Demons of Divinity

by Luke R. Mitchell

  A sob wracked my body. I tried to hold it together—needed to get it out, for both of us. But then she was there, her hands cradling my head, warm and kind and loving, stroking my hair, wiping the tears from my cheeks, and for a few minutes, all I could do was cry. She pulled my head to rest against her stomach, and I fell to my knees at her feet, burying my face into her. She held me tight, silently stroking my hair until I had no tears left to cry.

  “I can’t do it, Lise,” I said when the sobs had faded, my voice hoarse and wavering. “I can’t be what he was. What my dad was. I’m not good enough.” I looked up at her. “Why did he leave me here? I… I don’t feel like I deserve to be alive.”

  She sank to her knees, so that our faces were level, and planted a gentle hand on my cheek. “He did it because he loved you, Haldin. Because he couldn’t bear the thought of losing you. He sacrificed himself for you. Not Divinity, or Enochia. You. If all he’d cared about was stopping the raknoth, maybe he would’ve traded places. But he wanted you to live, Hal.”

  I was shaking. She held me, nothing but love and conviction in her eyes. She truly believed what she was saying. I sniffed hard in a futile attempt to keep my runny nose from overflowing, then tried to wipe the sopping mess from my face. Elise balled her sleeve and did it for me.

  “There’s something I haven’t told you,” I said.

  She finished wiping my nose and planted a light kiss on my forehead, the ghost of a smile touching her lips. “I think now seems an appropriate time, don’t you?”

  I wasn’t sure how to answer that. Wasn’t sure there was an appropriate time at all, or that she’d ever be able to understand the scope of what it meant to me. But now was the time to try. So I wordlessly slid the holodisk I’d been carrying all this time from my pocket and handed it to her. She studied it uncertainly, then activated it. Her eyes widened at the sound of Carlisle’s voice, but she settled, listening attentively, stroking my hair all the while.

  It was the first time I’d heard Carlisle’s farewell since finding it.

  “Do you understand?” I asked when the ghost of my mentor had finished.

  She studied my face. “I think so.”

  “He wanted me to stop them, Lise. To save Enochia. It’s the only reason I’m alive.”

  She rejected the idea. I could see it in her eyes. But she considered her words carefully before speaking.

  “Astute as you can be from time to time, I fear you will struggle to see what I see when I look at you.”

  I frowned. Those were Carlisle’s words. “Lise, I know—”

  “I have faith in you,” she recited, pulling me close. “More, I fear, than you have in yourself.”

  I tensed in her arms. She didn’t understand. “You are the best I have to offer this world,” I recited in kind. “He had faith that I could stop them, Elise. Faith that I could take care of this world when he was gone. And he was wrong. And—What?”

  She was shaking her head against mine, like I was spouting nonsense. “Just… Both of you. You say you can’t be like Carlisle, and yet you’re doing exactly we he did, looking at the whole picture and only seeing the darkness you think you deserve.”

  She held up the holodisk to belay my protest, scanning back until she found what she was looking for.

  “If you are hearing this, Hal,” came Carlisle’s voice. “If I’ve indeed perished, know that I will have done so gladly if it meant life for you and peace for Cassius. Know that it is not your fault. Mourn if you will, but do not for a second give in to despair.”

  “That’s not… He only said that because…”

  She hugged me then. Squeezed me harder than I understood—hard enough that my aching muscles cried out in protest. “It wasn’t your fault, love,” she whispered. “Carlisle. The Tower. I know you blame yourself. But you didn’t do those things. You’re not letting yourself see how much worse it all would’ve been if we hadn’t done what we did. And I’ve just been here, watching it kill you. Watching this wall grow up around you. Looking for some crack, some way in to find you and—and—”

  Her voice broke, and then she was crying, and I was squeezing her tight, wondering how in demon’s depths I’d ever been so blind—how I’d convinced myself for a single moment to shut this woman out.

