Tether

by Jeremy Robinson

  So you just held on…

  Morgan’s dead mouth doesn’t move, but I hear her voice.

  A nod. “I held on. I thought my grumpy steed would crush me if I let go. In hindsight, I think that might have been preferable, because around this time is when that horse decided to push out the motherload of horseshit. Dangling from my upside-down saddle, there was nothing I could do to stop it.”

  “You didn’t,” Rain says. I’m surprised to see an attentive smile on her glowing face. Despite all that’s happening and all that’s at stake, she’s allowed herself to give my tale her full attention.

  “I did,” I say, turning back to Morgan. “Every mound and nugget of hay-filled shit smeared and rolled across my face. Did you know that fresh horse poop is actually hot? Like a hundred degrees. It was like—”

  I remember.

  Morgan glides closer.

  “Take her hand,” Rain says, and I reach out.

  Looking at Morgan’s emaciated hand, covered in peeling skin like Brute’s, something in me recoils. Death, to the living, is abhorrent. But if people in Indonesia can exhume the dead, bring them home for a scrub and a change of clothes, then I can take the hand of my dead wife’s spirit.

  For some reason, being connected to Wisp didn’t bother me as much as this. Maybe because I had no choice, or because while I knew Wisp was Morgan, the giant, flowering spirit is actually beautiful in a haunting kind of way.

  But now…this is Morgan in death. There’s no way to make this picture pretty.

  But she is my wife, who I love, so I stretch my hand out to her.

  She hesitates.

  “It’s me,” I repeat.

  I know.

  Her blank eyes turn down to her ragtag body. While there is no life in her shimmering form, I sense her shame.

  “You’re still you,” I say. “No matter what.”

  It’s not what I am, I hear her say. It’s what I did.

  “You did what you had to,” Rain says. “To save me.”

  Morgan’s gaze shifts to Rain for the first time. You… But… What happened to us, to your daughter, is worse.

  “It’s time to make it right,” Rain says, holding out her hand, a mirror of mine.

  You must hate me.

  “I don’t even remember you,” Rain says.

  I remember you, Morgan says. All of you.

  She glides closer, dead hands reaching for ours.

  Okay, I think. Now wha—

  Morgan’s hands feel like cold coconuts—rough and brittle. A shiver rolls up through me as her fingers wrap around my hand.

  The sheer horror on her face fades a degree when I squeeze back.

  “Missed you,” I say.

  What I think is a smile stretches onto her gnarled face. Then she reaches out and takes Rain’s hand, connecting the circuit. Light flares from Rain’s body, flashing through mine and then striking Morgan’s. White hot pain arches my back and turns my head up.

  For a moment, I’m lost in eternal nowhere, and then…memories.

  They come in a flood.

  A childhood, lonely and full of pain. Desperate aloneness, and abusive parents.

  Teenage years come with parties, drugs, alcohol, and violence. Fights, jail, rebellion.

  Years in the military follow. Grueling boot camp. Face in the mud. Mockery and degradation. Followed by pushback. A tidal wave of effort. Rising above peers, instilling them with fear, and then respect.

  Then freedom. Old habits return. Violence and trouble. Killing for money.

  Assassin.

  A blip in the painful character arc flares to life, revealing love, and vulnerability. A child. A daughter.

  This is Rain’s life. Every single moment of it.

  The blip of love explodes into darkness. Death and pain follow. A return to darkness, and the giving up of life and hope. Better off without me, I hear Rain’s words and pain.

  I flinch at the face of Mr. Frank, his then-brown eyes still filled with an otherworldly confidence. He makes an offer. Money and protection. She’ll have the life you want for her.

  Acceptance and then betrayal.

  SpecTek. The lab. Morgan’s face. I won’t let them do this to you! I won’t let them take you from her!

  On the far side of a glass wall, Rain’s daughter, hand reaching for her mother as she’s dragged away.

  I feel myself in Rain’s body, reaching back, desperate and broken. “Kate.”

