Flynn moved closer. The portal tore open like a wound in the air itself, an old scar that had never truly healed. The rift before him trembled in a dozen shades of blue, and—
A rifle had erupted, and Flynn came to his senses. Jean and Mack had taken cover behind an upturned bench, targeted by a foe too heavily armed to let anyone near. It was then he recognized the man from the strike team—Rebecca’s paramour, come for revenge. A way out was behind Flynn. He need only take it.
“This way, now!” Flynn wouldn’t risk returning to help, should the rift close.
“You better have one hell of an exit plan!” Jean yelled. “I’m talkin’ smoke bombs and jet packs here!”
“No!” Doc screamed. “You will not get away while she—she—!” Shaking with fury, he fired but missed, the bullet passing Flynn and vanishing through the rift behind him.
No longer willing to chance it, Flynn stepped back, nearing the portal. Mack made a break to follow and Jean, after rattling the building enough that their assailant dropped the grenade he was holding, did the same. Doc screamed, incoherent with rage, but was cut short as the grenade burst at his feet and shrapnel tore into his flesh. Flynn watched as Mack fell, struck in the arms and back as he tried to reach the portal, blood seeping from the tears in his shirt. Jean staggered, but hobbled to him. How she managed to carry herself, let alone Mack, Flynn could only wonder. She gritted her teeth as she fell in after him, Mack’s scrawny form only barely slim enough to follow.
Together, they fell away from Earth.
Chapter Four: New Arrivals
Far removed from that ashen mountain on Earth, the descent from Jemina’s heights could not have been more generous. After the difficult ascent the night prior, this path was forgiving, dirt trails marked by clay lanterns whose wicks had burnt to dust long ago. Flynn neared the bottom with only himself for company, and likewise time to reflect on his fortune and friends alike. He harbored no illusions of who he was, or how many had suffered for knowing him. Rebecca Saul was dead. He had twisted out of her a love that—
He discarded the thought quickly, before she could haunt him. What she felt was never something he’d reciprocated, only nurtured. So what of Jean, or Mack? They shouldn’t have come. I told them to leave me alone. I take care of myself.
The morning sun climbed the horizon, illuminating a stone village in the clearing not far ahead and beyond that, only an endless vale in which to lose his way. But Jean’s words had tethered thorns around his untrusting heart. I don’t ditch my friends. She had stood by him when she no longer had reason. Mack too, if only by association.
Flynn stopped to rest on a small boulder, setting aside Rebecca’s rifle, which he had carried all this way. He placed his head in his palm, talking to the wind. “You barely knew me. You had nothing more to gain.”
Superficially, he understood the idea of altruistic intent. Jean had helped him, true, and he had helped her in return. But their arrangement should have ended after Civilis, if not at the apartment in Crescent.
The open field lay ahead. He knew what he should do, as well as what he wanted. For the first time, they were not mutual, and he trembled then to admit, if only to himself, the thing that had once defined his character: I’ve betrayed everyone I’ve ever befriended.
It came like clarity. He got back to his feet and looked up, trying to find the peak of Jemina once more. He had left Jean and Mack to die. There was no more hesitation. He began to ascend, to rescue those he had left behind.
*
When Flynn found his companions, both were pale and still. Jean was on her back, staring at the sky. Her eyes were glazed. Mack was beside her, resting on his side. Flynn hurried over and knelt by Jean, reaching out to check her pulse. Before his hand reached her clammy skin, she gave a startled choke and looked up at him, weary and weak.
“You came back.”
Shamed, Flynn bowed his head. “I got scared. I’m sorry.”
Jean looked away and said nothing. Flynn examined her wounds and found they had been tied with strips of flowered cloth—formerly the lower length of Mack’s aloha shirt. The work served, though Flynn could only speculate which of them had done it. The wounds were less severe than he’d feared; if treated, she had a real chance. The worst of it had hit her arms and legs, with only minor pieces buried in her back.
“Keep still. I need to move you down the mountain, but I can deal with this.”
“Get him first,” she told him, shifting aside and glancing at Mack.
