated, sand savored, ceded and accepted as sacrifice, all a lifetime and a stony pulse-beat ago. She falls now, back to the place of her first tenuous birth, pulled in, pulled down, by a force stranger and filled with more mystery than fate.
A daughter comes home to be reborn. And she will be.
When she wakes.
Until then, she dreams of falling and relearns stories as they are whispered to her by wraiths of dusk and sand.
***
A daughter falls like a single raindrop, one trailing comet fire. Reaching up for her is a miles-wide embrace. It makes her feel small, and find herself as part of everything that almost exists.
A decades-quiet part of her mind gains a voice. Truth
s rise like the fruit of millions of seeds lying dormant under desert sands. After a rain, silvery-green tasseled grasses will sprout and rise and sway with each gyre of warm air. A daughter can feel each new sprouted grass blade as its seed’s promise in the future. This promise holds through a thousand generations.
***
With a dash, their downward momentum stops. She rolls down a hillside bedded by windblown dunes and bounded by sharp rocks. Cuts open. She bleeds a quiet greeting. Her throat coughs out sand. She tastes the earth and breathes.
She receives the land’s ferocious welcome. One for a daughter who has returned. It watches her and knows her. She feels the land smile.
***
Older than names of nations, older than the tribes. This roving desert is littered with the carcasses of war machines. Naked, rusting ribcages thrust up through dust, remains of titanic battles no one remembers.
Still, this land has not had its fill.
Its appetite is endless.
***
People.
The scorpion senses them. With a flick of his stinger and a droplet of venom, he severs their last tie. A daughter is on her own.
They come, attracted by the strange light of the slow-falling comet.
Closer now, she sees their lives. Sees their factions fight, infants swaddled in dusty rags, flies buzzing and landing and breeding. Fires tended behind thick-walled houses send smoke into a hard blue sky. Old men drink tea and talk and stare out at an unflinching horizon.
She sees herself among them. They should be frightened.
***
They collect a rag doll and drag her off. A daughter’s mind follows. The men, indeed, are frightened. Not of her. They offer their prize to a white-beard whose scarred hands clutch an ironwood staff. It is decorated with the skull fragments of his enemies. Wraiths whisper his name—it has no substance where she is, the name of the white-beard.
He recognizes the remains of her uniform and decides to add her to his living inventory. Because she is a foreigner, she’s to be given the largest cell. He has a notion of inviting debased opium lords and greedy Jamiates to view and bid on her. Too early for business thoughts. Time for tea at his eldest son’s house.
The limp body of a daughter gets carried and dragged. Executions of the defiant and unransomed have left many vacancies in the white-beard’s underground prison. From one cell comes shuffling and faint wheezing. From another, lacerated, prayer-like muttering seeps through mold-crusted grating.
They toss her in.
Where her head and shoulders hit the floor, where shackles latch on tight, new bruises swell and rise. She will feel them later.
For now, she is a weightless shadow. Alone with herself. A memory draws her. It pulls a daughter on a journey no human mind can take.
***
Out where her body is, words are being spoken at her. The pauses between syllables might last a day. She has time.
***
There are four spaces in front of her. The same number of chambers that make up the human heart. Three atriums hold things for a daughter to see. The fourth is the unpast and nonfuture. She must choose.
She chooses all of them.
She has been and is in all of these places. In order to again become for herself and for those in the life which awaits: daughter, leader, friend, warrior, lover, protector, she must find things in this maze. The four rooms in front of her hold who a daughter was and who she will be. The journey’s end is understanding.
With her mind, she steps forward.
***
The first atrium is peacefully dim. She is alone, but not isolated. Two hearts beat. This is a pre-birth memory. Everything she studied about physiology and psychology dictate it should not exist. Yet it does. It exists with a simple certainty and clarity that she cannot deny, as much as she might want to.
Because if she could deny it, she could stop the shattering violation that takes place next. The one that forms the inner core of this first impossible memory. The tranquil darkness in which her unborn body floats is torn asunder by a merciless invader. Cold and sharp, it cuts through her world and her body. Once, twice, three times, then again and again, leaving bright daggers of terrible pain, like flashes of lightning seared onto eyes that have yet to open for the first time. The pain threatens to tear a scream out of lungs which have never drawn breath. Ragged cuts leave her small body floating in her own blood. Red rivulets mix with her mother’s. And a tiny heart pumps faster and faster in distress, each beat having less fluid to push than the last.
Infant heartbeats become a rush of thunder and air. She must go. She must!
The image of an animal’s five terrible claws is etched in her mind. Images that match wounds on her body. Wounds she will be born with and which will form the scars she will carry forever. In those few moments, a scripture of earnest pain, true hurt, and undying hate is inscribed upon her body. And she has yet to be born.
