Something about this feels like a turning point. Or the end of one, maybe.
I’m just not sure I’m the one who made that decision.
“You’re cold,” Jon says, rubbing my arms. “Let me go run you a hot bath, Allie––”
JON SUPPRESSED A shiver, gripping the handle tighter.
Taking a deep breath, he opened the door to her room soundlessly.
His heart already thudded painfully in his chest.
No guards had been stationed outside, which surprised him, but Jon strongly suspected this room had a hair-trigger wire to the construct as a whole, so maybe guards were redundant. Anyway, it wouldn’t be long before someone knew he’d come in here.
Shoving the thought aside, he walked silently over the white shag carpet, one of the few wall-to-wall carpets in the whole house.
This had been the previous owner’s master bedroom.
Apparently, whoever owned the house didn’t like waking up to cold feet. They’d fitted the whole room out in a more modern style than the rest of the house, especially the bathroom, which had heated tiles and a shower equipped with at least six jet faucets, along with a sauna and bath.
Jon walked barefoot, his eyes aimed at the four-poster bed.
Unlike the four-poster in Jon’s room, the posts on this bed were relatively short, too short to house a canopy. The bed itself looked modern, and not only in size, which had to be bigger than anything made during the Victorian era. The shelves built into the wall behind the headboard only strengthened that impression. Jon saw dead-metal electronics housed there, including for VR hookups and what might have been controls for the bed itself.
The comforter looked like real down though, and shone the same creamy white as the carpet. Drapes hung down on either side of open, glass, balcony doors––jade green in color, which struck Jon as an interesting coincidence until he remembered that Revik had been the one to stake this room out as hers.
Well… theirs, he supposed.
It occurred to him, he’d never bothered to ask anyone where Revik actually slept.
He knew some of the seers took turns watching over him, for a couple of reasons. Balidor told him Cass and Shadow attacked him through the construct every few nights; on every occasion, it happened while Revik was asleep and dreaming.
Those attacks had been severe enough that Balidor and some of the others forced Revik awake a few times, pulling him out of the Barrier so they could disentangle his light from the invading aleimi.
Jon hadn’t asked for details, but he got the impression the content of those attacks disturbed everyone involved, and not only because Shadow could apparently penetrate their Adhipan-designed construct at will.
Remembering the night before, that odd, empty look in Revik’s eyes when he showed up at his door, Jon frowned, slowing his approach to Allie’s bed.
He didn’t stop, though.
Once he reached the left side of the thick mattress, he forced himself to look at her. As he did, it hit him how rarely he’d been in here since they found her comatose.
He didn’t know what he expected to find, but the simplicity of her lying there bewildered him, forcing him to stop and look at her, if only for a few breaths.
She looked asleep.
The sight didn’t fill him with relief, but it managed to drain some of the tension from his limbs. Somehow, without knowing what he’d expected exactly, he’d expected something worse. To see her emaciated, maybe. A skeleton lying there, eyes sunk in her head––or maybe the opposite, bloated and flabby-looking, scabs on her face, like junkies Jon had seen.
Allie looked pretty much exactly as he remembered her, though.
It was strange, standing there, watching her chest move up and down, her eyes closed on that smooth face, dark hair framing her cheekbones and hanging down past her shoulders on the white comforter and even whiter pillows.
She’d lost weight, sure, but not that much.
He knew some of the seers took care of her body. They watched over her as if she were a holy relic, bathing her, turning her frequently to prevent bed sores, using electrodes to stimulate her muscles, feeding her and wiping her face and feet.
That is, when Revik didn’t do those things himself.
Even as Jon formed the thought…
…an exhale broke the silence, a soft shift of clothing and limbs.
Jon froze, heart hammering in his chest.
Turning his head, breath still held in his lungs, he focused on the shape curled up in a squat lounge chair parked on the opposite side of the bed. Since the chair’s back was turned towards the door, and stretched up high enough to obscure the body resting on its green velvet seat, Jon hadn’t seen him until now.
He stared at Revik’s face.
He watched it grow taut in sleep as the male seer shifted again, seemingly trying to make himself more comfortable in the confining chair.
Revik had pulled the dark-green lounger as close to the bed as it would go.
Even now, one of the Elaerian’s pale arms hung over the comforter, following his last rearrangement of limbs. It struck Jon that he would have seen Revik from the door, if the male seer adjusted himself even two minutes sooner.
He wondered if he would have dared enter the room at all, if he had.
Another, duller pain started in his chest.
Seeing Revik so near to where he stood––even restless, easy-to-wake Revik, who probably still wanted to beat the hell out of him––wasn’t enough to dissuade Jon from what he’d come here to do.
He hesitated only a moment more, and that time, it was purely logistical.
For those few seconds, he weighed sitting on the floor, where Revik wouldn’t see him if he opened his eyes, versus on the bed, where Jon could actually touch her. After going back and forth in his mind, he carefully––and achingly slowly––lowered his weight to the mattress, letting himself sink so gradually, he didn’t shake the bed at all.
He ended up less than a foot from her.
Reaching out in the dim light, he picked up one of her hands, lifting it gingerly from where it rested on top of the white comforter. Her fingers felt cold to him, even after he wrapped both of his hands around them.