  “I’m so sorry Elise,” I whispered, my eyes brimming with fresh tears. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. I never wanted to…” I squeezed harder. “I love you so much. Please. Please don’t—”

  Her lips pushed into mine, wet and salty with tears, her hands clinging to the back of my head, pulling my face to hers.

  “I thought I’d…” she started to whisper against my lips, then shook her head, fingers twining through my hair. She rested her forehead to mine. “Just please don’t do that again. I know we can’t always be side by side. But please just don’t go somewhere I can’t follow you again.”

  I cupped her cheeks. Wiped her tears away with my thumbs. “I guess it’s a good thing I’m on house arrest.”

  We shared a tear-filled laugh, and Alpha did it feel good, kneeling there together, trading breaths, holding one another and just relishing the closeness while I tried to work up the momentum to say what I knew needed to be said. It scared the scud out of me, but I got there eventually.

  “Where I go, you go?”

  She opened her brilliant blue eyes, so close to my own, and cupped her hands over mine. “You sure you mean that, flyboy?”

  I swallowed, holding her gaze. “I do.”

  “Alright, then.” She inclined her head. “Where you go, I go.”

  The smile she showed me then was one of the good ones, tear-streaked cheeks and all. The kind of smile that would’ve beam pure warmth and happiness straight into the spirit of whomever it struck.

  And right then, it was just for me.

  24

  Arrested

  We didn’t get back to work that morning.

  We laid in bed and held each other close. We talked and laughed and reveled in one another. We made love like it was the first night all over again, clinging desperately to one another as if gravity had inverted and we were the only thing keeping one another from falling away to empty sky.

  For a few wonderful hours, we let ourselves be teenagers again—together and in love and just… happy. Plain and simple. No cares in the world.

  I’m pretty sure it was the best day of my life.

  Which almost softened the blow of coming back down from the clouds to remember that I was still on house arrest. Almost.

  But that was okay too. Because I had work to do.

  Yes, there was still a wild horde of hybrids pillaging Enochia’s population. And yes, Glenbark and the Legion were depending on me for a solution to the telepath problem. But for the first time since the White Tower, I felt like I truly had Elise back—like I truly had myself back.

  Lying in bed that morning with the exquisite comfort of her naked body pressed to mine, there wasn’t a single obstacle on Enochia that felt insurmountable.

  My confidence threatened to waver somewhat when we finally called an end to our tryst to get back to work and I remembered that I didn’t have the faintest clue what came next in the grand plan—or lack thereof—of Project Mindsafe. For starters, I practiced my mental island technique to reacclimate to the cloaking technique I planned to eventually use on these runes. Once Elise confirmed it was working, I had her start practicing the technique while I turned to the runes and back to the starter task of trying to imbue one with the simple function of pulling thermal energy from the air.

  I won’t claim it was fun work, but it was kind of impressive how quickly the time passed when I was toying with runes and new techniques. Maybe it was a product of the countless hours I’d spent sitting on Carlisle’s practice mat, determined to hone my abilities into fighting shape as quickly as humanly possible. Maybe it was just the pressure of Enochia riding on the line. Whatever it was, the work possessed me.

  After finally achieving limited succ
ess with a few heat sinks, I turned to the more abstract task of trying to imbue a rune with my mental island effect, but that only ended in a long string of failures with a frustrating lack of understanding as to what aspect was off. Was I simply failing to effectively cast the cloaking effect onto the rune? Or was it the rune itself that was incorrect—incapable of holding the desired effect? Or was it something else completely?

  There was no way to know.

  Elise, having found little success with her own practice at the mental island technique, broke from her meditation to posit that—even if I was successfully expressing the cloaking field effect onto the rune—there was no reason the rune should work in isolation. In fact, she said, it made more sense to expect that a rune meant to accomplish something that required energy—something like generating a cloaking field—would probably itself require a secondary rune which could supply the primary rune with power.

