by Terina Adams
Behind my eyelids, everything turned white as my mind exploded. The brightness of the illumination burned my eyes but also burned the pain from my body. I felt renewed, invigorated, and ready to fight. Was I at maximum power? It felt good. I got up from the ground, only to feel something snap in my head. Like a plug pulled, my consciousness tunneled away fast.
Chapter 24
My consciousness filtered through, the softness below me the first thing I noticed. The smell was the next, a jumbled mix of fresh sweat and something else, clean smelling but not a fragrance I recognized. I would’ve been content to stay there feeling safe and comfortable if the pounding in my head didn’t start as soon as I moved.
I nursed my forehead and groaned, pressing my temples as if that would alleviate the pain. I slid a hand down to my cheek and pulled it away and cracked an eye open only to find the light in the room too bright. “Jesus.”
“Give it time. You’ll adjust.”
I jerked at the voice, then clutched my head again with another groan. “I feel like someone is cracking my skull open with a crowbar.”
“It will be worse this time.”
“What will be worse?”
“Yeah, your memories may take time to return as well. It was close. Too close.”
Why was I with Jax? I tried to sit up, but the crowbar spilt farther down the center of my skull. “Oh, god. I want to die.”
“We went in with too many too soon. Even though we were only level two, with that many of us together, especially two opposing factions in close proximity for the time we were, it resulted in a large-scale assault. You panicked. The result was a massive influx of your factional nature. Basically your power detonated in your mind. That’s why you feel like you want to die.”
“I don’t remember any of it.”
“You will. Memory is usually temporarily affected. It will right itself in time. I have something that will help, but I will have to move you.”
On his saying that, I realized the softness I lay on was him. We were on a bed, or something soft. He was propped up, and I was lying back against his chest. The sudden realization and I launched up to sitting only to be attacked by a savage hammering to my brain. Energy abandoned me. I fell back onto him again, curling to the side and cradling my head, groaning.
“It’s going to be intense, but at least your brain still works as it should. Any longer in the game and your brain cells would be like burned bacon by now.”
His words came from far away, swimming through the agony clouding my concentration.
“I’m going to wriggle out from underneath you. It’s going to hurt your head but you’ll feel grateful once I come back with something to help.”
Without waiting for me to protest, demand that he dare not move and make the crowbar split my brain in two, he was out, lowering me gently onto the bed. Without him there, I curled farther into the fetal position.
The feather touch of his hand on my hip brought me out of the fog of agony. He’d been gone for hours. The pain held me suspended, so maybe not.
“You’ll have to roll over.”
“I can’t.”
“You’ll feel better once you do. Trust me.”
I couldn’t feel any worse than I did right now, so I did as he asked, inching onto my back, groaning all the way because it buried me deep in my misery, and at the moment I couldn’t feel any hope of ever escaping this torment.
“I’m going to help you up. You need to drink some water to wash the pill down.”
He held my escape from this torment in his hands, so I allowed him to help me up and opened my mouth to indicate he could pop it in himself. No way could I open my eyes right now to the light and feel yet more punishment. Jax placed the glass in my hand and helped guide it to my lips. The pill was small enough to disappear with one gulp. Once it was swallowed, Jax took the glass and lowered me back onto the bed, then started counting. When he reached ten, I blinked my eyes open, and not because he’d commanded I had ten seconds to open them but because my headache receded enough by that point I had the courage to try my eyes with the light.
“How do you feel?”
“Like I’ve got a mean hangover, which is a lot better than ten seconds ago. That’s one hell of a painkiller.”
Jax sat on the edge of the bed, behind him a stark white wall, the floor shiny white marble or a close approximation.
I pushed myself up onto one elbow. “Where are we?”
“My apartment.”
“This looks nothing like your apartment.”
“The apartment you know of. We’re not in your world, Sable.”
I launched all the way up to sitting, scanning around the room, to see nothing but white. The bed was the only piece of furniture, the only piece of color black, sheets and cover. “We’re in another world?”
“My world.”
I shuffled off the bed. The cool of the smooth floor ran up my legs and into my head, which still throbbed with the residual from the onslaught of my factional nature. The next thing I knew, the side of my body hit the bed and I crumpled to the cool floor.
“Give yourself some time.” With his arms under my armpits, he hitched me back up onto his bed.
“I can’t. We’re in another world.”
If I wasn’t in shock from leaving Earth, I’d be in shock from another real smile on his face. A genuine smile that erased the hard lines and tension, wound him back to the young boy free of Dominus, world domination, lies, cheating, betrayal, and death. Drawing my eyes from his captivating smile, I glanced around the room once more.
“Was this where your family lived?” I knew nothing about him, except that he’d lost everything precious to him.
“No. Our family home was elsewhere.”
