by DJ Molles
Her hand swept gently across his shoulder blades, around his head, and settled on his face, turning him to face her. Her eyes were earnest. Kind. He saw in a moment that she was what she claimed to be. Nothing more, nothing less.
“Anger can make the fear go away,” she said. “Anger can make it easier to harness Confluence. But you know what else makes the fear go away? A sense of humor.”
He managed a nod. “Right. Yeah.”
She patted his cheek in a somewhat motherly fashion. “Now sit. Catch your breath. Things will settle in a moment. You’ve had a big realization. That’s never easy to handle.”
He plopped down, gracelessly. “My longstaff. My clasp.”
“You don’t need them.”
He looked up at her. “Did I ever need them?”
She shrugged. “In a way, yes. You needed them when you believed you needed them.” A wink. “Don’t get hung up on the details. For now, focus on the big picture. Focus on the task at hand.”
He managed to close his mouth for the first time since falling, and work some spit back onto his tongue. “Beating the Nine?” he swallowed. “But, Niva…there’s nine of them. And only one of me.”
“Oh, is it all about numbers, then?”
He looked at her incredulously. “In a fight? Yeah. It has a lot to do with numbers.”
She sat down beside him, cross-legged. Propped her elbows on her knees. Settled her chin in her hands. The repose made her look like a child now. How fluidly she could shift back and forth, even while maintaining the same form.
“Do you still not see?” she nearly whispered. “After all of that?”
“I want to see,” he replied. “Help me to see.”
“But you already have seen,” she said, her voice becoming sharp. “You’ve seen, and you’ve been told. There is nothing more that I can do, Perry. I’ve shown you all that I will. It’s up to you to perceive.”
He closed his eyes. “I’m trying. Be patient with me.”
She breathed out noisily. “I’ve been patient for thousands of years. What’s a bit more?”
“Give me the other powers that you have,” Perry said, suddenly unafraid to ask for more than he knew he deserved. “Give me the other gifts. Make me more powerful than them.”
“I’ve not made you anything, Perry. You are what you are. You are made as you’ve been made by things far greater than me.” She shifted, pursing her lips thoughtfully. “But…since you do not believe that you can do this alone…” She eyed him sidelong. “You have friends, do you not?”
Perry tallied them in his mind. “Yes.”
“And of those friends, how many do you trust?”
“Trust is a complicated thing. I can trust someone to fight beside me, but not trust them to keep a secret, or to think clearly in a bad situation. What kind of trust are we talking about?”
She shuffled about so that the knees of her crossed legs almost touched him. She was very close. Peering at him in a way that told him she was seeing more than what appeared to the naked eye. Searching. Perceiving.
Now, if only he could do that.
“I’m going to give you a gift, Perry. You asked for it, and I can give it, and so I will. It might not be what you want—it won’t make you more powerful, or more dangerous. But it will give you the help you believe that you need.”
At this point, Perry would take what he could get. “Okay.” He breathed deep, stretching his chest, sitting up straight. “I’m ready.”
“Not so fast,” she said. “What I’m about to give you is the gift of Dispersion. And this is why I asked about friends that you trust. If you were to give your powers to a person that did not have them…would they give them back?”
“Give them back?”
“Would you give them back, Perry?”
He suddenly felt like a man in a market who’s been taken by a hocker. The thing for sale something that he wanted so badly. But the price quoted being more than he could bear to pay.
“I don’t know.”
She shook her head slowly. “But you must, Perry. You have Confluence. And the gift of Dispersion will allow you to give that power freely to whomever you choose. But you must choose wisely. Because they cannot keep these powers. And neither can you.”
He knew he was wrong, but he tried anyways, like a kid bargaining for an extra cookie. “Give you back the gift of Dispersion? Yeah, sure.”
“No, Perry. You have to give all of it back.”
He wanted to swallow, but his mouth had gone pasty again. Nothing to pull down his throat and wet that dry pipe. “You want me to…give you my powers back? Confluence?”
A single nod.
“But…they’re mine. You said so yourself. They were given to me. I was made this way.”
“And indeed you were. But, as I said before, humanity was given the gift of Confluence by the Ferox. And it was not theirs to give.” She reached across the narrow distance between them and laid a hand on his knee. “I have great hopes for your people. Great hopes for you. But you are not ready, Perry. Humanity is not ready. They cannot handle that much power and not devolve into just another version of the demigods. You know this is true. You know they’re not ready.”
He wanted to argue it, but he couldn’t. Hadn’t he just been bitching about how these people couldn’t stop fighting each other long enough to address the real threat? And how would all their petty, spiteful differences be resolved when they could all spit balls of energy at eachother and fly about at will?
Another five hundred years of forever war. That’s what would happen.
“I can give you this gift, Perry. But I can’t simply take it from you once it’s been given. By its nature, a gift is simply given. But I’m asking you to promise me that you’ll give it back. Not just Dispersion, but Confluence as well. That is what I need you to promise me. That is the level of trust I need to have in you. That you give it all back.”
