by Sacchi Green
Cleo was clutching something wrapped in her keffiyeh. As her body rose, the scarf unfurled to reveal what had been concealed in the lining—a long white banner bearing the huge symbol of a black hand. The light from the drone shone full on it.
There was no time to wonder how Cleo had managed it. Ash carried her forward, twenty feet high, pausing, changing direction, the two of them one body, one mind, in two places. The drone’s light stayed on Cleo, while a river of women, two or three abreast, followed her. Some leaned against each other, some carried children on their backs. Razhan’s soldiers went up and down the line keeping everyone calm and moving as fast as possible.
Cleo looked only down and ahead, searching out each landmine. Ash wanted to scan the city, to look for guards who might mount the walls and shoot at Cleo, at the escaping women, but she couldn’t be distracted.
She kept her arms raised, in case it made a difference. They were already aching, in spite of Mac and Ilham’s support, and her shoulders shook with effort. Why had she practiced lifting heavy objects? Weight meant nothing now. It was time that threatened to drain her strength—time and distance—and there was still so very far to go.
Cleo must have sensed that. “Hold me, Ash…keep me flying…”
“I’ve got you. Always.” Nothing else mattered. Ash braced against the strain, calling up reserves of strength she’d never known she possessed.
Her concern about the guards diminished when Mac murmured in her ear, “Nisreen tells me that the few men watching from the walls are falling in prayer, none raising guns. When Cleo rose from the earth, with the Shadow Hand banner, they cried out that she must be a djinn, or an afreet, but the women all tell each other that she is an angel.”
The river of freed prisoners flowed on, following the beacon that was Cleo. Cleo kept on, pointing out each turn to be made, held up by Ash. And Ash was held up by Mac and Ilham.
“How far to go?” Rigid concentration roughened Ilham’s voice. Ash looked only at Cleo, not daring to glance away to see how long the river of women had become, whether it yet had an end, when it might reach the trucks and safety.
Mac freed one hand to raise her field glasses. Ilham increased her support.
“Our transports have turned on their headlights,” Mac said. “They make a stream of brightness. Only a quarter of the way still to go before Cleo reaches the safe zone.” She returned her full support to Ash and murmured, “Don’t forget to breathe,” close at her shoulder.
The turns Cleo directed came more closely together now as the minefield became more vicious. Ash watched with such intensity that her eyes burned. I can make it…we can make it… Deep in her mind, or spirit, or gut, she felt that some other source of power had joined what she already had. No time to think about that now. Keep on. Keep Cleo flying. Keep on.
She wasn’t aware of the trucks forging further out onto the plain until they stopped again at what must be the very edge of the minefield, their lights a bright river showing where safety began. Even when Cleo reached that line, Ash kept holding her up, while the stream of escapees continued, lit by the beams from the drone, until Mac tugged at her arm. “No enemies are following them. You can lower her now, gently. Razhan and the others will get her onto a truck bed and bring her the rest of the way.”
Ash lowered Cleo, felt her reach the ground, felt other arms support her.
“All safe now,” Cleo sent, then cut off communication.
Ash didn’t lower her arms, but stretched them out to her sides, flexing the stiff muscles, rotating her shoulders, still staring out over the plains below. Mac and Ilham stepped away and began gathering their gear. It was time to move.
“What the hell!” Ilham’s cry hit at the same time a blast of light from a previously unseen drone streamed past them from behind, momentarily blinding them when they glanced back at it. Blinking wildly, Ash refocused to witness her own dark shadow cast out from the rocky outcrop and projected far out over the plain, a giant, elongated figure with outstretched arms like something out of a monster movie—or a superhero one.
For half a minute a wild, intoxicating pride in her power surged through her—those magnified shadow arms and hands could reach down and lift great boulders, destroy ancient cities!—until she remembered Cleo’s words. “We’re only human.” That brought her back to herself. She spun around, shielded her eyes against the drone’s glare with one arm, and sent the intrusive technology spinning away. As she watched, the drone executed a graceful loop, still streaming light, then flew off toward the safe zone.
“Bastard!” She’d tacitly assented to photos and videos making her look like a big deal in Boston without showing her face too clearly, but not to this staged drama, not to whatever technician was behind it.
Ash sent Mac off with the truck to reunite with Nisreen and stayed on with Ilham, watching again through the helmet’s visor to see whether any escapees in the column needed help. Razhan’s troops were still among them, going up and down the line, making sure no one strayed or fell behind.
