by Harn, Darby
I sink back to the floor, terrified. Not for myself, but Valene. Christ. Valene. I find my leather jacket under a fallen mattress and zip it up tight. I rush out of the basement. Maybe she’s not gone to the station yet. Outside, I look up, as I always do. Across the river, the tower holds against the dark. Wasn’t it morning? Daylight. I swear I saw daylight on the other side of the door. My skin ripples as I swipe at my PEAL. It’s gone. Burned away. I have no way of getting hold of anybody. Who do I call? What would I say? Upstairs, I search for the bike. Snow on the ground. Why is there snow? It was spring.
The bike’s gone. Someone took it. Fuck’s sake. I start walking. Where, I don’t know. I drift through the cold dark, confused as the birds trailing me. They swarm me, bulleting around me insane and some of them crash right into me.
“Go away,” I say, shooing them away and lighting comes out of my hand. Birds vanish in light. They don’t burn or smoke but disappear and barbs splinter through the palm of my hand. Feathers sprout from my fingers and this surge goes through me. This impulse, to run, to flap and to fly and Jesus.
Jesus Christ.
More birds flock towards me. Light flickers in my hands like a growing flame. I clench my fists. No. Not this. I won’t be this. Go away, birds. Shoo. Stay away, for God’s sake.
Amaranth crackles between my fingers. This weight builds in my chest. My clothes constrict around me, like a blood pressure gauge and then puff out, wanting to explode. All the zippers on my jacket stand on end, and then flatten against the leather. I squeeze, pumped up and relaxed, as the hunger of the Myriad blunts against my disgust. My will. I can control this.
I’m in control.
The tightness fades. Light recedes. Birds keep their distance. Inexplicable snow piles in the streets unplowed, but I’ve got to get on. I’ve got to get some grip on this.
But where? Where do I go?
Abi opens her apartment door, in a Freddie Mercury shirt too big on her. Her mouth hangs open. “Kit…”
I try to smile without triggering another ripple in my face. “Abi… did we go for that drink?”
“What?”
“Did we get smashed or something?”
She shakes her head. “No. Why? WTF, dude.”
“Am I dreaming? Is this a dream?”
“Well, I’ve got a few that start like this. Let me pinch you and see if you’re real – ”
I jump back. “Don’t.”
“What’s wrong?”
I hug my arms around me tight, holding the zippers of my jacket like leashes. “I should go. I’m sorry to wake you.”
“Kit, where have you been? I thought you were dead.”
“Dead?”
“It’s been six months.”
Her words land on me like the rocks protesters threw outside the front gate. “You’re not funny. Don’t be funny.”
Abi tugs on the belt hanging from the end of my jacket. “I was so scared. Like, you don’t know.”
“I don’t,” I say. “I don’t know what happened.”
“Get in here.”
She pulls me inside. That pressure pops in my chest, and I lurch forward after her. Her apartment hums with electricity. Light bulbs tug on me like magnets. Wires behind drywall. Ephemeral energy coursing through Abi’s body, a swarm of fireflies underneath that shirt and I stuff my hands in my pockets. Think of something else. Anything else.
“Nice apartment,” I say.
She laughs kind of funny. “Um. Ok.”
It’s not exactly what I expected. What did I expect; something bright. Colorful. Active, like Abi. Outside of a milk crate of vinyl records next to a player, and a small shelf of books – Peter Pan. The Waste Land. Some assorted Russian fairy tales. – there’s little of the color I imagined. The life. I don’t know. Part of me expected her to live inside a thrift store, full of bright, unlikely things from the 70s and 80s. That’s Abi to me. Bright. Unlikely. There’s next to nothing at all here, except food, which Abi piles on the kitchen counter.
I keep my hands holstered as I drift through the kitchen. “What do you mean, Abi? Six months?”
Abi sets out a tub of cookie dough batter. “You went missing, dude. You’ve been missing.”
“What?”
