She stopped thinking about the end of the world. She stopped thinking at all.
And then, between one step and the next, she stood before a wall of flames. Heat seared her eyes and cracked her lips. She threw up an arm to shield her eyes, the keys she still held smacking against her forehead. Had Matthew heard her thoughts and come to her neighborhood? Was he burning down her house?
She turned to scream for Moira. Instead, she faced an open field, grass wavering in the light of the fire. The burning building was a farmhouse, and wherever she was, the sky was just approaching dawn, not fully morning yet. She had crossed time zones. Matthew hadn’t come to her; she had somehow gone to him.
That shouldn’t have been possible. But then, there were a lot of things that day that shouldn’t have been possible.
Beside her, Matthew turned. Tears streaked his face, cutting tracks through grime and soot. Still refusing to think, she took his hand. He flinched, but after a moment, he didn’t pull away.
They watched the house burn.
“I got them out,” he said. “The father was well enough to drive. One kid had burns.”
Lieve squeezed his hand. She couldn’t feel his drain on her power anymore. And it was comforting, at the end of the world, to touch another who knew the kind of pain she had known. Who understood loss so deep that it snapped DNA into another state entirely.
She tried in turn to convey with her touch what she felt. That she understood the pain, too. She understood.
Matthew must have caught her thoughts, because he gripped her hand hard enough to hurt. “I’m trying to be better,” he whispered. “Then maybe it will stop.”
Teleporters popped in around them, and Matthew yanked her with him through his instinctive teleport away. His memories were slightly different. Raw, but in a sense that spoke of examination, not animal observance.
They came out near a stream. The morning sun was just cresting the lip of a hill, spotting through the trees and onto the water.
Matthew shuddered. Lieve kept her grip on his hand, and he made no move to let go.
He poured out words in a rush. He told her of the guilt that was tearing him apart. His need to pull so far inside himself that he pulled in everything around him too. His horror that the universe had not allowed him to die. His horror at what he was—and it was a horror that had little to do with the manifester he was now.
“I lived it, over and over. I can’t face them, my wife and my kids, not even in my memories—God, I can’t even think about them. I can hardly remember them, I haven’t thought about them outside of that memory in…” He waved a hand. Months in the relative time of his powers? Years?
Lieve teleported with him three more times when he felt threatened. Between teleports, he continued to pour out words. And every time they teleported, his memories were different. Every time, the nuances changed. It became less of Matthew beating his friend in a rage, and more of the give-and-take of a drunken brawl. It was more the fear of the moment. The fear for his family, for their survival.
Lieve listened, because she’d had no one to listen to her. The Wardens had shown her how to make her world black and white and no longer feel the color.
Matthew stopped talking. He looked around them. They stood near a tree line, and birdsong filled the absence of words.
They’d teleported every other time he’d stopped his torrent, but though Lieve braced for the transition, they didn’t go. His cheeks were still streaked with the tears and soot, but in the morning light, his eyes were less shadowed. He looked younger, maybe younger than she was.
“I don’t feel it,” he said. “I’ve felt everything, every bit of energy from the trees and animals and people, so bright. Everything’s too bright. But I don’t feel it. I should feel my power starting to build, but I don’t.”
They still gripped hands. Lieve couldn’t see the accretion disk that had once been around him, but she could no longer see powers in the same way, either. And yet power flowed between them, a quiet energy humming through their hands. It warmed her—not with a warmth of lust, or of family, but acceptance.
She hadn’t lost her powers. She’d only lost the powers that had let her run from all that was important to her.
There was the pop-pop-pop as Wardens teleported in around them, weapons at ready.
Matthew stiffened, but he didn’t teleport away. Neither did she. She’d done it once, but she had no idea how to make it work on command.
Matthew shot her a panicked look.
With realization, Lieve vented a short, tense laugh. Matthew couldn’t teleport. He was truly losing his powers.
Natan stepped away from the teleporter who’d brought him, and the ground trembled as his face purpled with rage.
“You,” he spat at Lieve. “You didn’t lose your powers. He corrupted you. That’s what he does. Now you laugh, while people are dying—” His rage slipped just long enough to show the hurt beneath it. “Never thought you’d go rogue.”
One of the Wardens pointed at Lieve. “The power’s coming from her,” she said.
“Trap,” Natan breathed, taking a step back. “Shit, it’s a trap, he’s going to blow—”
“He has control,” Lieve said. “He’s not going to destroy—”
“Both of them! Kill them both!” Natan bellowed.
Lieve didn’t have her fields to protect them. Matthew couldn’t teleport them. She felt his shock ripple through their gripped hands. His palm grew slippery with a cold sweat. Or maybe it was hers.
But she had a need. Power breezed through her and lifted them away from this point in time and space.
It dropped them gently in another field, under a different, bluer sky.
Matthew wasn’t holding her hand anymore. He knelt a few steps ahead of her in the wheat, crushing the stalks around him. He held a black pistol to the side of his head.
“No!” Lieve rushed forward.