Jean was more useful in a pinch—powerful, dangerous. Mack was unpredictable, a wild card. He saw things. The shrapnel was deeper in his back, his odds much worse. But Mack mattered to her; he was all she had left to care about.
“Okay. Him first.”
*
The village of stone structures Flynn had seen from afar had been abandoned for generations. More than half the homes lay in shambles, but a few remained whose walls had not been breached and whose roofs still held. Picking the largest home, Flynn scavenged quickly, plucking up grasses to lay a soft bed, finding a gourd to fill with water. A river ran alongside the village, and Flynn washed his hands clean of Rebecca Saul’s blood at last. He gave it no thought and took no comfort in it, with so much ahead to attend.
After plucking the shrapnel out of Mack’s back by hand—using his claws to carefully incise when needed—Flynn washed the wounds and stitched them tight with strands of catgut he’d found in one of the homes. It was hard to imagine how Mack had survived losing an eye, an injury that seemed so much worse than this.
Flynn climbed to the peak once more later in the afternoon and closed Jean’s wounds on the mountain sands after rinsing her punctures clean. She made her way down alongside him as far as she could before exhaustion took her. Jean’s muscular body made her heavier than any common woman, and he nearly collapsed more than once while carrying her the rest of the way.
*
Getting Jean into bed left Flynn exhausted. As the sun set, he stumbled outside and wandered in the fading shadows of a pinkish sky before collapsing against a rotting log bench around the central fire pit, finally able to relax. There were none of the comforts of technology that Earth, even in its worst days, now enjoyed. Nor were there signs that they had ever existed here. Flynn was just grateful to be emancipated from a world where his own survival had always been his greatest concern.
“I’m surprised. I really thought you were going to let them die.”
Flynn rose and turned quickly—regretting it as the day’s pain wracked his body all at once. Overcoming it, he remained standing, eye-to-eye with a blonde girl who stood before him. Hers was a face young and fresh, and she wore a skintight catsuit, black and complete with gloves, covering all but her head. It was luxurious, but it was not what made her strange.
Twin horns arced from her forehead and down the sides of her face. Complementing the oddity was the ornate scythe she held lazily in one hand, the butt planted in the ground, the curved blade dangling. It stood a head taller than its owner, too lavish to be a tool for fields. The snath was ivory, the blade broad and wrought with engravings. Flynn imagined how blood would gather like whirlpools in the markings if she slashed someone with it. She held the tool like it had no weight.
“I’ve had a long day, so I’ll be direct: Who are you?”
“Me?” she played coy. “I’m the Reaper.” Pleased at first by Flynn’s bewilderment, she glanced at the hovel sheltering his companions. “I suppose you could call me Scytha, if you care. It’s flimsy, I concede … I don’t really keep a name of my own.”
Flynn looked at the blade she held, then back to her face, wondering if she was trying to be ironic. Distantly, he introduced himself. It was vexing to encounter such a being, yet impossible to deny her after such a trying day.
“And why would a ‘Reaper’ come here?”
“Sechal is a near-empty world, Flynn,” she spoke with familiarity. “When one dies here, it devastates. What am I to think
when two foreign souls just drop in—clinging to their last threads?”
“Drop in?” It came back quickly enough: the fall, his companions crashing on top of him, the wind knocked out of him. “The blue portal.”
Scytha inhaled somewhat dramatically, then spoke, “This may be hard to take in … but you’ve crossed over, to another world.”
“I actually figured that.”
Flynn’s swift response surprised her. It was her turn to be at a loss. “Really?”
“Have you seen where I come from?”
“Ah, well—”
“Knowing that, why wouldn’t this be another world?”
There was another awkward silence. Scytha mumbled, “And I had this all planned out.”
“If you’re here to help,” Flynn spoke plainly, “I’m here to listen.”
Scytha scrunched her face, looking at her scythe, “I’m not so certain about ‘help’ … it’s just, as a rule, mortals aren’t supposed to be left gallivanting across the universe.” She looked Flynn coldly in the eye, and asked, “And you are mortal, unless I’m mistaken?”