“Piller thought you like jumped off the bridge or something after Valene went up to the space station. Maybe I did, too. I don’t know. We had like a thing for you at the Pav. Even Dibinksy teared up. That might have been the booze.”
Whatever this is inside my chest solidifies for a brief second, and all this light in me, all this wonder, flames out of existence. “Wait – Valene is on the space station?”
“Did you hear the part where I said we poured one out for you? We looked for you, everywhere. I looked for you.” Her voice breaks a little. “Kit… where the hell have you been?”
“I was in the garage. I was working. It was light. It was morning. I heard the birds. You texted me.” I touch my hand again, forgetting for a second the PEAL is gone, but then it’s there. Light outlines through my skin, into the elastic shape of the device and the screen unfurls beneath my finger.
What the hell.
How did I do that? How is this not a dream? Texts balloon on the PEAL. Over a thousand notifications from Abi alone.
“Did you really text me the entire unabridged Shakespeare?”
Her face contorts in this mock kind of cringe. “I quit when I got to Titus Andronicus. I figured I was sending you the wrong kind of message, with the baking people in pies and stuff.”
Each of the texts has a date and time. With each one, the future went unanswered, and without notice from me.
“This can’t be…”
Abi scoops some cookie dough into a spoon. “How long do you think it’s been?”
“I left the gala… I left you, and I went…” I clutch the zipper of my jacket. “I was on another planet. Destos.”
She talks through a mouthful of cookie dough. “Destos?”
“Something is wrong…”
“No shit.”
“I messed up, Abi. I think I really messed up.”
She squints. “What do you have under your jacket?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean you don’t know?”
I pull so hard on the zipper I think the bloody thing is going to come off. “Abi… I’m in trouble.”
“It’s ok. Just tell me what happened. We’ll figure it out.”
The pressure always throbbing in my temples amplifies. I touch my head, afraid of what I’ll set off doing so. My fingers shake as I straighten a curl of my hair and let it go. The strand of hair coils into wispy stream of chromatic light that evaporates in the air of the apartment between me and Abi.
The spoon thuds against the floor. “What the fuck?”
I unzip the jacket. “Don’t freak out, ok?”
“Ok – ”
Snake-like filaments of energy coil out from the storm in my heart. All the electricity in the apartment pulls on me. All the power. The filaments depress against the border of my skin, my entire body a plasma globe and then lunge, through, into the television. The wall. The power lines connecting the apartment building to the power plant down the river. Filaments lash out at every electrical source and the bathroom door slams shut behind Abi. Tendrils lash after her and I fall on them, like grenades. I fight this want, this need but it’s too strong.
Bulbs explode, their soft, warm glow replaced by a chaotic, caliginous red. Power surges through me. Pressure. A vicious tug pulls me toward the bathroom. Snakes of energy slither out of me. Abi screams. Wood burns. The brass handle deforms.
I don’t.
I don’t bend. I don’t break. I don’t fear. I don’t want. This isn’t me, seething for the energy bristling within Abi, her heart magnetic behind the door, ba-dumm, ba-dumm, ba-dumm. I put all of my focus into suppressing these tendrils. This want. None of this connects. None of this fires. I don’t work like this. This doesn’t work. All the
energy in the apartment, the city, the world, it’s there but I can’t reach it. I can’t connect to it and neither can the alien. Tough fucking luck.
The crackling filaments withdraw back into my skin, tangling together, writhing in blindness. A thunderstorm pulses beneath my jacket. I yank up the zipper and hold it tight.
“Abi…”
“Take whatever you want,” Abi says from the bathroom. “But not the vinyl, though. Or the cookies. Don’t kill me, dude.”
“Abi… I need help.”
The bathroom door cracks open. “What… what happened?”
I explain everything, as best I understand it. The suit. The Myriad. None of it makes sense, but I say it all.
Tears slick down her cheeks. “It acquired you. You’ve been like pupating for six months. You’re a frickin’ alien, dude.”
No. It’s not true. “Abi. It’s me.”