  Cold blue light surges up and around. The explosion. The moment her memories were taken. All of it is back. My connection to Rain feels different now. She’s not the same person I knew. She’s herself—her true self—again. And she is pissed.

  But not at me.

  And not at Morgan.

  And that’s good, because I’ve seen the bodies left in the wake of her life as a career killer—for the military, for the depths of the U.S. government, and then for SpecTek. Being on her bad side is a very bad place to be.

  I can’t see anything other than light, but Rain’s voice cuts through it. “Still friends?”

  “Always,” I say, and it’s true. The Rain I got to know, free from the tortures of her past, was a kind, fiercely loyal and brave woman I’m honored to have known.

  “You have a plan?” I ask.

  “Always,” she says.

  “Am I going to like it?”

  “Never.”

  I laugh.

  “Going to miss you,” she says.

  “Wait, what?” My good humor drains away. “Are you saying goodbye? Why are you saying goodbye?”

  Her face slides out of the light, electric blue eyes burning with intensity. “You are everything you need to be, and have always been. You didn’t need Morgan, and you don’t need me. But Kate does.”

  I understand her points, but I have no idea what she’s really saying.

  “This is going to be weird,” she says. “At first, but you’ll get used to it.” She smiles. “And you’ll never forget me.”

  “How could I?” I say. “But what are you—”

  She leans forward, kissing my forehead. “Saul the brave. Saul the bold. It’s time for you to come into your own. It’s time for you to save her.”

  “Save who?”

  She steps back into the light, disappearing from view. “Your wife.”

  She lets go of me.

  Gravity reasserts itself. I plummet to the ground, falling out of Wisp’s body and landing in several feet of water.

  My first thought is that I touched Wisp’s body and nothing happened. My soul is still intact. Then I see Wisp above me, a ball of blue light building inside her transparent body, and I forget all about my ability to touch the kaiju without consequence.

  The light builds in a series of strobes, each one brighter than the last.

  Around us, the four kaiju watch as though dumbfounded, all of their rage and fear interrupted by a spectacle that befuddles the living and the dead.

  Light explodes out of the kaiju and then fades. Wisp’s glowing form remains, but something inside it falls toward me. I dodge to the side, avoiding a collision while looking back. Rain’s limp body is expelled by the kaiju and thrown into the water beside me.

  “Rain!” I stab my hands beneath the muddy, churning water. I find an arm, grasp hold, and yank her up out of the pond like a pastor baptizing the faithful. She sucks in a lungful of air the moment she breaches, eyes wide.

  Brown eyes wide.

  Her complexion is darker.

  Her straight hair is black.

  The energy that changed her body back at SpecTek is gone.

  But there’s something else different about her eyes.

  “Saul?” she says, arms around my neck, as though she can’t believe she’s seeing me, as though she didn’t expect to survive.

  And that’s when I see it in her eyes.

  Hear it in her voice.

  A sob chokes my voice for a moment, and then I manage a single-word question.

  “M-M
organ?”

  She smiles.

  I’m bordering on full-on blubbering now. My wife has been returned to me, maybe not in body, but definitely in soul. And that means…

  I turn my eyes up to look at Wisp.

  At Rain.

  Oh, God… Rain… What did you do?

  “Saul,” Rain…Morgan says. “Saul.”

  My wet eyes shift back to…hers. She’s fading, losing consciousness. “Your friend gave me a message for you.”

  I blink back tears and smile.

  Of course she did.

  Morgan’s eyes flutter and close. “Run,” she whispers. “Run...”

  46

  Above me, Wisp roars.

  It’s a new kind of sound, anger lacking the confusion of death. Rain stepped into this willingly. With a purpose. Where the other Riesegeists are caught in the confusing turmoil of having been both killed and turned into abominations, Rain knew exactly what she was doing, and she knows what she has become.

  Wisp’s body rises up, the ribbon-limbs spasming as though in pain.

  It’s not working, I think. The form of Wisp is rejecting Rain. Really, I have no fucking idea what is happening, but that’s the only thing I can come up with.

  Then, as she often did in life, Rain proves me wrong.

