by DJ Molles
Back to his left. Mala and Lux coming towards him, but not very purposefully, he had to say. Kind of drifting. Like they couldn’t quite figure out how to make their legs walk. Had they been injured? Brain-addled by the explosions?
Perry pointed into the empty wastelands where the Nine had stood. “Are they…?”
Mala simply shook her head at him. Her eyes looked like they hadn’t blinked in a while.
Then they did blink, and looked down. Somewhere around Perry’s feet. And Mala stopped walking towards him. Lux did too.
A hissing sound reached his ears, right about that same time, and he jerked his eyes towards the wreck, hoping something wasn’t leaking or about to explode and catch them all on fire. But then the hissing sound took shape in his ears.
“Fffffffffffffffuck.”
He jerked backwards, as shocked as Mala and Lux to see Stuber rolling onto his back, a fine cake of dust clinging to the left side of his face. Stuber puffed some out of his mouth, coughed, spat. He blinked a few times against some crumbs of it clinging to his eyes, then his vision swam into focus. Spotted Perry’s boots. Traveled up his legs and body and rested on his face. Squinting against the morning sun. Brow crinkling up.
“Stuber,” Perry managed, wholly confused, fairly certain he was back in the Otherwhere, experiencing some other reality.
Stuber twisted his body, groaning an affirmative sound as though to confirm that he was present, but not all there. He looked at the wreckage of the skiff. Eyes seemed to wander a bit, tracking the steady progress of a ribbon of black smoke. Skipped off of Mala and Lux.
Slowly back to Perry. “Did I really fucking survive that?”
“Stuber.” Perry’s eyes slipped down to Stuber’s belly. The shirt was still shredded and bloodsoaked. But all his innards were back where they belonged. All the rest of him clung with charred and tattered remnants of clothes, but the body they contained looked untouched. Like he was some actor that had simply donned the costume of a hard-fought warrior.
“It’s the whiskey,” Stuber grunted, rolling onto his side, straggling himself up. “Makes the bones strong. Now. Where’d those fuckers go? We were just…” he stopped in the midst of brushing his knees off. Head snapped to the wreck. “Sagum and Teran.” Over to Mala and Lux. “You assholes had shields—but where the fuck is Sagum and Teran? Their frail bodies couldn’t handle that impact! Have you looked for them?”
“Stuber.”
But Stuber was already charging back towards the wreck, then angling to a form lying in the dust. “Shit-fuck!” Stuber snapped, as Perry finally got his feet moving and followed. Stuber slid to his knees at Sagum’s side, hands already crabbing across the body to try to find the wound. “Ah, shit, he looks dead.”
Perry staggered to a stop over Stuber’s shoulder, staring down into Sagum’s wide-open eyes. They were looking up at the sky, unblinking, mouth parted, slack and unfeeling.
“But…” Perry stammered, now doubly confused.
“Not dead,” Sagum muttered. Still hadn’t blinked.
Stuber stopped moving. Hunched there. “Can you move? Are you paralyzed?”
“No. I’m just not supposed to be here.”
“Here, like…”
“I should be dead.”
“It’s fine. I get that feeling all the time. It’ll pass. Can you move your legs?”
Sagum lifted his head so that he could look down at his legs. One rose up off the ground, hale and hearty, though missing its pant leg and boot.
“Oh, good,” Stuber noted. “You’re not paralyzed.” Started to prod and poke at Sagum’s limbs. “Any broken bones? No? Well, that’s a fucking miracle. You look like you might have early osteoporosis. You should have Petra check that out.”
“He won’t have any broken bones,” Perry said, his words a little fumbly, like his mouth was numb. “Or osteoporosis.”
“You a fuckin’ doctor now, too? That another one of the gifts your All-Kind gave you?” Stuber snapped to his feet. “Where’s Teran?”
Perry knew where she was. Looked over to where her body had lain, doubtlessly in pieces like the rest. Except that it wasn’t. She was lying there on her side, looking at him through a curtain of frazzled hair, looking like she couldn’t decide whether to scream or puke.
She decided to scream. “WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED?”
