by Alex Leopold
“What’s she saying?” Cooper asked looking at her mother with one eye while keeping another on her father’s younger-self.
“Yin is telling her she was sent by the Oracle.” Their father replied his face grave. “That the greatest predictor the world has ever known thinks there’s something special about me.”
The twins watched their father as he studied his younger-self. It was obvious from the way his mouth curled at the edges that he wished he’d died on this day.
“Yin is telling your mother she can’t let me die.”
It was not a message their mother received well. She continued to openly protest until she was cut off
“Then let him die if you think you know better!” Yin said.
Taking a last look at Quill their mother cursed bitterly. She pulled an arrow from the pouch on her back, and had it notched and released from her bow so quickly Riley thought she couldn’t have had time to aim. Yet, the arrow sliced through the rope and the younger Quill dropped down to his knees and began to gulp air back into his lungs.
“This is how it began.” Their father said with regret. “This was when the Torchbearers sealed their fate.”
40
At a shallow riverbed, the Myrmidons had lost the trail. As the minutes passed while they waited for their Sekhem to pick it up again, the Hangman spent the time secretly watching his senior.
Control was fidgeting.
While the others had never been able to contain their excitement once the hunt was on, Control had always been able to remain the cold detached killer he was. This time however, something had changed. Ever since they’d discovered the Great Inventor was close, the Myrmidon leader had been… agitated.
More, when he thought no one was watching, he’d remove his glove and reach into the pocket where he kept the daughter’s ring. He’d done it so often it was becoming an obsession.
Something in the ring’s metal was beginning to affect him, the Hangman thought, and he couldn’t help wonder what it was.
Another memory.
It was late in the evening and they’d moved into one of the buildings surrounding the square. Dozens of candles littered the room and tracked the twins’ mother as she paced the floor. She spoke in a quiet whisper as she walked back-and-forth but punctuated every word that left her lips. It had been a mistake to save Quill she said heatedly and her hand jabbed at the young thief every time she mentioned his name.
She did not look at him though. Her anger was reserved for a waif of a woman who sat pressed into the room’s darkest corner, her arms and legs tucked up tightly in a ball against her body. The Oracle.
“By the time I met her, the Oracle had already delivered dozens of prophecies about the future, all of which had come true.” Cooper’s father spoke.
With her white dress and white hair, Cooper thought the predictor looked like an angel, or a ghost. Yet, what was most striking about her was that she was only in her twenties, barely older than Cooper’s father and mother at the time. With her frail body, wild eyes and furrowed brow it was hard to believe that this nervous little thing had once been the most powerful person in the nation.
Her father gestured out the window. “Everyone you saw in the market today was there because of her. Because of what they believed she could do.”
“Which was?” Riley asked.
Nakano answered for him. “They believed she could return freedom to a nation that had known none in over two centuries.”
“And in order for that to happen the Oracle needed, you?” A somewhat disbelieving Cooper asked her father.
“Apparently.”
“But you didn’t believe her?” Riley asked.
“No.” He said with a smile. “And you’re about to see why.”
Throwing open the door to the Oracle’s bedsit Kitt made to leave.
“I’ve never doubted you, not ever.” She announced to the Oracle as she stood with one foot planted firmly in the hallway.
Turning her attention for the first time to the younger Quill, who was leaning lazily against a wall, she crinkled her nose in disgust.
“Until now.”
The predictor and the thief watched as the Elder marched down the steps of the building and away into the night.
“She’s a got a real unique personality that one; a real charmer.” An amused younger Quill sighed once she was out of earshot.
“And yet you will come to love her.” The Oracle spoke matter-of-factly, her voice barely above a whisper.
When the younger Quill had gotten over his initial shock, he looked at the Oracle as if she was crazy. “Me and her?”
“One day Kitt will be your wife.”
“She tried to have me killed.”
“They say marriages can be challenging.”
Quill barked a laugh at that before looking at the Oracle with blank-faced seriousness. “All of this, including her and me: it’s never going to happen. Understand?”
“But it did.” Their father said with awe as their surroundings changed and they found themselves on a bridge the color of rust and blood, their view obscured by thick fog.
“Everything the Oracle predicted, came true.”
Their father’s younger replica now slightly older and with longer hair came running out of the mist dressed in blue military clothes stained with dirt. On the shoulder of his uniform was the lit torch insignia of the Torchbearers’ army.
“The impossible battles she showed us how to win, we did.”
After firing an antique looking pistol at an unseen enemy, the younger Quill pulled his sword free and shouted: “Live free or fight on!”
Along with their mother and a younger Acadia, the war-cry was picked up by the rest of the army of blue coats. As they raced across the bridge, the sun burnt off the fog in time for the twins to see two armies collide.
Their father continued as the scene changed again.