He opened his eyes and looked up at her, then down at the gun in his hands. His mouth opened and he dropped the gun, skidding away.
For a long moment, they both stared at the gun.
“Are we…?” he asked.
Lieve took a shaky breath. Yes, it felt like his place and time. It felt like his moment. “I think so.”
He dragged a sleeve across his face, which was unmarred with soot and tears. There was dried blood on the cuff of his sleeve, from his fight. “But if we’re here—I still remember—”
He looked around him and swayed. “Did it actually happen?”
“I don’t know,” Lieve said. “I think so.”
“What…now?”
Lieve closed her eyes. What indeed?
His powers were gone, or at least changing into whatever form they would take now. He was starting to heal. He had made the change into this new form of manifestation. And maybe he had brought them here. She didn’t know.
This was the next level, wasn’t it? No one was ever meant to stay in the shock of their first powers, it was only the first step in this phase of human evolution. The first step required control, a careful bottling of emotions. The next step took the courage to set those emotions free and move beyond the pain.
Lieve reached for his hand again, pressed it, and let go. “Go be with your family.”
He hissed through clenched teeth. But then he braced himself. “Thank you,” he said. He nodded, cast one more look at the gun, and left it behind as he walked away through the field.
He would need to tell his wife what he had done. He would need to tell the authorities. He would likely go to prison. But Lieve knew he would survive it. He had a different self to grow into, and new powers to bring change to his life, to his world.
And so did she.
Lieve thought of her family. She needed them, and they needed her—a need that had so long gone unfulfilled. It was time to live again.
She closed her eyes and let the wind take her home.
A Word from Holly Heisey
I think there a
re few things more damaging to a society than when an enemy is made into a faceless, inhuman target. It might channel our fear and outrage into action, but at what cost to our own ability for empathy?
A few months ago, I read Mahatma Gandhi’s letters to Adolf Hitler in 1939 and 1940, asking him “for the sake of humanity” to turn from his path of war. That made me pause. Gandhi saw someone who history calls a monster, and separated the man from the monstrous things he did. He appealed to Hitler—human to human—for a better and more peaceful way.
When I sat down to write “Power Outage,” I had no idea my characters would take me to a place of empathy for someone who destroyed worlds. True, Matthew didn’t destroy with intent, but it was his choices that drove him to that place of destruction. And how the Wardens handled it, and how Lieve handled it, taught me a lot about my own humanity.
We have powers in our world. We have the power to fight our enemies, to criticize, to fear, to destroy. The trend of internet shaming—rage and contempt on a global scale, against a target we neither know nor see face-to-face—is one that has damaged lives. But we also have the power to love. We have the power to see those we view as a threat as human, just as human as we are. We have all known pain, and we have all acted from it.
I believe superheroes have walked the earth, and are on it today. People like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mother Teresa, Mahatma Gandhi and Malala Yousafzai. People who live out of love.
In a time when adding to the global conversation is just a click away, what would the world be like if we showed less anger and more compassion? I would like to find out.
I hope you enjoyed “Power Outage”. To hear when my new books and stories are released, please join me on my newsletter—http://hollyheisey.com/newsletter/. You can find more about me and my writing at http://hollyheisey.com.
The Last Siege of Olympus
by Therin Knite
1
There was a boy named Icarus
Who flew too high toward the sun,
And when his waxed wings melted so
His mortal toil was truly done.
THE WINDOW IS FORTY-FIVE CENTIMETERS HIGH and fifty-five centimeters wide. Through it, a beam of sunlight crawls across the white room. At 8:00 AM, the light is just to the left of the empty chair that sits five meters from the window. At noon, it shines directly on the chair’s dull gray seat. At 4:00 PM, it’s three white tiles to the right.
The window doesn’t open. The chair doesn’t move. Everything is stagnate but the sunlight.
And me.
I don’t ever sit in the chair. I don’t ever move the chair. And since there’s nothing else in the room to move—except my own body—nothing in the white room ever gets moved. The lone door eight meters behind the chair hasn’t even been opened in all the time I’ve been trapped in this place.
But then, open doors are no longer a concern of mine.
I usually come to the white room in the evening and stay until the next morning. Sometimes, however, I stay all day. Why? Because I feel like it and for no other reason. I’m drawn to the white room, like it’s a beacon. A beacon for what, I’ve yet to figure out and likely never will. Because nothing ever happens in the white room. I come. I leave. I come again. An endless cycle.
The white room never changes.
The rest of the building, however…
At exactly 2:00 PM, I hear Linda shuffle down the hall. Linda is fifty-five, divorced with three children. One of them, her son, Dave, is a heroin addict. She talks about him all the time, chatting about her family issues with all her colleagues, as if they don’t all have enough on their plates already. One good thing about her blathering though: she talks so damn much. I can actually pretend to have a conversation with another person. You know, despite my little invisibility problem.
With that thought in mind, I walk through the closed door of the white room and into the hallway. The hall’s a bit more interesting than the room, even though the walls are the same white color and bland fluorescents beam down at my head. Whereas the white room never changes, the white hall is different every day. Linda is a constant, as are some of the other orderlies, but the visitors are not. They hustle and bustle through the hall, every minute of visiting hours, and they all have their own stories.