Perry shook his head. “I don’t know what the fuck happened.” He turned and looked at Mala and Lux, who had soundlessly floated their way back up to him, and were standing somewhat creepily by his shoulder when he turned. “What the fuck happened, Mala?”
She raised a finger. Pointed it at Sagum. “His head was gone. Not the whole thing.” She grabbed the upper right of her own head. “Just this part.” Then she motioned at everything below the waist. “And all of that. Gone too.” She looked up at Perry, expression briefly haunted. “I swear it. I remember seeing the inside of his nose. It’s very distinct in my mind.”
Sagum, somewhat stricken by this account, began to feel his face to make sure it was still there.
“They were all shooting you,” Lux said, his voice surprisingly deadpan. As though reciting a written Inquisitor’s report. “All nine of them, firing on you at once. Then you gathered it into a ball. I don’t know what happened after that. I thought the ball consumed you. But then you exploded. Except for…you didn’t.” A flash of a crease between his brows the only note of emotion. “But you did explode. In blue.” A finger tracing an arc overhead. “Big, blue bubble. Almost like a shield. Perhaps a few hundred yards in diameter.” Then he stopped and looked very troubled as though the next part didn’t make any sense at all. As though he’d gotton his chronologies mixed up, just like Whimsby. “And then you were not exploded anymore. I feel like something happened in between, but for the life of me I can’t remember what.” He raised his eyebrows to Perry, almost pleading with him to fill in the blank spots. “You don’t remember either?”
Perry opened his mouth, confident that the memory would be there, but it wasn’t. Hell, it had only been a few moments ago. And it had seemed so clear and real at the time. He remembered being in a place. Couldn’t remember what it was. Just that it was neither here nor there nor anywhere. It was Otherwhere.
Then some things had happened. And some stuff.
And that was about all he could remember.
Perry frowned. “I don’t think there’s anything else. I think you covered it.”
Teran let out a little noise that caught Perry’s attention again. She was standing there, looking down at herself, as though shocked she’d found legs attached to her hips. “I don’t think anything’s broken!” her eyes came up to Perry’s, and she began walking, as though fearing her ankles were made of glass and might shatter at any step. “How is nothing broken? And where did the Nine go?”
Lux, who had been the one to find Teran’s body, looked a tad queasy. “Oh, it was broken,” he muttered.
Teran, more confident in her limbs, began to walk normal, began to look around, first out to where the Nine had been, with a cautious frown across her features. “Where did they go?” she repeated.
Perry found himself rubbing the back of his neck. “You know? I’m not really sure. All I can say is that they’re not here anymore. Not on this earth. Maybe not in this universe.”
Teran stopped in front of him, face blank, like she couldn’t decide on an emotion. “So you killed them?”
“That…” Perry shook his head. “It’s…uh…maybe.”
“Maybe?” Teran raised her brows.
Perry took her face in his hands. Felt her skin against his fingertips. Marvelled at the fact that it was whole, and alive. “You ask too many questions, Teran. I don’t have answers. I’m just glad you’re alive.”
She seemed a little taken aback by his hands on her face, but not displeased. An awkward second passed, where neither of them quite knew what to do next. Teran glanced over his shoulder. “That’s quite the audience,” she said, a little
gruffly.
Perry let go of her face, wondering why it felt so suddenly melancholy to do so. He turned and followed her gaze back towards Karapalida. Back towards the line of people, all along one section of the horizon. Mordicus and his legionnaires, standing as though in reserve for a battle. Standing witness.
Perry swallowed, feeling a whole mix of things that he didn’t really want to feel at that moment. Would have preferred just to feel triumphant and awesome. And he did…but there were other things mixed in it too. Some of them bitter, some of them sweet. Still, that lingering sense of so much having passed by in a dream. The grief of losing his friends still present, for some reason, still fresh, even as he felt elated at having them alive. A measure of surrealism to the whole thing. A very logical doubt that any of this could be real, and a fear that he might wake up from it at any moment.
But…mostly it was good.
And seeing all those people that had made a decision to come out here, rather than leave him to die alone…
Not as many enemies as he’d supposed. A lot of assholes, it was true. But still friends.
