by TylerRose.
“Their immortality is tied to you,” she heard her Gramma Addie say.
“The Apogee is not the boss of me. He is the boss of the pentagon around me,” she said. “The pentagon serves me, not the other way around.”
She stood, picked up the stack, and teleported herself and all her possessions in the room up to the attic suite. She looked at the inside of the only door. It stood at the top of a steep stairway that creaked. She would hear them coming. Still, she psionically installed a bar lock across it. They would have to teleport into the room, which she would feel.
She spent half an hour rearranging the room to her preferences. Bed moved away from the window. Chairs and table near the window. Stereo against the long wall, her little rose space rug brought to her from wherever it had been. She had the vidpad, but no way to convert her new music onto it.
[Julian, I have a question.]
[Yes?]
[Can you come get my new music and put it on the vidpad for me?] she asked.
[I could omit this information just to come see you; but I won’t. Open the vidpad to the music player. Place a disc on the screen and hit the Import link. The machine will scan the disc and convert it for you.]
[Thank you.]
[Hold on. There’s something more. Jerome contacted me some time ago. Someone named Landra Ahr sent me the message. He said he deeply regrets your last two meetings.]
She met him with silence, not sure what to think or say.
[He said if you will come to see him again, he will be kinder.]
[When was this?]
[About two years ago. I couldn’t find you.]
[Thank you. I’m in Montana, in Thomas’ hunting lodge. He’s here with three other guys.]
[You’re allowing him to be Apogee?] he asked.
[I am alone in the attic suite. They are below. They can guard a stairway. I’m no longer clouded. I’m not confused. I simply have not decided when to go and exactly how to do things. I’m giving myself time to see if there really is no good future here] she said.
[Understood. I miss you, Tyler. Oh, you should know. Pisod is Emperor of Voran. If you do go back and change things, you may change that also.]
She made no reply, ending the contact. Sitting with her journals, she started converting all the new music while writing. Each disc took about a minute to convert. When she was done with both tasks, she plugged it into the Audio Input jack of the stereo so she could have an appropriate volume. She put the machine on random and let it go. She would sing whatever the universe, whatever The Mother, told her to. She would listen to what The Mother had to tell her.
Heart of Stone, Broken Wings, As the World Falls Down, Crashed, Rooms on Fire, Outlaw Blues (electric version), Father Figure, Holding Out for a Hero, Angry, I’ll be Your Shelter, If you Think You Know How to Love me, Enemy, Love is a Stranger, My Kinda Lover, I Think, Renegade, The Chain, Phobics of Tragedy, Kingdom Key, Promises in the Dark, Rhiannon, One Thing Leads to Another, Let’s Stay Together, Talk to Me, I would Die 4 U, Take me Back Then, Hard Day, Nightbird, At This Time, Dreams, The Real, Flight Response, Le Bel Age, River Of Love, Only You, What I Want, Shadows of the Night, Strawberry Wine, Don’t Walk Away, Rise Pt 2, Purgatory, Sanctuary, There and Back Again, If Anyone Falls, Weapon and the Wound, Red Vision, Not the Same, Ray of Light, True Love, Sorry.
She stopped the machine. Fifty songs. She had to sit and rest, needed to smoke a bowl and think. The Mother had one message. Everything screamed Jerome.
She looked to the bedside clock. Two minutes after nine in the evening. Mexico would be an hour or two behind? The sun might still be setting. She repacked the pipe and teleported to the gate of the compound.
Ten minutes standing outside and he had not come out. She had been searching the compound for familiar energies. His energy was there, but faint. He still lived here but was not currently on the property. L’Roc-ai was not there at all. Not even old energy.
She turned her back to the gate and slid down to sit on the ground and wait for him. A flying squirrel came down in the last rays of sunlight, checking her out. He climbed up her leg, to her knee, and let her pet him.
She heard a familiar rumble coming up the mountain. In a moment, headlights turned the last curve to shine on her. The Torino. He was alone. The car shut off, lights turned off. He sat there a moment deciding what to do, what to say, regretting things said and done before. The squirrel leapt away and ran to the nearest tree. Her eyes followed it, ears hearing the car door open and close. She remained in place, let him do the work this time.
“Hey there, beautiful.”
“Hey,” she replied.
“I didn’t think you got my message,” he said, approaching, stopping a few feet back.
“I didn’t until a few hours ago. I was out of reach.”
Night sounds in the dark but she saw him well enough and he saw her well enough in the starlight. The sky was so bright here, but the moon was only showing a sliver. She looked up, saw the Big Dipper. Saw the galaxy she really had sprung from.
“I’m sorry, Ty. I should not have treated you like that,” he finally said. “I was wrong. I should have let you take us off planet. Touch died giving birth and the baby died too because her stasis leukemia had come back and passed to the baby. She lived a half a day.”
“I’m so sorry,” she said with all sincerity.
He reached a hand down to her. She took it and pulled herself up. His arms slid around her as she stepped into him, so tight around her in the most comfortable hug she’d known all her life. The smell of him. The feel of his chi even without the crystal energy triggered something in her. She let it go and cried. He did not try to stop her, his hand palming the back of her head as he held her. He shed a few of his own tears.