I shouldn’t have asked him. Now I’d lost the smile and the carefree boy, to find it replaced with the pain of what he faced, what we all faced, our reality. My eyes landed on the tattoo inside his wrist.
“Why doesn’t Holden have one of those?”
“He had the tattoo removed by laser when he arrived in your world.”
He fingered the mark. Watching him do it reminded me of all those times I’d watched Mum trace lines along the tattoo on Dad’s inner wrist.
“You hate it so much, why didn’t you?”
“I need a reminder of why I do this.”
Along with the declaration was the shuttering of his emotions. It was always the same, so I sensed the moment it happened. His body language mimicked the closing of a door, the severing of a connection. Was the reason the result of his parents’ murder or us being on opposing factions?
“Do you really believe in what you’re doing?”
Jax folded forward, resting his elbows on his knees, and continued to rub at the tattoo, below that the graft, which was supposed to control his factional nature, now deactivated.
I slid toward him, placing my feet on the floor. “Holden sees it as a symbol of oppression. Is that how you see it?”
“Yes.” He didn’t look at me when he replied.
“How far are you willing to go to free yourself from that oppression?”
I looked around his room. While stark, it looked expensive by Earth standards. Back home, a high-polished stone floor would cost a fortune, and his room was not small. Oppression looked comfortable over in this world.
Instead of answering me, Jax stood and headed toward the wall, which turned into a door on his approach by sliding open. I rose to follow but was stopped by the view out of the glass wall. The whole one side of the room was glass, or glass looking, whatever materials they used in this world. Outside, the buildings rose like glass spires encased in massive exposed beams of heavy industrial steel…metal…whatever. Beyond those, crisscrossing the sky, were some of their skytrains.
The door whooshed closed, slapping me out of my daze, but as I neared, it whooshed open again. Jax was looking out of another window taking up the entire wall.
“Califax City,” I breathed as
I came up beside him.
Beyond the towers of glass and steel, the Dome rose like a majestic fork of savage spires, not a dome at all. Behind, a blue moon began its journey up the horizon, glinting its dirty-snow color off the glass. But the beauty of the sky was marred by the strange aircraft crisscrossing through the air, following invisible skyways. I pressed closer to the glass and peered down hundreds of feet below to a carpet of color, predominately green, but with splashes of vibrancy.
“I shouldn’t have brought you here. I acted without thinking.”
“Does everyone look like you? Human-like?”
The crinkle on his brow told me I’d asked a stupid question.
“I’ve watched a lot of science fiction.”
“We are no different. It’s how we were able to live amongst you on your world. We are a mirror image if not for our customs, culture, architecture, landscape—”
“World.”
Our eyes held. The creep of my smile was matched by his own. “The only mirror we share is language and the way we look.”
“And a love of our family, it seems,” he finished for me, then looked back out onto his world, robbing me of his expression.
“I’m glad we share emotions.”
This was awkward. I joined him staring out the window. Easier to do that than focus on the sudden uncomfortableness that saturated the air. I didn’t know how I was supposed to feel toward him. Hating him was easy. I should want to continue hating him to continue making it easy for myself. He’s Carter’s, remember that. They want Ajay.
“I should take you back. It’s as dangerous here for you as it is in Dominus. You don’t know enough about our world to pass as a citizen and you have no tattoos, which will signal you as an anomaly. If the Senate of Factions discover you, they will start executing Aris and Persal until they find the truth.”
“Why?”
“They will do anything to uncover dissent.”
“Why is everyone so paranoid in your world?”
Jax turned to me and shrugged. “It’s just how it is.”
“If your governing body wasn’t so scared of its citizens, maybe you’d all learn to get along. Fear leads to fear. Violence to violence. It’s nothing but a circle.”
“I wish it were that simple.”
I turned back to the window, not ready to get into an argument over his beliefs as opposed to mine. Maybe I should. It could help me hate him again, and then it would be how it was before, and I’d know how to act around him. I was so far out of my comfort zone being here.
“Come, we need to head back. Everyone will be wondering where you are.”
He held out his hand and once again I looked at the tattoo of his oppression.
“How is it there are people in my world with latent factional abilities?”
“When shifting was a normal part of our lives, many people spread out through the dimensions, much like when you go on holiday overseas. And like traveling overseas, the process was strictly monitored. People had to register their intention and destination and register their return. All of this was held in a database. Carter and Nixon where able to sift through the database and record which dimensions were visited the most and by whom. It turns out your world was popular because the people there are almost identical to those on my world. And conveniently for them, Aris and Persal in particular loved the place. I think that’s why the two of them formed the alliance. They believed there were probably enough interludes between our worlds to give rise to offspring in your world with the talent. All they needed was something to kick-start the process.”
“Dominus. What happened to get us here?”
“What parts do you remember?”