Perry grunted. Looked skyward. Swished his eyes about to spread the wateriness and keep it from spilling over. “That’s…uh…nice.”
“Pardon, friends,” A polite, but very amplified voice called out.
Perry and the others spun to the sound of Whimsby, saw him lying there, just a head, a torso, and an arm. The arm, up in the air, like a kid wanting to ask a question. “I’d drag myself to you, but it seems rather undignified for the circumstances. Perhaps one of you could give me a hand?”
“Whimsby!” Sagum was on his feet and running like a worried mother hen. “Oh shit! What did they do to you!” Worry turned to anger as he stopped, his hands clawing his hair, staring down at Whimsby. “Shit! I just put you back together!”
“Not to worry, Master Sagum,” Whimsby soothed. “It’s easy enough to fix. In fact, if you can reattach my other arm, I might could do the rest myself.”
Perry realized he was still standing in the same spot, while the others had all jogged after Sagum to check on Whimsby. Stuber, Teran, Mala, Lux. All of them whole. All of them alive. All of it impossible. And yet it was.
“What did happen?” he murmured to himself.
“Well, it looks like you finally figured out Dispersion.”
He jerked, looked up in the direction of the wrecked skiff, and spotted her gliding out of the smoke as though she’d been hiding in the particles the whole time. Hell, maybe she had. Perry had no idea what was what anymore. But he was starting to get used to the sensation.
“Niva,” he said, cocking his head to one side, trying to figure how angry he should be with her, replaying all that had happened, sussing out whether he had any legitimate grievances. He raised a finger and wagged it at her, but couldn’t really come up with a reason to be pissed. “You…I feel like you fucked me over. But I’m coming up blank.”
“Maybe that’s because I didn’t fuck you over.” She strode towards him casually, her hands in the pocket of her light canvas jacket, red hair pulled back, as though she were about to start working.
Perry muddled that over. “Now, I understand you never expressly said certain things, and maybe I did jump to some conclusions. But you certainly implied a lot…”
He trailed off, realizing she was laughing at him.
“I’m sorry, is this fucking funny?” Perry asked, but lost the heat halfway through the question and found himself wheezing out an ill-restrained chuckle. “Oh, it’s all funny in hindsight because everything worked out. But you didn’t know how it was gonna work out. So stop fucking laughing and be serious, and think about what would’ve happened if we all died. Then you’d feel real bad about all your mind games and riddles and obtuse instructions.”
Niva made as though wiping a tear from her eye. “Oh, settle yourself. Of course I knew it was going to work out.” She poked him in the chest. “See, I’m not the one with the faith problem. That’s you. You didn’t have faith in me. But I had complete faith in you.”
Perry narrowed his eyes. “So there is such a thing as Dispersion?”
Niva looked at him blankly. “What? Did you think I just laid my hands on you for the pleasure of your touch? Of course I gave you Dispersion. How the hell do you think all your friends are alive right now?”
“So they have Confluence?”
Niva shrugged. “For the moment that you brought them back to life, they did. You see, Dispersion only works when Confluence is flowing in a certain direction.” Niva smiled at him, then pointed to the ground between them. “Look at that, Perry.”
He looked down. Didn’t see much. Just that light-tan dust, ubiquitous across the wastelands. A series of slightly darker patches, where Sagum’s blood had soaked…
Perry knelt, staring intensely at the ground. Living all his life amongst the wastelands made him something of a connoisseur of dust. He knew what it looked like in its varied states. How it looked when you spit in it, or pissed in it. How it looked when it turned muddy with blood.
That was not how these dark patches of ground looked now.
See, living all his life amongst the wastelands, Perry wasn’t so much a connoisseur of actual dirt. But he’d seen it once before. And touched it. Back in the Crooked Hills, where there was rain, and grass, and dirt, and vegetation to grow in it.
He reached out. Pressed his fingers into it. Felt the sponginess of the texture—not just the sluicy gush of dust moistened by blood.
“That’s actual dirt,” Perry whispered.