When she stopped, he gave her his handkerchief to wipe eyes and blow her nose.
“Come on. It’s a quarter mile to the house,” he said, going to the driver’s side and opening the door. “Get in. Scoot over.”
She sat and pulled herself backwards to the middle of the large bench seat. He got in, closed the door, restarted the engine, and lifted his arm for her to move up against him for the short drive. The gate opened. He drove one handed along the dirt road to the house, pulled into a covered entry. Leaving the car at the front door, he took her by the hand inside, past several pairs of wondering eyes. No one asked. He did not explain or introduce her.
“I need a shower,” she said. “I didn’t realize it would be so warm here in the mountain. Do you mind?”
“Yes, I do,” he told her, hands already pulling her shirt over her head.
“But—“
“But nothing, woman. That one night we had together? You hadn’t showered since that morning. You were sweat and old soap and you. Your own scent has been so completely stuck in my nose ever since that it’s driving me absolutely fucking insane.”
He picked her up around the middle to walk the few feet to his bed and tossed her onto her back. Pants and shoes all but ripped off her, he forced her legs open to get his mouth into the slick musk at the top of her thighs. His groaning, satisfied growl, that of a starving man finally presented with a life-saving steak, hit her ears and soul simultaneously.
This was an assault performed with the tongue, unceasing until she was as blind in her need as she’d ever been. When he couldn’t make her cum any harder, he opened his pants and thrust in hard and deep with one merciless buck of his hips. Her gut caught in a clenching grip she recognized. She’d felt it their first night together. Thomas had tried to make her feelt it too but he had failed.
Time faded away. They drowned in their mutual need and passion, in no hurry for it to end. When at last they lay together to rest, she felt their hearts pounding in time. Even as they slowed, they maintained the same speed and beat.
“It’s you,” she whispered.
“What is?” he asked, having heard her perfectly well with his genetically enhanced ears.
“I was told it was the
crystal energy that I bonded with. That it didn’t matter who the person was. That’s wrong. It’s completely the person. Nails never had the crystal energy and I bonded with him so strong it felt like I was dying when he did. You don’t have the energy anymore but here we are. It’s not the crystal energy at all. It’s you. We can get a crystal from anywhere. Voran’s is sticking out of the ground ready to use, but it hurts me.”
“Who has what was taken from me? Can we take it back?” he asked.
“Can? Yes. Should is another matter. Will you let me take you somewhere?”
“Where?” he asked.
“A place of peace that I created. I need help finishing it, getting it ready to use.”
“Okay.”
The hacienda became a grassy slope on a warm, sunny day. They stood at the top of the slope and she looked up to the granite mountain face so much like the temple on Ercoli. She wondered if she copied it perfectly. She’d only been in a room or two.
Rather than walk up the inside, she teleported them to the top plateau of the mountain. Grass covered the flat space sine sixty feet wide that led up a hill to the summit. The two sides were sheer drop-offs. The front was a huge open-maw cave some twelve feet tall inside. The far left wall was also open, rock on the other side making a natural balcony wall.
“If you were to turn this into a fortress for me, what would you do to it?” she asked.
“Well, first, put a wall here,” he pointed to the drop-off on the left outside the cave. “At least three feet tall. Nice and wide for stability.”
A wall there was, wide enough to stand on, which he did at once to look down that steep drop. The wall shored up the entire drop, preventing anyone from easily climbing up.
“The other side also,” he pointed, and she put one there.
He went back into the cave, saw a stairway directly down.
“Oh, there needs to be a wall with a door to separate the open cave from the access stairwell. Make this over here into quarters for the highest ranking guards or guards on duty. Social and duty area out here, row of rooms, communal shower and toilet,” he gestured. “Put in another door to access the garden area separately.”
She did all those things, then followed him down a level to the large chamber beneath her cave.
“Leave this section open for socializing and working out. Back there, several corridors of rooms for about fifty men. Two to a room, I guess? But bunks can be put in to make four to a room.”
Corridors of rooms appeared exactly as he saw them in his mind.
They went down one more level. The stairs opened to a small landing with a single door. Through it was an airlock type entry. Beyond was a lovely open space with a pool in the middle. Grassy yard with flowers. Down the left and right were doors one after the other. A dozen or so in total.
“Men need women for companionship,” he said. “This looks like a private place to take time off from duty. This is fine as it is,” he said, and turned around to leave it.
Down they went, finding quarters and social rooms, the kitchen, a square room for teaching fighting. He stopped in a stairwell, stopped her.
“How is this going to happen?” he asked. “How do we end up here?”
“Well, we are here,” she pointed out. “The problem is that I have no one else I trust to be here with us. Only you. I don’t know who to ask. The one who has your crystal energy is someone I cannot have here in the capacity he would need to be. He’s a brother figure, a friend, not a lover. I cannot ask him to give up the energy. That wouldn’t be fair to him. We can’t just take it. That would be wrong. I have to figure out how to get us here with the number of men you want. Fifty guards? That’s a lot. Plus the men to run the place, right?” She shook her head, not seeing how that could be accomplished.
“Okay, we’ll figure it out later. Take us back to the top.”