  It made perfect sense, and it felt like a major breakthrough, but my excitement only lasted as long as it took me to realize I had no idea how the scud one would go about powering one rune with another.

  This entire endeavor was quickly proving itself to be one endless stream of flopping awkwardly from one unknown to another, without even the most basic reassurance that we were even flopping in the right direction. And meanwhile, thousands of people were dying.

  I needed help.

  I needed those Emmútari texts. Why the scud had those two even yanked us into that dungeon if they were only going to chuck us back on the streets? Didn’t they realize what was happening on Enochia—how many lives might’ve been saved if they would’ve just told me what they knew? What had Pasty seen on that helmet that had so terrified him at the end?

  The more I failed to spark any new progress, the more these questions pushed into my mental space, swirling on a dark cloud of frustration.

  Finally, when I couldn’t look a rune without hearing Pasty’s bare feet slapping across the stone floor of his dungeon, I broke from the work to have a bite with Elise and call Franco for any updates.

  “Hal,” he said, sounding a little surprised. “Good timing. I found something this afternoon. Was planning to visit once I’d confirmed.”

  “What is it?” I asked, trading an eager look with Elise.

  “I’m not in the best place to talk right now. Here…”

  My palmlight threw up a buffering icon then populated with a vid feed of Franco. He was sitting at a desk in a busy room I could only assume must be Therese Brown’s lab. Or soon-to-be lab, at least. The room was bigger than I’d expected—though it was sort of hard to tell from our fixed viewpoint in the corner—and currently awash in chattering scientists and poorly arranged equipment, or so I gathered by the copious debating and emphatic hand-waving. There were maybe twenty people in view, a roughly equal mix of Legion specialists and civilians. The gaunt pallor of cycles spent on the blood racks marked most of the latter as ex Vantage employees.

  “Welcome to the United Hybrid Trackers of Enochia,” Franco said, waving a hand at the mess behind him.

  “Is that seriously what you settled on?” Elise asked beside me.

  Franco gave her one of the cryptic smiles that only she seemed capable of deciphering and turned his attention back to something in front of him. “I’ll send you what I have for now.” He turned from his work at a voice I couldn’t quite make out, and nodded. “Of course. Come say hi.”

  Therese Brown drew up behind Franco with a wave and a warm smile. “Hello, there.”

  “Hi Therese,” Elise said.

  “How are you feeling?” I asked, though I could guess well enough from her appearance. Her eyes were tired, and her brunet curls frizzy and a little wild, as if she’d been working too much and sleeping too little, but she still looked better than she had in the days after being rescued from Vantage—her face less sunken, and her cheeks full of a healthy flush.

  “Better than you, from what I hear,” she said with a concerned look. “Are you holding up okay?”

  “I’m doing fine.”

  That earned me a skeptical look from all three of them at once.

  “More fine than some would prefer,” I clarified.

  “Well not this frazzled old survivor,” Therese said. “I hope you’re eating, and getting enough rest.”

  I couldn’t help but smile a little at that. Therese might not have been particularly calm or collected, but there was something about her that always seemed to put me at ease anyway—a kind of soft-spoken goodness that seeped peacefully into my spirit even though we weren’t physically in the same room.

  My palmlight buzzed with an incoming message from Franco, and I saw that Elise’s did as well.

  “Elise knows how to access that,” Franco said, I assumed more for my benefit than hers. She was already busily swiping and tapping away at her device.

  “Sorry,” Therese said, glancing between Franco and us and taking a step back. “I didn’t mean to interrupt. I’ll let you three—”

  “Hey, you got those freezers!” came a familiar voice from off-screen a second before Johnny drew up to join them. “What’s going—Oh, hey guys. Long time, no riots.”

  “Speaking of interruptions,” Franco murmured.