I like their stories. They’re the only entertainment I have in this place.
Today, there’s a middle-aged, overly tanned woman rushing down the hall in clacking heels. She’s spouting curses and breathy threats into her cell phone at somebody who apparently ticked her off enough to paint a bright red target on his back. But at least it makes her an interesting person to follow—so I do.
The angry woman follows another orderly, Martha, through two left turns and three right turns, until both women arrive at what I assume is another white room. I’ve never had the guts to actually go into a white room besides the one that draws me to it—these others, it’s almost like they physically repel me. I’m sure I could walk straight through their doors or their walls if I put my mind to it, but I’m almost afraid. Of what? Maybe of finding another being like me inside. Or maybe…
I’ve wondered about a thousand times now if this hospital-like building is some sort of purgatory, where each white room is somebody’s waiting room on their trip to Heaven or Hell. If I was confined to the white room, more corporeal than I am now, I think I might be offended if some random asshole waltzed into my room unannounced.
Of course, that idea implies that I’d be able to perceive a ghostly intruder. None of the orderlies or visitors can see me. What if the other white-room occupants can’t either?
I’m an outlier, I know. Some anomaly.
Nobody else in this building can walk through walls.
But everyone else—everyone in the halls, not the white rooms—from the visitors to the orderlies…they can leave. Leave the hospital.
I can’t. I can’t get out.
The tan woman spends fifteen minutes in her chosen room, and when she reemerges, she’s calmer. No, sadder. Sorrow has washed her anger away, her cell phone tucked into her purse, call ended. Whatever she saw in the room—whoever she visited—didn’t make for a happy occasion.
Because I have some masochism fetish (obviously,) I follow the tan woman toward the exit of the hospital. I’ve thought up a lot of hypotheses about visitors like her over the many days of my indefinite stay in this place. That they’re not real people. Not sentient. That they’re projections from some higher power, created to allow the other white-room residents to absolve themselves of their sins. Lots of other crap like that—I’ve had too much time to think about this place with too little information to go on.
And no matter how much I think, it doesn’t change the facts.
The tan woman approaches the exit in the main hospital lobby with my invisible self a few steps behind her. But whereas she continues on toward the door, I’m forced to stop several meters from freedom. There’s not an exact place, no line in the sand, where I hit the magic barrier. My body always seems to get stuck in a slightly different spot each time.
Regardless, the result is the same. I can’t pass through the exit doors.
Those damn automatic doors, opening and closing, over and over.
They taunt me.
Beyond the doors is a beautiful world...one that I can’t touch. Tall trees line the opposite side of the walkway. Flowers peek up from fresh mulch. Small, furry animals dart around, half-hidden in the underbrush. Spring always seems to be in full bloom outside the hospital. But no matter how long it lasts, I can’t go outside and enjoy it.
The tan woman passes the doors, effortless, and steps out into paradise.
But me, Iccy the ghost—I’m still trapped in purgatory. Apparently forever.
I sigh and turn away from the doors, peering back down the bland white halls.
There’s little sense of time in the building. The clocks wrap around through the same twelve hours, over and over. The calendars move through the same tw
elve pages, over and over. The world beyond the doors, the wondrous world, never changes. Purgatory is monotonous and never-ending—a hell without the flames and pitchforks.
Sometimes, I wish I could just go. Either direction. Up into the clouds. Down into the pit.
Anything would be better than this.
I’ve been here long enough, and I won’t take it anymore!
…I say to no one but myself.
And then I silently trudge back down the hall.
I could go to the cafeteria, where they serve ghastly looking food I’d never touch even if I had an appetite. But there, I often run into these people who I think might be other white-room residents, and they tend act rather…how do I put it? Unhinged? It’s like they aren’t all there at times. I can’t help but wonder if that’s one of the effects of living in this place for a long time.
Will I be like them one day? Mumbling to myself? Ranting about nonsense? Lost in wild imaginings…
Oh, wait.
Joke’s on me.
But still, I’m not like the others. If I was, wouldn’t I be allowed to participate in the building’s activities? Eating? Exercise? Social Hour? Bingo Night?
As it stands, I’m totally ignored in every sense of the word.
I’m pretty sure no one knows I’m here.
That’s me. Iccy the Nobody. Iccy the Wandering Amnesiac. Forgotten in the afterlife.
Conceding defeat yet again, I head back to my own white room. There’s little comfort to be found in the other parts of the building. I went exploring a while ago and found some pretty disconcerting shit. Weird machines with lots of sharp pieces that look as if they’re meant to pierce skin. Cases filled with “medications” that have death listed on their side-effect labels. Suit-wearing doctors in plush desk chairs who claim to the unhinged that the keys to escape are “therapy” and “achieving balance,” whatever the hell that means. And finally, some of the orderlies themselves are pretty scary, barking commands to others like they’re ready to bite your head off.
The Doomsday Chronicles (The Future Chronicles) Page 36