“Within the connection, the Oracle showed me the inventions from the past and I started to rebuild them.”
They’d moved to a large workshop. Its walls were stacked with endless chalk covered black-boards, its floor littered with all manner of half-finished machinery. In the middle of it all, illuminated by a single electric bulb, was their younger father. His body was kneeling in front of what looked to be a prototype of the gateway.
“And the woman she promised I’d marry.” A choke caught in his throat as they found themselves in a barn so crowded it was fit to burst. “I did.”
The music was loud and fast-paced. With flushed and beaming faces. The revelers drank and danced as if the world might end on the next day. Houndsmen howled, ursinians stamped and the humans amongst them – of which a young Nakano was one – did their best not to get knocked over.
Then a roar went up from the back and the band stopped as the crowd parted to let through a clean shaven Quill in an ill-fitting suit. Behind him, he led Kitt dressed in white. Looking at their mother, the twins didn’t believe anyone could ever look so beautiful.
“Kiss her!” A young Acadia bellowed drunkenly on unsteady feet.
In an attempt to satisfy them a bashful Kitt snuck a peck on Quill’s lips. The crowd responded with boos and pelts of food.
“I said kiss her, damn you!” Acadia boomed revealing the bear incisors in his mouth and the crowd picked it up as a chant.
The couple held the kiss long after the first cheer had died down. Held it even after the band struck up again and everyone returned to the dance floor. They held it as if they wanted to remain that way for an eternity and when their father paused the memory they did.
41
For some time Cooper watched as her father stared longingly at his dead wife and his younger-self, his face lost in remorse. No matter what Riley and I do, no matter what we become, all he wants is to return to this moment and stay here forever, she thought with dejection. All he wants is her.
When Cooper wondered if he even remembered they were with him, he spoke.
“I became one of the Oracle’s fiercest supporters. I was convinced we could succeed under her.”
“What went wrong?” Asked Riley.
He turned away from his wife. “What went wrong was we were winning the war but losing close friends and loved ones along the way.”
As he spoke, people in the frozen memory began to disappear.
“Too many, some thought.” He added as more people vanished, including a pretty young woman who was leaning against Acadia’s chest. When she was gone, so went the memory.
“They blame me.” The waif-like predictor said as she pressed her head against a window in her chamber and watched the world below her through the glass.
It was a world she was both ultimately responsible for and yet could never be part of. She belonged to the future and the past; the present was too much for her to cope with.
The younger Quill, his body stained from battle and wrapped in bandages, sat exhausted on the other side of the room with his back against the door to her chambers.
“They think my visions show me who will live and who will die, and yet I send our armies off to war anyway. They think I don’t care.”
“Do you?” The younger Quill asked, barely finding the strength to speak.
She turned to admire him. “I see many paths. This way is the safest.”
“That it may be”, he sighed and his shoulders sagged. “But what’s the point in winning a war if everyone we love is dead at the end of it?”
Their father spoke. “I pushed the Oracle to find another way, a quicker way. A way with less death.”
They were still in the Oracle’s chamber but time had moved forward. Dark blankets now covered the windows to block out any light and in the center of the room, the Oracle and Yin, her beacon, lay in reclining chairs facing one another.
“To find our solution, the Oracle forced her mind further into the void than anyone had ever gone. Right to the bottom of the well.
“She was down there for three days.”
The silence was broken as the predictor’s eyes popped open and she let out a terrifying cry.
“The final prophecy was what she returned with.”
Time moved forward again. Dawn had come and from her bed, the Oracle watched as the light from the rising sun spilled into her room.
“Tell me what you saw?” The younger Quill asked from the foot of her bed.
“Not yet.” Her voice was thin, the strain of the last three days etched across her face. “I have to confirm it all first. You know what can happen when you delve too deeply into the void.”
“What is she talking about?” Riley asked.
“I’ll let Nakano tell you.”
She gave him an amused scoff. “Now I know why you brought me along.”
For a moment she considered saying nothing, then she spoke.
“When you access the void you go in with all your hopes and fears, prejudices and desires. It’s confusing down there, your mind is under constant attack. If you’re not careful, you might think you see a vision of the future but what you actually see is simply a reflection of what you want to find down there.”
She turned to Cooper’s father, a look of rising anger on her face.
“I know what you’re trying to do.”
“And what is that?”
“You want your daughters to think the Oracle was deceived by the void. That the prophecy is a lie.”
“I just want them to have the facts.” He replied. Then his younger-self was speaking.
“Please, I beg you. Give me something.”
She smiled weakly.
“I saw a weapon, called the Liberty Key. It’s scattered across the nation, but I will show you how to find it, how to build it. And when you use it, it will make you so powerful no one will be able to challenge you.”
“Me?” He was stunned.
“The future has chosen you, Quill, and only you. You will be the one who will finally bring peace to this nation. I told you, you were important.”