“Perry?” Teran’s voice behind him.
He stood and turned, found his friends approaching, somewhat cautiously, eyeballing the newcomer. Whimsby was draped, legless, between Mala and Lux, while Sagum hurried along, fussing over wires while he kept a curious side-eye on Niva.
Teran stopped a few paces from them. Stuber rounded to stand by her shoulder.
None of them looked like they knew where to begin.
Stuber, unable to stand the hesitation, gave Niva a brief flick of the fingers, up and down. “So, you’re…?”
“Your friend calls me Niva,” she said, dryly.
“Right, but…” Stuber arched one brow, buried the other. “Are you…?”
“Yes,” Perry put in. “She’s the one. The woman with the red hair. The magical hobo. And…I guess…one of a mystical race of beings called the All-Kind.”
Stuber’s expression didn’t move. “Right. So what happened with the Dispersion?”
Niva smiled. “I’m sure you have plenty of questions. You’ll get answers eventually. Unfortunately…I’m here for something else, and…” she looked apologetically at Perry. “It needs to be done. The sooner the better. These things, oh how they can begin to run and tangle if you don’t pay them proper attention.”
Stuber grunted, a little hurt. “Thought I was gonna fly and shit. Shoot energy beams.”
Niva gave Stuber a sly wink. “Don’t worry, old boy. You’re dangerous enough without those things.” She looked across them all as her gaze slowly turned, as though taking a tour on its way back to Perry. Teran, still as dubious and hard-nosed as ever, not giving Niva one bit of quarter, even if she had flattered Stuber into compliance. Lux and Mala, perhaps a bit mesmerized, perhaps a bit confused. Maybe even doubtful that she was real. Sagum, looking eager and curious. Whimsby, hanging there, looking like someone who’s got so much to say and so much to ask, but chooses to bide his time.
Finally, her eyes back on Perry. “Your friends have nothing that they need to give back to me.” She held out her hand. “But you do, Perry. You’ve done wonderful work. You’ve done what I knew you could do. And there’s not really enough words to truly encompass what you’ve done.” Her eyes flitted to the others. Then back. A flash of something like remorse. But then she smiled again. “You’ve meant a lot. More than you probably know. And…well, that’s why you have to give it back, Perry.”
Perry was holding his own wrist
, as though his hands were something that might be swiped by a pickpocket. “But what if there are other fights?”
“I’m sure there will be.”
“And what if I have to fight them?”
“Perhaps your fighting days are over.”
“People won’t believe me when I tell them what’s happened.”
Niva gestured out at the legion that still stood and watched at a hesitant distance. “You’ve a lot of witnesses.”
Perry’s mouth worked. And what came out next he said quietly, almost like he thought he could keep the others from hearing. “What’ll I be?”
Niva’s smile became sympathetic. She raised her chin. “You’ll be you. Exactly as you are right now, standing here at this moment. Dusty, sweaty, bloody and scarred, with wild eyes that hold a whole universe right in the center of the black. You’ll be just like this forever.”
Perry had no clue what she was talking about, but was running out of reservations to give voice to. So he wasn’t going to have powers. Did it really matter? He hadn’t had them—not really—for the vast majority of his life. Felt weird to lose them after he’d grown so accustomed to them. But…what’re you gonna do?
“Deal’s a deal,” Perry sighed, and stretched out his hand towards Niva’s.
“You understand,” she said quickly, just before his fingertips touched hers. He hesitated. Had been focused on her hand, but now raised his eyes to hers. “That it’s…everything.”
And there stood a long moment where Perry was rendered as immobile as a dead man, and felt his blood running about as cold. What she’d said…well, it could’ve meant anything. But somehow it went right around Perry’s conscious head, and straight into him, into some part of him, maybe the part that had lived and died so many millions of times in so many millions of years that had all gone by like a flash, and it cranked his guts tight.
“Of course,” Niva said, much quieter now. Seeming so close that her lips dominated Perry’s vision, he didn’t seem to be able to look at anything else. “There’s not really a choice. A deal is a deal, as you pointed out. But, I wanted you to know what it meant when you took my hand.”