Abi eases out of the bathroom, clutching a plunger. “What were you doing? Kit… what were you thinking?”
I clutch the jacket zipper, and the idea I’m still myself. Eighty thousand people died in 1968, many of them acquired by the alien. None of them returned when the alien ‘died,’ though I’m quickly discovering that the alien, along with its victims, wasn’t entirely lost in the battle over Break Pointe. When Professor Blackwood shut down the ship, he shut down the Ever. It’s been sleeping all this time. It’s been waiting.
“Valene… it was for Valene.”
Six months. How could it have been six months; I was just in the garage. Just in the tower, desperate and now Valene is two hundred miles above the Earth. Does she think I’ve forgotten about her? Is she still in pain? Is she alone?
“She’s not better?”
“I don’t know,” Abi says. “No one knows.”
“Is the strike over?”
She snorts. “Yeah, right. GP won’t forgive the city’s debt unless they get total administration of the island.”
“Total administration?”
“Break Pointe will be a completely private city.”
I tremble with this electric anxiety, only some of it the desire desperate to get out of me. Some of it I know is fear, real fear, that I’ve lost Valene forever. That I failed.
“I have to get back to the garage,” I say. “I can fix this. I can still fix this, I just need to…”
“I think we should call Dr. Piller. I think that’s a really good idea right now.” Abi swipes at her PEAL with frustration. “I can’t get a signal… there’s like interference.”
“All Professor Blackwood wants is this power. It will never benefit Valene. I’ll become a guinea pig.”
Abi stabs her finger into the screen. “C’mon…”
“We can’t call them, Abi.”
She looks up from her PEAL. “Is this you?”
Power circuits through the apartment, and not all of it contained in wires and bulbs and boxes. Much of the energy in the building, in the world, floats free, in and out of us in signals, in radiation, in ways we barely perceive. I see it all now. Everything is energy, gnarled in living shapes. I can untangle them. I can tie them up in knots, too. It would be kind of cool, if it weren’t so absolutely fucking terrifying.
“I don’t know I’m controlling any of this,” I say.
“Which is why we should involve the adults.”
The energy worming in my hands shadow Abi’s every movement. That want again. Something within me lurches at her.
She grips the plunger. “Stop.”
“I’m not…”
Abi crumples against the bathroom door. “Please.”
Ba-dumm, ba-dumm, ba-dumm.
Birds crash into the patio windows. In the glass, I flicker back and forth, between myself and the Ever. Across the river, the husk of alien ship glimmers like I’ve never seen before. A deep want to go to the ship tugs on me; a deep need. I have to get out. Get out of here. I slide open the patio door. With nothing between us, the birds swirl into graceful, relieved arcs around me. Dawn breaks across the city. Light fractures within me. Nothing illuminates. I weep at my confusion. My foolishness. The tangle I somehow manage to always make worse.
I look up, as I always do. Valene. Hear me.
Piller can’t help me. Professor Blackwood. No one can help me, nowhere makes sense for me now, but with her. Always with her. Halogenic clouds blanket the city, but I can see the white and black paneled corridors of the space station, in the specs I studied the archive. The airlock. The habitat module. Valene’s quarters. The empty outline of a person meant to represent Valene, presented for scale. I close my eyes. Imagine a space suit, complete with a rocket pack and I blast off into orbit, rendezvousing with the Laputa and my feet leave the terrace.
“Oh.”
Birds swirl around me as I rise, higher and higher. The magnetic field of the Ever; has to be. No other explanation for how I’m levitating off the ground. My momentum carries me out over the lake and my feet peddle hard as I try to steer back to the city. I don’t feel the resistance of the wind. The cold of the air. The weightlessness of my speed. Only the buoyancy of dreaming that gives out from under you without warning and you wake up falling but I don’t wake up. I lift into the sky, drawn into the embrace of Valene, the dust of the world falling off me and I’m going to wake up, recalled to life.