A counterpoint. A loophole. Anything.
“I … might have nine lives?” Flynn offered. That was weak.
“Close enough,” Scytha shrugged.
“You’re … really not committed to upholding cosmic law, are you?”
For a Reaper—the Reaper?—Scytha was more amicable than he’d have expected. A noncommittal “eh” was all she proffered.
Seizing opportunity where he saw it, Flynn asked, “What did we pass through?”
“A rift between worlds. It’s like a door, one improperly locked long ago. Any ordinary traveler could never open it, much less sniff it out like you did.” Scytha seemed particularly amused by the next bit. “Near as I can tell, something within you flared up when you got near it.”
“‘Something’ flared?”
“Don’t look at me,” she was instantly defensive. “It’s your body.”
Walking past her, Flynn looked around. The village was dead; he knew that. There was little sign of life for miles and—if what she said was true—he may not find another person at all. To live and die. Here. Alone.
“So what now?” Flynn demanded, worried. “Are we stuck?”
“That depends on you. Do you remember feeling anything? When you got close?”
“Nothing special. Just a … just a pull, a tug. I knew it was there, I’d been there be … fore …” Flynn trailed off. He’d felt it, but hadn’t recognized it until now. Something drew his attention back toward the Jemina peaks and the gateway back to Earth. There was another still, farther and faint.
“Like I thought.” Scytha smiled. “You’re connected.”
“I can sense another,” Flynn confirmed. “But how do we find it?”
“I don’t know where it is, or where it goes. I don’t move through the world as you do. I don’t need to. I am Death—in touch only with life’s end.” There was a gentleness in her tone, the kind that could lay someone to rest forever, if she wished it. “But don’t worry, and don’t be daunted by the distance you see before you. While you may have to cross expanses to find your way out, there is always a way, and they are seldom arbitrary.”
It was a lot to take in. His life—every life he had ever known—was rigidly defined by survival, and to be so suddenly cut loose from all that—
Cut loose.
“Scytha. If you’re the Reaper, will I be traveling alone?”
“That depends on whether they make it through the night,” she told him, walking away from the fire pit, toward the house where Jean and Mack were interred. “I make no promises. I am not the Mystik of Life, only of that Death.” Before sliding the door open, she glanced back at Flynn. “You need your rest. I’ll watch them, for the night.”
“Is that permitted?” Flynn was intrigued.
“Well, I’m already here,” she shrugged. The Reaper stepped inside and closed the door behind her.
While sleeping that night under the stars, Flynn was not afraid for his life or freedom, of treachery or ambush. He feared instead for the lives of others, and found a strange catharsis in it.
*
When morning came, Scytha was gone. Flynn wondered if she’d ever truly been there to begin with. He’d had conversations with people who weren’t there before, but never with someone he’d never met.
Mack snored softly, a basin of drool forming by his face, flat down against the matted grass upon which he rested. Jean slept on one side, facing away from Flynn. So silent was she that he felt compelled to quickly examine her, rolling her onto her back. She was expressionless and his heart quickened, afraid he had taken too long to tend her, that her wounds had become infected in the night.
“Jean?” he whispered as he reached down to examine her leg. “Je—”
“Ow!” She sat suddenly, batting Flynn aside to put pressure on her wounded thigh with both hands. A sharp ache shot through the smaller wound in her shoulder at the movement. “OW!” She snapped at Flynn, “I was sleepin’, asshole!”
Flynn felt a stirring relief. “You’re alright.”
“No shit.” Reflexively, she stretched, only to be stopped short again by the pain in her shoulder. “Ow. Right. That.”
“Yeah,” Flynn nodded. “That’s the second time in the last day that I thought you were dead.”
“I’d thank ya,” she reached back, massaging around her wound, “but I seem to recall ya ditching us too.”
“If the best we are is even, it’s fine. I owed you. You saved me, back in Civilis. You didn’t even know me, and you saved me.”