“What does the Key look like? How do I find it?” He asked but she refused.
“I will not say more until I’ve seen the visions again. There is too much risk with this route for me to be mistaken.”
“She never got the chance to see the last prophecy again, did she?” Riley guessed.
Her father confirmed her worst fears with a nod of his head.
“Rumor of the Liberty Key and its power reached an underground criminal organization called the Directory. Its leader, the Archon, was a man of great ambition.
“Interested in taking possession of the Key for himself, he tried to kidnap the Oracle to find out what she knew. When that failed, he had her eliminated.”
Their father swapped the memory in front of them for another. They were still inside the Oracle’s chambers but day had bled into night. By the chamber doors they found their younger father kneeling over the Oracle, her body lying in a pool of blood.
“Don’t you dare die on me!” He shouted as he shook her.
When she didn’t move, he placed his hand on her chest and shocked her heart with the spark. She jolted back to life with a gasp and her eyes flittered open. When she saw it was Quill she grabbed him by the arm and pulled him close.
“Listen to me. The first part of the Key is hidden in a metal vault somewhere inside a dead city.”
“Which city?” He asked.
“When you have it, you’ll know where to go for the rest of the Key.
“The Pathfinder.” She added, and with her last breath. “You, and only you.”
“Which city!” He pressed, but her eyes had grown lifeless. She was gone.
Cooper watched as her younger father cradled the Oracle in his arms. The younger man, stricken by grief, roared with a tear filled anger. Her father on the other hand, watched on impassively, his face a study of indifference that bordered on disgust.
“Did you ever discover which city she was referring to?” She asked when her younger father’s sobs grew quiet.
“No.” He shook his head. “Before I could search for it, the Directory raised an army and attacked Sancisco. They took us by complete surprise and overran the city before we could stop them.”
He moved them from the Oracle’s chamber to a street that was the center of a war zone.
Cooper had been in this memory before. Her father had brought her to this street yesterday when he’d first taken them into the connection. This was the night the Directory took control of Sancisco, when the Torchbearers were slaughtered.
“It was a massacre. Hundreds were killed. Including every Torchbearer the Directory could get their hands on.”
In the connection, he made them stand right in front of the torn corpses piled one on top of the other.
“You forget, they were my friends too.” Nakano reminded him as she looked down at the bodies.
“Then perhaps you can understand why I didn’t see much use in finding the Key after Sancisco fell. It was supposed to save everyone I cared about. But after the Directory took the city, they were all dead.”
She nodded. “I understand, but the Key is our last and only chance to beat the Directory and save the nation. You must see that.”
He looked skeptical. “When I close my eyes, all I see are the dead bodies of everyone who blindly followed this fantasy.”
“It’s not a fantasy, and I can prove it.” She argued, pulling her notebook from her pocket.
“The Oracle told you, the first part of the Key is hidden in a metal vault somewhere inside a dead city.” She turned to a page in the book. “I saw exactly the same thing.”
She held up her journal and in the connection the words jumped from the page and hung in the air for them all to read.
|| A vault-sized large metal door is guarded by an eagle the size of a colossal, and a god-like man with angel’s wings. Behind the door something important is hidden. Through a nearby window a lost civilization city is spread out far below ||
“The
last prophecy is not a lie.” She stated. “There is a future where you gain possession of the Key, and use it to destroy the Directory.”
“You saw me do that?”
“Yes, through your eyes, I saw it all.”
“Not through my eyes, through the Pathfinder’s.” He corrected.
“Is there a difference?”
“Yes, and that’s the problem.”
“What do you mean?”
“There is another.”
An ear-piercing blast of noise shattered the silence and the room began to quickly fill with heavy vapor. When it finally cleared, the twins found themselves in a room with tall machines that glowed a metallic-orange; the gateways. As they watched on one of the machines came apart to reveal rows of armed Directory guards.
“Leave them alone!” A man yelled behind them and they turned to find their father with their heavily pregnant mother and Yin. All three were kneeling before a man with a golden mask.
“Who’s that?” Cooper asked.
“The Archon.”
Reaching into the hood of his cloak the man removed his mask.
“It’s the same man from the square!” Cooper realized when she saw his face. Her father had called him Bellic.
“He was my closest friend.” Their father said. “My confidant.”
“Hello, old friend.” The Archon spoke down to Quill’s younger-self. “I warned you something like this would happen.”
“And he is the other Pathfinder.”
42
As Sancisco fell to the Directory, the Myrmidons dragged the three prisoners out of the gateway chamber back to the Great Hall. There, the Archon began Quill’s interrogation.
Bound and doped, there was nothing Kitt and Yin could do but watch as the Archon struck him with the spark and sent him spinning across the marble floor.
“Bellic, you’re killing him.” Kitt shouted.