“Some bits are filtering through. I remember everything going dark in a blink.”
“The warrior you fought was Phonus. They—”
“Control the night. So the creature that attacked me was a bat?”
“Bat. That’s better than some of the nighttime creatures they evoke, but fitting for level two.”
“It felt like my mind exploded.”
“You destroyed the warrior. You saved your skin.”
At least I did something right. “How did I do it?”
“It’s likely the panic from the fight triggered your ability. The warrior disintegrated.”
“I did that with my mind?”
“You’re Persal, destruction, remember? It’s easy to do with bots, not so easy with humans.”
I looked back out over the city, to all the people who I couldn’t see from up here but inhabited this world, filling the buildings surrounding us, riding their funny aircraft, walking the streets below, all these people who were capable of doing these things with one thought.
“Holden can teach you to call upon it at will and moderate the force.”
The view out the window was the best place for me to look right now.
“The hardest thing you’ll have to face is overcoming the desire to be that which you are.”
I snapped my head around to face him. “I don’t understand.”
“Once destruction becomes your true nature, that is all you’ll want to be. Holden can help you overcome this so you’re not a danger.”
I placed a hand on the glass, felt the cold seep through. The warmth from my palm kept the cold from moving straight through, but if I left my palm pressed on the glass long enough, perhaps the cold would break free and funnel right down to chill my heart. “And that is what it means to be free from the graft.”
“Yes.”
“I think I would rather be grafted.”
“You believe everyone has a choice. You said that, remember? So you can choose to not be dominated by your factional nature. You can train yourself to command it, not the other way around.”
I faced him. “I thought you didn’t believe in choices.”
“I have to believe we have some; otherwise there is no hope.”
“But you don’t want to believe that differing factions can be friends.”
Jax huffed in frustration and half turned away from me. “It’s—”
“Not that simple. Maybe that’s because you don’t want it to be that simple.”
“That’s why we fight. That is the point of Dominus. We want to change the way it is in our world.”
“Change starts in the smallest ways.”
He looked at me like I was speaking tongues. “You want to change the way the rules are in your world, and yet when given the chance to live differently in my world, you won’t. There’s no reason to treat Holden like the enemy, no reason for Aris and Persal to be the enemy in my world. And yet you both choose to keep the boundaries between your factions defined. Neither of you wants to trust the other. It has to come from in here first”—I pointed to my heart—“before it comes from here.” I pointed to my head.
“You’re talking about changing our culture. A history of habit cannot be wiped in a matter of months.”
“How can you control your desire to become your true nature, which according to you is extremely difficult, yet you can’t even stop yourselves from loathing each other?”
“You don’t understand my world.”
“I think I do understand your world. Perhaps it has more to do with what’s really important to you. Living in freedom is very important to you—I can understand—but not so much living in harmony, or in love.”
The sudden silence in the room underscored the heat in my voice. We stared at each other with a distance that seemed unreachable.
Jax broke the void created from our argument. “Those are ideals.”
“And will remain that while you are all afraid of each other, hiding in your own quarters of the world.”
He snorted a laugh. “You’re nothing like your father. Being part of the Senate of Factions, he is very pro separation.”
“If he and Carter are on the senate, why are they doing this?”
“For the same reasons we are.”
“I don’t believe
that. People in positions of power rarely want change unless it’s more beneficial for them.”
“Maybe it will be.”
“You say factions can’t get on, but Dad and Carter made an alliance.”
“And look where your father is now.”
I pressed my lips together. “That was Carter’s plan all along.”
“Your father’s as well. Carter just beat him to it.”
“Neither ever planned for the other to rule with them.”
“It would never work.”
“But it does; otherwise you wouldn’t have a Senate of Factions.”
“You think any of them trust each other? And it works only because they suppress us all with these grafts.”
“So you’re willing to let Carter rule, because that’s the plan, isn’t it? That’s why Dad’s in jail, so that Aris can rule over your world. That’s the true plan.”
“Your father was no different. He planned on it being Persal.”
“You told me when factions go to war, there isn’t a lot left.”
I stepped in close to him, drawn by the fleeting moment when his expression changed, when the conflict within twisted him up enough to make him look lost and shamed. The moment I reached for him, the shutter fell down, the iron of his conviction won through, and he stepped away.
I did too, allowing the space between us that was proper for Persal and Aris, which was what he wanted, what everyone seemed to want, without questioning the true cost. My headache from the game had receded, along with my strength, sucked away by the force of Jax’s will. I couldn’t match the armor of his determination, but it didn’t mean I agreed. Dominus taught the players to fight in simulation with their factional natures so they could fight for real when the time came. Carter would have us become his puppets. He would turn us into monsters. He’d have us destroy each other so he could rule. Everyone was all right with that. And there was nothing I could do.