He fought to warm her skin, even as tears rose, wanting to choke him.
But he hadn’t come here for that.
Closing his eyes, Jon let his light slide back into the Barrier.
He did it without electrodes, without jump chairs, without Revik… without anything but himself.
He knew what he was doing might get him killed.
He didn’t care. Death hadn’t scared him for a long time now.
Death wasn’t the worst thing, not by a long stretch.
10
HAUNTED
LIKE THE JUMP with Revik earlier, Jon doesn’t feel any sense of motion or travel.
He simply finds himself in a new place.
Unlike earlier that day, this place is dark.
Not just dark––it’s utterly devoid of light.
It makes him sick. Really fucking sick, nearly instantaneously. He wants to leave. He’s never wanted to leave any place so badly in his life. His mind can’t attach anything to that wanting to leave, not even images.
At first, he sees nothing––nothing but that void-like darkness.
Fear overcomes him. Revulsion follows and that’s worse; his nose fills, his mouth, his lungs. He tastes rot, blood, smoke, sickness, cooked flesh, burnt hair, feces, urine… death.
The revulsion is instinctive, animal-like, triggering a base form of self-preservation. It feels like being thrown in a septic tank and bathed in every imaginable foulness, forced to drink it, breathe it in, let it cover his skin and face. Every atom of his being, every particle of his aleimi wants to leave. His light screams at him to leave, to get out before he’s lost forever.
Something quieter stops him, keeps him where he is.
He. Will. Not. Leave.
The voice speaks from a deeper,
less rational part of himself––or maybe a more rational part. He can’t attach any logic to its reasons, only a feeling, but whatever that feeling is, he recognizes the truth behind it. He will stay. He must stay.
He feels that, from some part of him that needs no other reason.
He will find some way to stay, to bear it.
Certainty lives in him as he repeats the thought, incongruous with the fear, the nausea, the desire to flee. How he stays, how he manages to be here at all without losing his mind, without retching or crying, he does not know. He would rather be dead, really dead, than be lost in this place. Somehow, it is that thought that stabilizes him.
He will not get lost here.
He came for Allie.
The world around him slips incrementally, slowly into focus.
Jon’s mind creates a landscape, trying to understand, to put what he feels in a context, a set of references his conscious mind can follow. Everything around him feels like death, but his mind fights to sort through it, to make sense of where it finds itself.
Shapes gradually emerge.
Those shapes sharpen as the light rises.
At first they mean nothing to him. Blurred, dark and light objects, exuding that light-sucking death, whispering at him from the dark, pulling at him with thick cables. After what feels like an endless stretch of time, those shapes change, become familiar.
He recognizes the main road in Seertown.
He can’t see all of it, or even most of it. Too much smoke hangs in the air to make sense of anything more than a dozen feet in any direction. He can’t see the mountains, the snow-covered peaks of the Himalayas, the dense trees, ferns and rock formations he remembers from that high-up perch. There are no people, no living plants, no birds.
The trees nearest to where Jon stands are blackened sticks, still smoking from some recent fire. Surrounded by low-lying, yellow-brown mist, they loom over him menacingly.
He walks up the hill.
Vash’s compound grows visible, covered in black smoke.
Half a wall is all that remains of the largest residence building that once ringed Vash’s monastery. The crumbling brick stands on ground blackened by fire and ash. The earth is ripped up, dotted with holes filled with dank water, bones and rotting bodies where Jon once remembers shrubs and grass. Stone benches are gray or black instead of white, covered in soot and turned over, legs broken or smashed to powder.
Litter covers the grounds.
Plastic bottles, syringes, used condoms, oil drums that burn, sending up black smoke, candy wrappers, cigarette butts, used batteries, smashed tech and sight-restraint collars, cans half-filled with rotten food swarming with ants, maggots. Dead animals with burnt hair and flesh are mixed in with dirty diapers filled with feces, rotting piles of eggs, vegetables, meat…
He fights not to look at any of it, to smell any of it.
He can’t get away from it. It’s all around him. He can’t force the cloying sickness away from him; he chokes on it, swims through the smoke-clotted air. He doesn’t have to breathe here, but he can’t not breathe it in; he can’t extricate himself.
He. Will. Not. Leave.
The thought stabilizes him, however briefly.
The sky hangs low and dark, as different from the sky in that life-teeming paradise of white sand and golden ocean as any he could possibly imagine. Here, he is lost inside billowing smoke. He feels the unnerving touch of sticky, tangled threads, like spiderwebs, or threads of mucus.
Like all Barrier spaces, when he focuses his attention on something, it pulls up like a zoom lens jammed back, growing more vivid, close with excruciating detail. Unlike when he stood on those crystal shores, where everything filled him with wonder, the detail here brings revulsion, horror, a desire to flee.
It’s like stepping barefoot in pile after pile of shit and decaying flesh.
He coughs on the smoke, forcing his legs forward along the twisting path.
Dark threads try to tempt his attention, using fear, hunger, sexual pulls that unsettle him. His fear causes him to stare, like prey caught in a predator’s gaze. He fights to look away, but the threads continue to tug, to wind their way deeper into his light.