In a blink they were in the big cave.
“I didn’t see any food in the place,” he said. “I’m starving.”
Bowls and platters of bread, fruits and cheeses appeared on a low table with firm bench-like pillows. Pitcher of water, his favorite salami, knives for cutting, forks for piercing and spearing. He ate with gusto while she nibbled.
“If we cannot start from here and build our team of allies, what is the other option?” he asked, unafraid to know the hard truths.
“I leave this body and travel back in time to an appropriate place. I inhabit a fetus and grow up all over again, this time with purpose.”
“Time travel? Seriously? You can do that?” he questioned.
“I can now, yes. I couldn’t before.”
“Why not just go in the body you have?”
“Because it has too much Earth human DNA. I need it to be more Sistarian so I have a better chance of evolving properly. The human DNA holds me back.”
“I see. So you go back. You have a body you grow up in. Then what?”
“I insert myself into the right place and time. Sometime after our one night together but before Adamantine arrives. We kick his ass. If I accomplish all that, the future will be wide open to do what I want.”
“There’s only one thing wrong with that statement,” he said.
“What?”
“Not ‘if I accomplish’ but ‘if we accomplish’ all that. Find a way to get under my skin again and I’ll be there to the end, babe.”
“But how?” she asked, putting down a half-eaten piece of apple.
“I have no doubt you will figure out something,” he smiled. “I need a shower. Where can you put one?”
“In the outer corridor. It’s already there for the men who will eventually be here. But there’s no water to it yet.”
“I like this setting better anyway,” he said, looking out over the plateau. “Make a covered arbor area to protect from rain. Then a grotto-like area with a spring fed pool waist deep.”
Going out to look over the space, she turned here and there to see what he did. She created both features exactly how he saw them in his mind, with shrubbery and leafy vines for screens, and stepped down into the water. He joined her, took her into his arms so naturally it was like they’d always been together. In this moment, the last ten years hadn’t happened.
She didn’t feel anger when she was alone with him. Her guard hadn’t gone up once. She wasn’t concerned. She didn’t need to constantly plot and think and think and think. The rest of the universe didn’t matter while they were alone.
“Can you make that area over there paved with slabs of stone? Outside the cave’s mouth? Big enough to have guys gathered for…whatever?”
She turned and leaned against the side of the pool and saw into his mind what he wanted. She created it where he wanted it and he pulled her backwards against him. His hands slipped around to grasp her breasts, thumbs strumming over her nipples.
“It is so sexy when you make stuff like that,” he said, and bent her over the side of the pool to have a good ass fuck.
A minute after he finished, he was out of the water and walking into the cave. She followed him, if a bit slower, compelled to be within his aura.
“Now…we need a bed. A really big one,” he said. “Over there.”
She created a king and a half with two extra feet on the length.
“Very nice. A pentagon of men, you said?”
She nodded.
“One at the top point and then four to take daily care of you, you think?” he asked.
“Probably, but I won’t know for sure until we get there.”
“Then I want a short post at each corner, with small platform on top for sitting on.”
She made what he saw.
He held out a hand to her, grinning in that way she could not refuse. “Now let’s try it out.”
With the sunrise, she woke to see him working out on the stone pad outside. Chi Kung forms that Chen had taught her.
“I been thinking,” he said when she came out to join him in a mirroring exercise. “If you’re going to
be raised up all over again from babyhood, who will do the raising and be your mother and father?”
“I have had a mother. That was nothing but bad. Sifu Chen will raise me. I’ve already asked him. I stayed in his new Kwoon on the East Side. I’m not as dedicated to practice as you; but I have skills.”
“Show me,” he said, and darted out a hand in mild attack.
She caught him totally off guard and he found himself landing hard on his hip on the unforgiving stone.
“Okay, moving to the grass,” he grunted, getting up.
“How about outside the mountain?” she suggested, and ported them down to the lawn out front.
Naked as they were, they sparred and made love for hours. For days. His genetic endurance was still there. His speed and strength matched the endurance of the young goddess still discovering herself.
“I may be able to tell Landra Ahr something before I go to Earth. What should I tell him?” she asked.
“To not be so conservative in dishing out the genetic alterations. Gable might be alive if he’d been a bit faster. I might not have had to engage a second time if mine had been more. He insisted on being safe and conservative,” Jerome said.
“If you could tell yourself something, what would it be?”
“I could fill a book with that!” he laughed.
She produced an empty journal and a pen. “Then do.”
“Isn’t that against some rule or something?”
“Whose rule where?” she countered.
“Take us back up to bed.”
She did, and he put her to sleep. While she rested, he wrote a few things to himself, starting with the same words he’d always used when addressing himself.
Yo, stupid. You’re about to fuck things up bigtime, so pay attention.
“Could you be here a thousand years if needs be?” came her voice some hours later.
He went to her, lay close to kiss.
“Babe, I would be anywhere with you for a thousand years. I’m sorry I ruined our opportunity. If we can’t make it work on this end, then I agree. You have to go back. If you’re going to grow up again, with Chen as father, you need a secluded place. This is good. Make a village to live in. Bring people to get it ready, to be established and prepared for you.”