Amused, Jean glanced at Mack, still sleeping like a dog. “He didn’t know me when he saved my ass.”
Jean was wearing little more than the moth-eaten blanket Flynn had found and draped her in. For all her posturing and intimidating gusto, it wasn’t hard to see what Mack had seen in her. “Yeah, well …”
“Well what?”
“You’re not exactly ugly.”
“You kinda are, Flynn.” Jean got to her feet. She faltered from the pain, but stood as tall as her wounds allowed, looking down on him. “Don’t be gettin’ any funny ideas ‘bout me.”
She hobbled out the door and greeted the forgotten village that had become their makeshift home. “So where the fuck are we?”
“Another world, called Sechal.” Flynn ignored her head-turn of bewilderment. “Near as I know, we’re the only people for miles around. Maybe farther than that.”
Jean had to give it all a moment to sink in before asking, “So we’re really off Earth? No one else, no one’s chasin’ us?” At Flynn’s nod, she grinned. “Best fuckin’ escape plan ever!”
Flynn filled her in on the last day’s events, leaving out the part where Death herself showed up. Even given the rift of blue light that had dumped them in another world, that part felt too farfetched.
“So you can get us off this rock?”
“I think so,” Flynn replied. “I know that’s how this started, anyways. Before Civilis.”
“Ain’t never heard of our kind bein’ able to do something crazy as that,” Jean observed.
“I don’t think it’s a half-human trait,” he confessed, looking back to Jemina’s peak. “Not that it mattered when they saw it, when they turned on me … but I think it’s something else.”
“So what’cha gonna do?” Jean asked. “I mean, way I see it, this place is pretty, but it’s dead. Only wusses play it this safe.”
Flynn had no answer. Disappearing forever remained an option. Still looming was the unfairness of it all; his escape—not just from Civilis—was unprecedented fortune. There was no justice in someone like him gaining liberty when so many others—including people he’d befriended and baited—remained imprisoned, probably for the rest of their lives. He only knew there was no sense in going back. Three people, however capable, would not challenge or change a system so deeply rooted. He looked to the red sun and knew the only way t
o go—to find meaning in his senseless survival—was forward.
*
In the days that followed, Jean and Mack rested. Able to travel neither fast nor far, they were forced to keep within the village’s limits, and they relied entirely on Flynn. Wild fruits and vegetables could be harvested easily enough, but meat proved less viable. Fishing produced sporadic results at best, urging Flynn beyond the village outskirts, hunting for game with Rebecca Saul’s rifle, a weapon alien to these lands. He hadn’t fired the thing in over a year, not since he’d first placed it in her hands. More than a few shots were wasted reacquainting himself with it, more still in the process of remembering how poor his aim was.
The only mercy was that Sechal’s prey had no other predators. They never ran far when spooked and he found after running out of ammo that it was easier to approach the tri-antlered, deer-like creatures and cut them down with his own hands. But he felt like a butcher, killing such pitiful beasts that had no sense that their lives were at stake before they lost them. The feeling was familiar, but accompanied by something new: For the first time, his actions were performed on behalf of others. There was no endgame with Jean or Mack, no payoff he was building toward. Their survival on this day and into the next was the only thing that mattered.
Flynn saw how the newness of this world affected them each differently. Mack displayed an exuberance to see all of what Sechal had to offer—which Jean and Flynn quickly had to quell, lest he pull half his stitches in his enthusiasm. Jean, however, was restless in spite of this new peace. Flynn had known many like her, who had spent so much of their lives on the run. There was no sense of safety for her in standing still; she itched to resume traveling. Flynn had also been a nomad, and was as comfortable on the move as she. But unlike Jean, he had never in his life felt unsafe anywhere and for that, without intending to, he pitied her.
*
Sunlight was in short supply the morning they were to at last set off in search of the way from Sechal, to see what worlds lay beyond. They emerged from the hovel to find storm clouds had moved in, the rising sun’s rays thinner than the falling rain. They didn’t see the storm as an omen of ill fortune, but rather of the older world and all that had held them down being washed away.
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