He doesn’t stop moving.
He walks slowly up to the House on the Hill.
Here, the building is haunted, an inside-out version of the ancient, sacred structure built by priests, sages and engineers among the First Race. Jon knows this version isn’t real, even as the air fights to throttle and bend his light, to make it compatible with––to make it resonate with––everything inside this place.
He fights his way up the weed-choked path, gritting his teeth.
He. Will. Not. Leave.
Despair hits. He is alone here––so alone.
At the same time, this isn’t about being alone, not really. It’s about being abandoned, left to die in the dark. It’s about being unloved, powerless, crushed under the heel of something sick and hateful that wants only to see every spark of light and love extinguished.
It wants him to forget the light existed––until he can’t tell the difference.
It wants him to think he belongs here.
Allie was here, he realizes.
…is here.
Allie is here.
The thought doesn’t make him angry. It fills him with horror. Grief, disbelief, terror, a crushing guilt overwhelm him. Allie can’t be here. This can’t be where he’s left her.
It fucking can’t be.
Allie! He screams her name. ALLIE! ALLIE! Where are you?
Some part of him refuses to believe it. He can’t wrap his head around the certainty that she is here. He is in the wrong place. How could the Ancestors, how could Revik, Vash, Tarsi or Wreg, let Allie be in a place like this?
How could their parents?
ALLIE! he screams up at the monolithic gray walls. ALLIE! WHERE ARE YOU?
Black and gray streaks ride up the white stone. The smell is worse here, causing him to stumble, one hand clamped over his nose and mouth. He closes his Barrier eyes, trying to block it out. They sting from smoke. He slaps and wipes off that tangle of threads he feels touching every inch of his bare skin. His feet crunch on bird corpses and he yells out in horror, hearing the snap of small bones under his bare feet.
He forces himself to keep going, to keep moving towards the mansion on the hill.
The gardens are gone.
It looks like someone used a flame-thrower here, charring the hillside, leaving nothing but blackened bones. Jon sees a half-eaten, dead dog rotting next to the smoking trunk of a tree. Vultures stand over it without moving, staring at Jon with dead-looking eyes, stirring their bloody feet restlessly.
ALLIE! Jon screams up at the house. ALLIE! ANSWER ME!
He still doesn’t understand how she could be here, but he knows she is, even as his mind fights the knowing. He tries not to think about what she might look like here.
Unlike the white sand beach, the golden ocean, that cobalt blue sky, water teeming with fish and brightly plumed birds––this dead version of Vash’s home is the opposite of who Allie is.
Even as he thinks it, it hits him how true it is.
He’s so used to her, he takes her for granted, but she… she is light. She is light, like nothing and no one he’s ever known. He doesn’t understand it, not with his mind, but he feels it.
She is light.
Not like Vash was light, with his warm heart and his constant laughing.
Allie’s light is different. Slower-burning, distant, yet strangely immediate, too. Something about that light is quiet, less obvious than Vash’s.
She lives in it quietly, too––inside a golden-white sun.
Her and Vash, they fit together, resonate together, just as she resonates with Revik. Just as all of them are different, they fit together; they bring different things to the world.
But he knows Allie’s light best of all.
The thought brings tears to his eyes, a deeper und
erstanding of what he’s lost.
Allie’s light invaded every corner, lit up things that needed to be seen, whether people wanted to see them or not. There was fire there, in all that quiet––more fire than Jon ever let himself see, more fire than he’d felt in anyone, even Revik.
Every decision made. Every turned corner. She hadn’t been handed this thing, like being born into wealth, or being gifted with inordinate brains or beauty.
She was made. Built. Honed over time.
Beaten and reheated and beaten again.
As he thinks it, he remembers the clarity of that golden ocean. It matches the clarity he knows from her. That place isn’t simply “her” place. It isn’t only a refuge, a place of healing where Allie goes to lick her wounds.
The golden ocean is her.
It reflects some aspect of Allie herself.
He remembers staring down at her in that crib, for the very first time.
He remembers––
Blinded by his own connection to her, he gasps, feeling for Revik, feeling so much for the other man, understanding even more why Revik came to him that night. They share this thing, in some, strange way. They share some part of their connection to her.
For the first time in his life, Jon shares that with someone else.
The thought makes him sick with worry. Dread rises in him, a wash of terror that he may have lost her right when he finally understands, right when they need her most. And they do need her. He sees that now, as well. He sees it so clearly––even if he still doesn’t fully understand why, or what it means, or what she’s supposed to do.
He has to find her so he can tell her.
ALLIE! He yells her name. He chokes on the foul smell of the fog and the sticky heat that fills his lungs. ALLLIE! GODS, ALLIE. I’M SORRY… I’M SO SORRY! PLEASE! TELL ME WHERE YOU ARE, PLEASE!
He is running out of time.
They all are.
ALLIE! he screams. PLEASE, ALLIE! PLEASE!
It’s why Shadow sent her here.
He wants her out of the fight. He took her out of the fight.
ALLIE, PLEASE! WHERE ARE YOU?
He reaches the door that leads inside the House on the Hill.
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