She wants to leave this place. But she cannot, truly. This place is her. She can only live within its confines. But they are as large as mind and spirit can make them. Practice and faith and discipline and love have made its frontiers large.
She moves on to the next chamber.
***
Words are being spoken. The pauses between syllables might last hours. She has time.
***
The infant who was dying in her mother’s womb is alone. Really alone now. Out. She tries to cry with sodden lungs. She is too weak to open her eyes. She can hear only one heartbeat. Weak. Failing. Hers. The other is separated from her, though she feels slickly covered with that heart’s last issuance of blood.
She is newborn. Trying to see, unseeing. She is surrounded by air. She wants to breathe in, unbreathing. She is new to life, unmoving. Dying.
Years from now, a girl will run soap-wet fingers over her own scars. A young woman will read them with her touch and yearn to feel the history they hold. What is new is the clarity this unique seeing gives a daughter who has returned. For the first time, she sees she was not born alone. For the first time, she discerns the other. Her vǫrthr, her racht. She witnesses the precise moment it clambered aboard an unborn girl.
Rust-corrupted iron delivered pain and wounds. And more. This rough blade infixed the other. So intense was Scythe’s frenzy, so receptive her unborn mind, it passed into her. The coiled passenger crawled across a gangplank of warped metal to board a tiny vessel of bleeding flesh.
As a daughter watches the past unfold, the dark spark sliver wriggles into the cozy space of her most ancient brain. No sooner has the partitioned segment of the distal tendril taken root than it finds itself insulted. This vestige spark feels its tiny infant host dying.
For the first time, she sees the other’s essence. It is made up of a few twitching ethereal nerve cells. Her vǫrthr is a strange life form. Its embodiment is quantum resonance dermis sloughed off from a severed tentacle of an incomprehensibly vast being. A master parasite mind which eons ago tore itself into existence.
This other was injected into her through the five wounds on her body. This shade of a shade of a brutal, disembodied consciousness cannot leave its host. It is trapped within a newborn. The other senses her weakness. It is disgusted.
With the reflex convulsion of the cut tip of a snake’s tail thrown into simmering coals, it gives her a selfish gift. From the cold, deep pillars of the universe, it speaks to her, the newborn daughter. A soundless word no conscious human mind could ever understand reverberates inside the torn body of an orphan girl lying unmoving above the blood-stained plastic floor of a combat hospital on the edge of the Wandering Desert.
Hate.
The cold vibration pulses out from the dark passenger. The giver serves only itself, according to its nature. These vibrations are the only evidence this other is alive and has a frightful will to stay that way. It
lends its stark life force to the alien child.
It gives her the energy and the will to sustain life when no other human could have survived. Through this twisted miracle, an infant girl endures. They are born together. It will become known to her as her racht, which means “sudden surge” in a language she never learned.
Tháinig racht feirge uirthi, bhuail taom feirge í.
Through this rancid mercy, a daughter lives. Just long enough for caring, skilled hands to sew up terrible wounds and fill veins with enough blood for a tiny heart to pump. She moves. She breathes. She opens her eyes and looks into the face of someone she will soon recognize as Theodora McKnight.
***
The second chamber fades. She is Sienna Iðunn McKnight, daughter of Hamida, Theodora, and Annalies.
***
Words spoken. Pauses last minutes. She has time.
***
SIENNA
The third chamber envelops Sienna’s mind. This one is not memories. At least if these are memories, they are not her own. Sienna considers them ideas, images recorded by a far-seeing eye.
They confuse her. The knowledge they hold has no reference to any time or place she knows. Her practical mind struggles to find something real, something she can use in the fight that awaits her the moment she decides to awake and face the critter who holds her actual head under real, wet, drowning water. Her body’s mundane needs, like breathing, must wait. Sienna needs to sort this. Here, in this between.
The most rhythmic and, indeed, prettiest images in this third atrium coalesce first. A ballerina in front of a mirror. No. These are two dancers—twins, definitely twins. Their grace is only exceeded by their speed. A variation is completed before a hummingbird’s wing has time to thrum a single beat. Glittering back at her with four cat eyes, the white-clad twins twirl. Red drops fling at her from elongated needle-nails.
Before these strike her face, Sienna blinks. The pair are gone.
Next, out of time and out of place, comes a rolling cloud. But no cloud ever hugged the ground so greedily. No storm ever spread from horizon to horizon like this enshrouding mass. It moves like a smoke cliff miles high. It obliterates the horizon and has no end. For it is its own end. From the midst of the undulating blackness comes a five-taloned demon. Metal-clad bone spikes hew down, down through rock armor into loamy earth. Above those terrible claws hang eyes that tear into her own with their gaze. They are a screeching nothingness that sees all in their own image.