At last, confident she could leave her post, Ash followed Ilham down the steep, dark side of the bluff to the motorcycle and they headed for the repatriation camp and field hospital set up beyond the first range of hills.
As the motorcycle wove carefully along the road through the camp, the milling crowds seemed chaotic, but nearer the center they saw distinct family groups reuniting. There were smiles, but even more tears, and some of the released captives seemed to be on the verge of collapsing. Ash saw one woman huddling on the ground with a family group around her, and when the woman straightened slightly it was clear that she held a small baby in her arms. The older man and woman next to her took several steps backward.
“Plenty of that going on,” Ilham grumbled. “She’s probably been in captivity so long that the father can only be one of the enemy.”
“What will happen to her, and others like her?”
“They’ll be cared for, one way or another, but…” Ilham stopped the bike and looked back. Ash looked, too, and held her breath as the older woman took one step forward, then another, and reached out, taking the baby and holding it close. The man lifted his daughter to her feet. “That’s the best way, for sure,” Ilham said gruffly.
They kept on, going slower and slower as the crowd grew denser. Finally, inside the hospital complex, they walked along beside the motorcycle. Things seemed more organized there. In an expansive tent with the sides rolled up, dozens of pallets were lined up, all of them occupied, but many of the patients Ash could see didn’t have apparent physical injuries.
“Exhaustion,” she murmured almost to herself.
Ilham nodded, but added, “Trauma, too. Mental trauma.”
“Of course. Their captivity must have been hell to endure.”
“Oh yeah. And the escape…” Ilham paused, looked straight at Ash, and made a gesture with one hand that took Ash longer than it should have to interpret.
“Oh! You mean Cleo ‘flying,’ and…and all the rest.” Of course. The lion heads roaring over them. The walls being torn down by an invisible force. The tremendous noise, the massive destruction. How brave they had been, how strong, to take the chance for freedom even through such terrifying and inexplicable turmoil. No wonder they were exhausted, and traumatized. She couldn’t have done them more harm than good, in the circumstances—this was war, after all—but still.
Ilham gave her a gentle thump on the shoulder. “Better this way than being slaves. They’ll mostly get over it. And as we’ve been moving along I’ve heard plenty of folks chattering, happy enough to believe that supernatural beings from their legends took a hand in saving them.”
Ash was only half-listening, still gazing into the tent, a dark mood rising in her, until Ilham jerked on her sleeve.
“Hey, I see some folks I need to get to. I had friends in that hellhole. Here…” She grabbed a passing nu
rse and told her to get somebody to take “Shadow Hand” to Cleo’s private tent.
So much for anonymity. Ash followed the young nurse, who was too awestruck to speak, pausing when she heard a familiar voice in a tent they passed. When she looked in through the narrow space where a flap hung open, Mac was there on her knees beside a cot where silver-haired Nisreen lay, one hand on Mac’s bowed head, the other stroking her back. Their voices were low, but vibrating with feeling so intense that Ash pulled herself away to preserve their privacy.
The nurse was just pointing to Cleo’s tent when Ash was jolted to a stop by another voice, one that belonged to the other side of the world.
“Hey, Ash, how’d you like my latest gizmos?”
“Twelve!” Ash’s reaction was not exactly welcoming. “That sure explains a lot.” So Twelve had been Mac’s “independent entrepreneur.” No wonder Ash had felt like she was in a movie.
Twelve shrugged. “I guess you didn’t care for my money shot at the very end, but at least I only filmed you from behind. Even after all my videos, nobody would recognize you in a crowd. Just the same, that image would make a great movie poster. You’ve gotta admit the rest of the gig was well done.”
“Yeah, okay, but I need to see Cleo now.”
“Oh, she’s all right. I’ve already told her about our next gig.”
“There is no next gig.”
Twelve went on as though Ash hadn’t said a thing. “Arizona. Jian and her whole crew are already there. I’ll be there later, after I do another job for Mac. She knows how to get funding! Anyway, did you know that lots of those sex-trafficked Chinese women are smuggled first to South and Central America and then over the border from Mexico?”
Arizona. Red rock canyons. Wild horses. High country ranches. But all Ash said, for now, was, “No, and I don’t want to hear it. Maybe later. Right now, get lost, before I rip you into two Sixes. Or a Seven and a Five.”
“Ha! Good one.” Twelve turned casually away and faded into the shadows between tents. Ash watched her go. There was something different about her, a sense of purpose, maybe, and confidence that came with success.
The nurse’s awe had been replaced by a repressed giggle, but she composed herself and lifted the flap to the next tent.