The sky bruises from blue to black. Miles speed by like years and there is a silence that I know is Valene’s silence. I’m close. I’ll make the difficult way aboard the station easy. I’ll find Valene and take her in my arms and the cyclone of birds around me scatter on my scream.
I can’t touch Valene. I can never touch Valene.
Nine
The dream gives out. I fall, so fast ripples radiate through my entire body. Lightning splits the sky after me. Thunder booms as I break every barrier, human and alien, crashing back to earth. I tumble into the currents of birds swirling around The Derelicts, all of them circling the same drain. A violent, magnetic force rips me out of the sky, through the crack in the skull of the ship. My descent swerves out from terminal into this bizarre, nauseous curve through the geodic heart of the wreck. I’m a toy car, gunned down the magnetic track until I jump the curve, headfirst into the wall.
That hurt.
What am I doing here? How did I get here? Decks, shaped like painter’s palettes, float free in the air around me. Plates rearrange themselves, over and over, a puzzle with no solution. I crash to my knees as the deck docks with another piece of the jigsaw in the upper reaches of the ship. This deck is much larger, a continuous ring encircling the core itself. A dark crystal. A giant sized version of the Myriad, really, that even in its sleep writhes, gossamer skin undulating with activity just beneath like the wormy eggs of fleas ready to hatch.
Ok.
The same magnetic tug I felt as the Ever tried to acquire me seizes me. I cling to the railing, even as my feet leave the deck. Fingers of electricity claw at me, burning through the bubble of my skin, grabbing at my crystalline heart. Vines of energy pull at my skin, my face, like they’re trying to tear the label off a bottle. Energy snakes out of the Myriad, out of me, tangling with that of the core; entwining. Fusing.
“No!”
The core pulls me in, subsuming me, boxing me away with the police officer. The warrior from Destos. The uncountable the alien has bottled within their boundless hell. One voice rings louder than the others. Clearer. The voice I hear every night as I try to sleep and there’s no sleeping. No peace. Just the work. If I do the work, I have something that connects me, that compels me forward and I’ve got to keep moving. I’ve got to hold on. I hold on, like always, the sound carrying me through, the sound denying all others ba-dumm, ba-dumm, ba-dumm.
I remember all the nights with Valene, her heart echoing mine, her loving whispers cocooning us both against the drone of the world. Don’t ever let go. I promised. Nothing holds me. Nothing bends me. Nothing breaks me from Valene.
I won’t let go.
The voices recede b
ack into their depths. I reel in the reach of my power, like I did with Abi and I come away free of the core’s grip. Leave. Get as far away from the ship as you can before it leeches every last thread of you. I follow the curve of the ring and arrive back where I started. I fly to one of the deck plates orbiting the core. As soon as I land on it, it shuttles me right back to the ring. I magnetically shove the metal deck away, but the will of the core is stronger.
A strange, unsettling voice wells from deep within the ship; from deep within me. The work must continue.
A firecracker may as well have gone off underneath me. “You can have it back,” I say. “Just take it back! I don’t want it!”
You are us now.
“I’m me.”
We are you.
“I’m me!”
I push back, hard as I can and propel off the ring up through the gauntlet of pursuing decks, free of the gravity of the core. Our magnetic fields repulse each other, vaulting me out of the wreck into the no man’s land of the Quarantine Zone. Blackened tanks and jeeps block the streets ahead, not that they’re recognizable as streets. The wall stands between me and Break Pointe, broken for miles beyond. Booby traps. Landmines. Obstacles I can’t begin to imagine. Power gleans my thoughts.
Possibility.
I can’t use my powers, not without losing myself. I can’t go near the ship, not with the ship’s hunger. What happens if I join with it? Does the ship wake up? Will more come? Would I still be me? I’m still me. Still Kit. I can deny the alien, like I deny everything else. I can keep myself. I have to, for Valene, even if we can never touch again. Even if there’s no life for us but the life I’ve always led, in silence, in isolation, in distance that prepared me for this moment.
I rise into the air, my course twisted and confused. I don’t know where I’m going; what’s my life now?