  The flower-shaped body of Wisp folds in on itself. All the petals and ribbons twist into the core of the massive body, like a black hole is drawing them inside. Then all of that spectral mass comes out the other side, transformed into something new.

  Two legs emerge first, flashing in and out of the world, slender but strong and human—toes and everything.

  The others were lost when they became Riesegeists. Their confusion, rage, and desperate sadness turned them into monsters. Wisp was different because Morgan had been focused on me. On our love. Rain is fully herself and is transforming with that sense of self—and her humanity—intact.

  Mostly.

  Her luminous body is lined with spikes and serrations. An undead weapon. This is how Rain saw herself in life, before she lost her memory.

  Fully formed, she emerges from what once was my wife…and drops to the ground.

  I lower myself over Morgan’s new and unconscious body as Rain lands. The ground shakes from the force of a several hundred-foot-tall ghost-woman dropping fifty feet.

  Above us, Rain casually looks at the kaiju surrounding us, each of them growing more agitated by the moment.

  Do they know who she is? Do they know that Morgan—the woman ultimately responsible for them being Riesegeists—has escaped their fate?

  Rain turns her head down, frowning at me, as her luminous hair flows out around her face.

  “Right,” I say, like she can hear me way up there. “Run. I’m running.”

  I hoist Morgan-in-Rain’s-body over my shoulder and scramble out of the watery pit. When I reach the top, the kaiju creatures’ patience has boiled over. Brute pounds the ground and huffs out a bark.

  Why aren’t they leaving? My hands are extinguished. So is Rain’s body. SpecTek is destroyed. So what’s keeping them here?

  Bright light casts my shadow thirty feet ahead of me.

  It’s Rain.

  Even in her massive form, she has retained the ability to attract the dead.

  High in the sky, Dragonfish bellows, bulging eyes on Rain.

  Dalí lets out a bellow, raising its long limbs and smashing them down, its gelatinous body shaking like a deflated, water-filled balloon. Then it charges, straight for Rain, which also happens to be straight toward me.

  But there’s no other direction to run. To my left is the river, and Brute. To the right, vast destruction and Dragonfish, swooping down for a low approach. And behind me… Well, I’m not even going to look. At least there’s a chance Dalí’s long stride might miss us.

  “You can do this,” I tell myself, running toward Dalí. The only thing separating us is an open field. The arts center has been decimated.

  I’m as close as I can get to a sprint with Morgan over my shoulder, my side already cramping up. And yet, for every twenty strides I take, Dalí’s long gait halves the distance between us with a single step.

  I shift to the left, hoping to skirt between Dalí and the river, but the monster’s wide stride puts a stop to that. A long limb crashes down directly in my path, knocking me back and nearly to the ground. I stagger, off balance thanks to Morgan’s weight.

  And then I slip.

  I’m going to hit hard. Going to be hurt.

  How the hell am I going to get out of here?

  Despair turns to confusion when my fall is arrested at a forty-five-degree angle. I’m pushed up from behind, back onto my feet.

  I should run. But I can’t stop myself from looking back for my rescuer. A glowing ribbon slips away, twisting back to its source, high above.

  It’s Rain, but it’s not just Rain. The petals and long, flat tendrils that made up Wisp’s body now flow from Rain’s back, like wings.

  “Like an angel,” I say.

  Rain flares like the sun, lighting up the whole city.

  Dalí wails and charges, lunging past me and toward a patiently waiting Rain.

  “Run,” I tell myself, repeating Rain’s final message to me. “Run!”

  I feel pitifully small and slow, but I manage to push past the cramp and the exhaustion, and I break into another sprint.

  Behind me, behemoths clash.

  Dalí’s anguished roar rips through the air, as Rain drives her foot into the long leg, bending it in the wrong direction.

  A shift in the wind draws my eyes back again.

  Dalí, its leg ruined, has twisted around and fallen to the side…straight toward me. There’s no outrunning it. No dodging it.

  “C’mon,” I will my hands, trying to ignite the brightness that might make me intangible to the dead, and prevents my soul from being sucked away. But nothing happens.