Perry hung his head. Buyer’s remorse even before the thing is bought. “That’s a difficult thing to promise, Niva. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m shit at leading these people. I can’t get them to cooperate. Everyone just wants to run off and do their own thing.”
She squeezed his knee. “Perry.”
He looked up at her.
“It’s never been your job to unite them. It’s never been your job to lead them. It has only ever been your job to make them free again.”
“But how can I promise you that they’ll give it back?”
“That is why you have to trust them.” She tilted her head. “Is there no one that you trust that much?”
And here is what it all came down to. If he couldn’t trust them, then he would have to go it alone. He would have to take on the Nine by himself.
Everything had been leading to this. This was his mission. This was what his father had given him to do. This was the task that his whole life had been about—to free humanity from the powers that enslaved them. To break the power of the gods.
And he would do it. He knew that he had to. It wasn’t an option not to.
So then it came down to whether or not he trusted himself to go it alone…or trusted his friends enough to make a wishful promise to Niva, that they would give it all back, all the power that let them be free, all the power that made him who he had become. No longer a godbreaker. Back to being a man. A runt. A Shortstack.
Why did everything always come with so high a price to pay?
And would he even survive to pay it?
What if this was all a suicide mission? Could he casually bring his friends into this fight, knowing that their chances of winning were so small? Was it, perhaps, better that they lived in enslavement than died fighting?
Men say all kinds of noble things about dying for freedom. But when it comes right down to the choice, most people choose to live.
Perry knew that he was going into this fight. That much had already been decided. Live or die, he was going to do it. He was strapped into a
machine that was carrying him to one destination—had been carrying him there his whole life.
So do you try to save your friends? Or do you drag them into the fight with you?
And he realized in that moment, that he’d forgotten about the real question: Whether or not he trusted them.
He sucked in a big breath, and belted out his declaration before he could rethink it: “I have five friends that I trust.” That’s not enough. “And I trust them completely.”
Niva gave him a wan smile, and reached out, touching her fingertips to his forehead. “Then we shall see which way the wheel turns.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
MASTERS OF THE FORLORN HOPE
Eventually, everyone has to sleep. Even in the midst of the end of all things, with fires burning low and stinking of flesh and hair. With sweat and dirt covering your skin. With nagging worries circling in your mind. Even with all of that, your body eventually gives up.
Stuber and Petra had reached their terminus right around two o’clock in the morning, as best Stuber could estimate. Webbings of their fingers still sticky from blood, scabbing and clotting beneath their fingernails. Smoke and dust smeared and smudged across their faces. Sweat half dried to a resin, their clothes clinging to them, their arms speckled with bits of everything.
They wandered out of the building that had become the new hospital, now stuffed to the brim and overflowing into the streets and alleys around it with the wounded and dying. Some of the wounded were still awake then, but most had fallen into a stupor of unmedicated pain, and even the ones that were still awake only had the strength to murmur quietly into the darkness.
A stillness had gripped the city of Karapalida, and in the midst of it, Stuber and Petra had lain down against a piece of toppled concrete. It was amazing what could be comfortable when you were falling asleep on your feet.
And so Stuber slept there, beneath the stars, the night clear and mild.
But, eventually, once the edge is taken off your exhaustion, all the things that might keep you awake come back with a vengeance. And so Stuber awakened at some point in the night—or very early morning—with his thoughts still swimming about restlessly, as though they’d never stopped.
Petra lay against him. Her face smooshed into his chest. Her hair tickling his cheek in the stir of a mild breeze. Her breathing even. An occasional snort, rendered adorable by Stuber’s perceptions, and it made him ache for the thing that he’d wanted for so long.
Or thought that he wanted.
To live. Not for fear of death, but to be with Petra. To have that shred of normalcy that they’d never had.
But was that really him? Oh, he’d imagined it for so long, that it held the patina in his mind of a talisman, well-loved and constantly turned over in the hands. An image made of pure fantasy. A house that didn’t exist, in some place that he couldn’t find, where there was peace, and he was happy to live in it.
Easy to fantasize about when you’re at war. When you’re on the run. When you’re always fighting for you life.
But somehow he’d never really imagined what he’d be doing in this fantastical place. He just pictured himself, with Petra, pleased as a man can be, maybe with a little family of their own. Just images, really. He’d never bothered to dive deeper into them. To think about how he would spend the long days and longer nights. About whether he was fit to be a good, peaceful husband. Whether he was fit to be a father.
What skills did he have besides killing? What wisdom could he impart to a child besides how to kill the other guy first? How could he provide for a wife and family, if it wasn’t at the muzzle of a gun?
A farming freehold, perhaps? Breaking the land? Tending to whatever crops they could get to grow in wherever this imaginary place was?
Yes. So that he could bring the Nine the fruits of his back-breaking labors, just to watch them burn it all to ash as a reminder that he was nothing.
No. Even if none of this had ever happened, even if the Nine had never been released, Stuber could never be happy in this fantasy. Whatever part of a man enabled them to be happy while at peace was broken inside of Stuber. Ruined by strife. Callused by conflict.