  “You’re telling me,” Johnny said, clapping a hand to Franco’s shoulder. “Seriously, though, guys. Check this out.” He must’ve plucked the camera from Franco’s node then, because our view lurched wildly around until I found myself looking at two long surfaces that almost looked like bulky tables on wheels until Johnny raised the camera and I got a look at what lay beneath the translucent panels on top.

  Each bulky chamber contained a frozen hybrid.

  I suppressed a shudder, staring at the things. Beside me, Elise’s fingers had paused over her palmlight as she took in the garish sight. One was newly turned from the look of it, pale and still smooth-skinned in a few places. The other was fully covered in dark green hide, which I took to mean it was one of the older specimens from Humility or maybe one of the other attacks.

  Therese was saying something off camera that I couldn’t make out.

  “Nice,” came Johnny’s voice from much closer, holding the camera on the frozen hybrids for a few more seconds before taking us on another lurching ride back to Franco’s desk. “Nice and creepy.”

  Therese shrugged as Johnny stepped back to let us see them all again. “Better than keeping them in the food freezer. People were starting to complain.”

  “That’s a joke,” Franco added at Johnny’s quizzical look.

  Therese winced. “A bad one too, I take it. Sorry, it’s been a while.”

  “I think you have the mother of all valid excuses there,” Elise said.

  Therese just looked around the room, cheeks reddening, until she found an adequate diversion. “Oh, there’s James with the ion exchange filter. And…”

  “Hey guys!” called an energetic voice. Then, as James bounced into view and caught sight of us, “Oh! Hey guys!”

  Phineas wasn’t far behind him, pushing a cart laden with a heaping, bulky machine whose function I could only guess at.

  James shook his head, patting the thing. “You won’t believe the hoops we had to jump through to—” He paused, looking back and forth between Phineas and Therese, who were furtively eyeing one another. “Oh yeah. I guess you two haven’t actually met yet, have you?”

  “No,” Therese said, “we, um…” She smoothed her blouse. Wiped a rogue brown curl out of her face. “Funny we’ve both been in and out and haven’t crossed paths yet.” She extended a hand as they drew up. “Pleased to finally meet you, Phineas.”

  Phineas abandoned the cart and gripped her hand. “It’s… an honor. After what you did for Enochia… We owe you.”

  I was almost positive it was the most words I’d ever heard him say at once. And demons to the wind, was that an artifact on my palmlight display, or was he blushing beneath that bushy beard?

  “Oh, um, thank you,” Therese said. “But
it was nothing, really. I just…”

  They only seemed to realize then that they were still shaking hands.

  Phineas straightened, releasing her hand.

  Johnny and James were watching the interaction unfold like they’d just stumbled upon a rare animal and were worried any movement might spook it. Beside me, Elise was equally mystified.

  “So… they’re like, in love, right?” I sent to her.

  “Like, at first sight. I almost feel weird watching.”

  “Ah, to be young again…”

  She failed to stifle a smile. “If you’d tried to make that joke yesterday, I might’ve killed you.”

  I just took her hand, lacing our fingers together and deciding I was glad it wasn’t yesterday. On my palmlight, Phineas was retreating with some mumbled explanation about needing to go grab something from the skimmer, and Therese was positively red-faced. After an uncertain glance back and forth, James decided to follow Phineas.

  “So, uh, did you learn anything new from those hybrid samples?” I asked, in part to fill the silence that followed, but also because I was intently curious to know.

  “We’re still working on it,” Therese said, composing herself and glancing toward the freezers. “I haven’t had the samples or the equipment long enough to say much, but there are a few interesting preliminary observations.”

  “What’d you find?”

  “Well, the samples from the, um, articulate hybrid have noticeably higher concentrations of foreign nitrogenous materials than the samples we harvested from one of the, uh, newborns before Vantage was destroyed.”

  I frowned. “Foreign nitrogenous…”

  “If you’re willing to overlook a few minor technicalities, I suppose we could say the articulate hybrid’s samples are expressing more foreign proteins and have lower human cell counts than their newborn counterparts.”