“Cleo,” Ash began, then stopped short when she saw her on a narrow cot, one leg splinted, bandages covering the left side of her face.
She could still talk out of one side of her mouth. “Hey, what a victory! Don’t look like that, I’m okay. Only scrapes and bruises under the bandages. You won’t believe how hard it was, keeping in character, managing not to take down either of those assholes who hit me until the very end. I didn’t even curse!”
“That is hard to believe. But your leg…”
“Just a crack and a torn ligament. Soon mended. We need some time to make different plans for our next campaign, anyway. Gotta keep ’em guessing.” She looked closely at Ash’s face. “You look pale! Better pull up a chair and sit down.”
There were no chairs, but the nurse brought in a pile of threadbare floor cushions. Ash kept on standing, and gestured for the nurse to leave them alone.
“No more campaigns like that one, for sure.”
Cleo must have had about enough residual adrenaline in her system to keep her cocky. “You’re just jealous because I got to fly through the air like Superman, and you didn’t. Did you see Twelve? She sure outdid herself with those drone contraptions once she had the chance and the backing. Maybe next time she can film me flying over the Grand Canyon.”
“Only if you’re flapping your own wings.” Ash fell to her knees on the cushions and leaned close, stroking Cleo’s uninjured cheek with a gentle finger. After a minute or two Cleo wriggled, trying without luck to sit up.
“Want some help?” Ash carefully raised her without laying a hand on her bruised body, then stood and slid a cushion behind her. “Is that comfortable?”
In answer, Cleo reached out both arms, and Ash leaned in for a tentative hug.
“I won’t break,” Cleo said, holding her more tightly.
“You’d better not.” Ash shifted so that she sat sideways on the edge of the cot with her head on Cleo’s shoulder, her lips brushing Cleo’s neck. Have I broken too much already? she thought, the dark mood returning, and only realized that she had sent the words to Cleo when she felt the response.
“What’s wrong?”
Feeling each other’s thoughts skin to skin sent a wave of joy through Ash. The dark mood began to lift, but didn’t dissipate entirely. She sat straighter so that she could meet Cleo’s eyes, and spoke her thoughts aloud, low enough that if the nurse were close outside the tent she wouldn’t hear. “Can you imagine how brave and strong the women we freed had to be? Some of them are in the hospital tent, exhausted, but some are also traumatized. Not just from all the noise and smashing and threat of mines, but the impossibility of it all, walls torn down by an invisible force, and…well, all of that.”
“And me flying over their heads.” Cleo began to slide down the cushion. The adrenaline was fading, her own stress catching up with her. “But if I…if I hadn’t been so slow, hadn’t got myself bunged up, hadn’t needed to be held up like that…” Her voice wavered.
“No! Flying above, doing the impossible, may have been exactly the right thing to do, the thing that made it all work.” Ash thought back to what Mac had related that Nisreen had said. “Do you know what they’re calling you? The women you saved, the soldiers here, most likely even the enemies in the city?”
“Definitely not Superman,” Cleo began, but her bravado gave way to a look of bone-deep exhaustion. “Tell me,” she whispered.
“Some think you’re a djinn, or an afreet in a rare good mood. But the ones who get it right say it was an angel who led them out of that hell.”
“No…” Cleo began, but Ash put a finger over the exposed side of her mouth.
“That’s okay. I guess I can put up with an angel. Angels don’t absolutely have to be celibate, do they?”
For once, Cleo had nothing to say. The aftershock of what they’d done was hitting her, and tears blurred her visible eye. Ash bent, at first to conceal the tears in her own eyes, then to lay her weary head once more on Cleo’s uninjured shoulder. They rested together, breathing as one, absorbing a strength from each other even a goddess could envy, and far beyond any superpowers a goddess could grant.
About Sacchi Green
Sacchi Green is an award-winning writer and editor of erotica and other stimulating genres. Her stories have appeared in scores of publications, including eight volumes of Best Lesbian Erotica, four of Best Women’s Erotica, and four of Best Lesbian Romance. In recent years she’s taken to wielding the editorial whip, editing eighteen lesbian erotica anthologies, most recently 2010 Lambda Award Winner Lesbian Cowboys, Girl Crazy, Lesbian Lust, Lesbian Cops, Girl Fever: 69 Stories of Sudden Sex for Lesbians, and 2014 Lambda Award Winner Wild Girls, Wild Nights, all from Cleis Press.
Sacchi lives in the Five College area of western Massachusetts, with frequent stays in the White Mountains of New Hampshire.
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Blog: sacchi-green.blogspot.com
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