  Long, fleshy ribbons jut out from Rain’s back, wrapping around Dalí’s limbs, keeping the kaiju from plummeting atop us.

  I want to stop and thank my friend for continuing to save my life, but before I can speak, Brute thunders up from the river, tackling Rain from behind. Now, instead of one impossibly huge Riesegeist falling toward me, there are three.

  Just run, I tell myself. There’s nothing else you can do.

  My legs burn and shake. I can’t go on like this much longer.

  The ground quivers from an impact. I stumble as the earth beneath my feet becomes about as stable as a vibrating bed.

  Wavering blue light and a cold wave of pressure alert me to the presence of a Riesegeist descending above me. I don’t bother looking. If the end comes, I’d rather not see it.

  Another jarring quake knocks me off balance, the energy it takes to keep myself upright nearly makes me collapse. I drop to a knee, take a deep breath, steel myself, and then push myself back up. I’m still determined to not look up, but I don’t need to.

  The world around me has been transformed into an ethereal forest. Glowing, wriggling strands, like spectral anacondas, hang down from a luminous ceiling. I stare up into a shifting, blue membrane that is both there and not. Inside, trapped souls, mouths agape, claw in a futile attempt at escape.

  A scratching spins me around. One of the tendrils, which I now recognize as Brute’s long hair, snakes toward me.

  “Gah!” is all I manage to say, before it strikes like a snake.

  I’m struck from the side, wrapped and constricted.

  My desperate shout becomes muffled as I’m lifted off the ground. Then it explodes into the night air as I’m freed—by Rain’s ribbon. I see her long appendages twisting out beneath the fallen kaiju body, bearing its weight, assaulting the living hair, protecting me, and clearing a path.

  “Thanks,” I say to Rain, hitting my top speed—a slow jog—in just a few steps. In terms of gratitude, it’s a pitiful representation of how I actually feel, but there’s no time for me to recite the number of ways I’m gratef
ul for Rain.

  All around me, snaking hair reaches out for me, trying to suck away my soul. But I run with confidence, knowing that Rain still has my back. Ribbons flank me, deflecting attacks and tangling the hair. I duck and weave, legs threatening to give way.

  Somewhere, a kaiju roars. The sound shakes the air from my lungs.

  I can’t make it…

  I’m not going to make it…

  My legs become unstable stilts. I waver. And fall.

  And am caught—again.

  A ribbon lifts me off the ground, wrapping Morgan and me in a gentle embrace, carrying us toward safety as the ‘ceiling’ above us lowers toward the ground. Even if I’d been at full speed, not carrying someone over my shoulder, I couldn’t have escaped in time. But lifted up by the body of Wisp-turned-Rain, whom I can still touch without consequence. Then I’m propelled like a rocket.

  The end of my journey comes as quickly as it began. The ribbon unravels just before it’s pinned under the bulk of Brute’s body. I roll to a stop beside Morgan’s limp form, struggling for air and trying to push myself up. My arms get me halfway there, but my legs are Jell-O.

  I shout in frustration. I can’t let Rain’s sacrifice be in vain. I get one leg under me and push. It wobbles, and fails me, but I don’t fall.

  Pressure wraps around my arms, and for a moment, I think Rain is still carrying me.

  “I got you,” Bjorn says. His nervous smile is brilliant through a face soiled dark gray. His teeth are gritted against the pain of using his wounded shoulder to support my weight.

  “I’ll get Rain,” Reggie says, flinching when she sees brown hair instead of white-blonde. “What happened?” she asks.

  The ground shakes. Dust billows around us. I don’t know what’s happening behind me. Don’t want to know. Not yet. Right now, I just want to honor Rain’s last request.

  “Later!” I shout. “We need to run!”

  “Run?” Reggie says, waving her hand to someone. “Screw running.”

  Tires squeal and an engine roars—for a moment. I lose the sound when a kaiju’s bellow drowns out the engine. But it’s impossible to miss the Thunderbird skidding to a stop in front of me. The side door flings open, revealing Garcia, equally as dust-covered as Bjorn. “Get in!”