Some nights, when he’d been on campaign, or afterwards, when he’d been a fugitive, or even after that—recently—when he’d been searching for a way to topple the power structure so he could return to Petra, he’d imagined that the life he led was the lie.
Now he realized that the lie was in the fantasy.
And then the fantasy curdled. Darkened. Dimmed. Cracked through with a thousand tiny fractures. Like looking through glass that’d had a series of bullets pass through it.
Laying there in the darkness of Karapalida, with his wife snug against him, he pictured that fantasy in the light of truth. The truth that he was a rotten human being, fit only for killing other rotten human beings. He could never be a peaceful husband. He could never be a gentle father.
Even in all of this, he’d never doubted his love for Petra. Not even in that moment. But with her snugged up against him, he suddenly felt like a wild animal with its leg caught in a trap.
Slowly, ever so slowly, he began to disentangle himself from her.
She woke, or at least her eyes opened. She glared at him for the transgression of moving, mumbled something, and then rolled away from him.
Good. Let her sleep.
He rose up quietly and stood there, looking down at her.
Tangled hair. Filthy. Mouth slightly open. Faint snores. A bit of drool coming out.
She’d never been so lovely.
And she deserved better.
Stuber had never been prone to maudlin thoughts. And he didn’t think he was falling victim to them now. The facts are the facts, after all. And he saw it all laid out, a neat little timeline. The only one that resulted in Petra’s eventual happiness.
Namely, with him dead.
Oh, sure. She’d be sad. She’d mourn. It would hurt her. But she was also tough. Adaptable. She’d get through it. And she was a beautiful woman. She’d find someone else, wouldn’t she? Someone more capable than he of living a peaceful life.
When he thought about it like that, it felt almost selfish to stay alive. To string her along, endlessly tied to a man that couldn’t really give her what she deserved.
He grimaced. Looked away from her.
Well. Sleep was done and over with, it seemed.
He stooped and quietly drew up his rifle. Turned it over in his hands, looking at the way the dim lighting struck its contours. His mistress. The one that kept drawing him away from his wife. Luring him back to her cold, gunmetal embrace, because she filled something in him that he couldn’t fill any other place.
He’d never felt dirty about his weapons before, but he did now.
Sighing softly, he turned away from Petra, with his lover in his arms, and walked away. Wandered along the temple courtyard, towards the waning light of the fire where the stink of burning bodies grew stronger.
Around the corner of the temple, where a stone bust, toppled from the timewheel above, still lay on its side, leering sightlessly at him. He regarded it for a moment, tilting his head to match the angle. All the power and glory that it was supposed to invoke, now a desolate mythology that meant nothing.
He grunted at it, then continued on.
In the temple square, only ash and blackened bones remained of the hundreds of bodies that had been piled there. Femurs and tibias and clawed filanges all sticking out at random angles, like a pile of sticks that refused to burn. The ashes not a powder, but more of a greasy, blackened mud. A stain that Stuber figured would never really wash out of the stones.
A lone figure sat on the last step of the temple. Mala, with her longstaff hugged to her body and resting on her shoulder. Her long legs folded up nearly to her chest. Staring blankly at the ashes with her black hair hanging so that he couldn’t see much of her face.
Some kinship there. A fellow insomniac. A sister to him, not by the blood in the
ir veins, but by the blood on their hands.
She didn’t look up as Stuber sat down next to her, laying his rifle across his lap.
“I’m in no mood, legionnaire,” she murmured.
He sniffed. “Good. Me neither.”
This garnered him a look. A glare of squinted eyes through strands of hair. “What? No wry quips? No bawdy jokes? No braggadocious advice?”
“Meh. I’m fresh out.”
She shook her head and looked back at the ashes. “What brings you to staring at the dead at this hour?”
Stuber shrugged. “Restless. You?”
“Lost,” she said plainly.
He was only slightly tempted to tell her where she was. But that could be categorized as a wry quip. He didn’t have the energy for it. And he knew what she meant. No point in being dense about it.
He went with, “M-hm.” That’s always an appropriate response.
“Already tired of spending time with your lovely wife?”
Stuber hated how much that stung. Too truthful. He was too honest to deny it. Too much of a liar to confirm it. He chose not to respond.
Mala looked at him again. “You really are quiet tonight.”
“It seems appropriate.” A pause. “Should I leave you be?”
He fully expected her to say yes. Was already leaning forward to rise.
“No,” she said, looking away. “There’s enough death for two pairs of eyes.”
“The death is in the hospital. This?” he waved a hand at it. “This is just ashes and bones. No different than what’s mixed with the dust of the wastes from a thousand different battles. There’s probably not a square foot of ground that hasn’t had a man empty his blood into it. And you wouldn’t go around accusing all the ground of being death.”
“I didn’t kill them,” she stated, as though he’d accused her of it.
“No, you didn’t. You disposed of the bodies in the best way possible. Better than letting them rot in the streets where they’d only make others sick.”
“But I feel like I killed them.”
“Why? Because you’re a demigod?”
She snapped her head in his direction again, eyes angry. “Don’t go accusing me. You kill for money.”
