“I’m already a freak—she doesn’t need this to worry about too,” Jetta said. The same paralyzing fear that kept her silent for so long found its way back into her mind. This was wrong—all of it. Leeches were an abomination, humans were an infection, Fiorahians were street rats, and to love a woman was utterly unthinkable. She should have never—
“Don’t do that,” Triel said, pinning her wrist against the wall.
“What do you want from me?!” Jetta shouted.
“I want you to kiss me,” she whispered back.
Jetta stammered. Triel let go of her wrist but held onto her hand. The Healer moved over to the candles on the composite platform, gently pulling Jetta along so that she would lay next to her. Jetta allowed her to lead, though her body was stiff and numb.
“Jetta Kyron,” Triel said, tucking the stray strands of hair behind Jetta’s ear. “You can defeat the Motti, you can lead the Starways Alliance Fleet, you can face your brother and you can save a Fallen Healer countless times—but you can’t kiss the woman you love.”
“Hey!”
Something inside her snapped, and she leaned over to kiss the Healer. At first the kiss was tentative, but when Triel slipped her tongue into her mouth, the floodgates of uncharted desires broke open. Pushing Triel down onto her back, Jetta laid on top of her and kissed her with a passion she had never expected from herself. After so many months of suppression, what came forth was uncontrollable.
Triel gently slid her hand between them for a moment. Jetta could hear her trying to catch her breath as she spoke.
“You always were an easy tease.”
“That’s not funny.”
“Don’t stop,” Triel said, pulling her back on top of her.
The Healer started slowly, kissing her neck and caressing her sides. She unzipped the top of her lifesuit to the waist, letting her hands slip between her skin and the suit. Jetta hadn’t realized how cold it was outside until she felt the warmth of Triel’s touch against the biting chill.
As the Healer went back to kissing her lips, her hands moved underneath her shirt. Jetta gasped when the Healer touched the underside of her breasts. She had never been touched like this before, and even from her borrowed memories, she had never expected the actual sensations to be so powerful.
“I can’t–”
Triel kissed her mouth lightly and whispered, “Just stop and feel.”
Triel rolled back onto her side and rested her head on her arm. “You’ve never done anything like this before, have you?”
“I haven’t exactly had a normal life,” Jetta replied. She was somewhat annoyed by this, and also intimidated. Was she doing something wrong?
The Healer shook her head. “I didn’t mean to offend you. I just think we should take things slowly.”
“This body isn’t eight years old,” Jetta whispered. “I’m not eight years old. I’ve already grafted more experience than I will ever live out in my own lifetime.”
“I know.”
Triel moved her hand to Jetta’s stomach, this time going immediately under her shirt. Her fingers grazed the ugly self-inflicted scar that wouldn’t heal but didn’t linger long before traveling up her chest.
“You know, I’m new to this, too. I’ve never been with another telepath. It’s different, you know,” Triel commented as she lightly caressed the curve of Jetta’s breasts.
“Yeah?” Jetta automatically replied as Triel’s hand moved underneath her lifesuit to her hip, her leg and then pausing a moment before slipping down to her inner thigh.
“I’m not ready for that—”
“Don’t worry,” Triel said. Her muscles rippled for a moment but relaxed again as Triel kissed the tender place below her ear. “I wanted to try something else. Prodgies have the ability to enter one another both physically and psionically. It’s a more intimate experience. Do you want to try?”
Jetta was breathing hard now. Triel’s hand moved back to her chest and lightly pressed her fingertips above her heart. “Yes.”
The Healer, not taking her hand away, moved on top of her and rested her forehead against Jetta’s. Again she kissed her, but this time it was different. She slipped inside Jetta through her lips, the sensation not unlike all the other times she went within to manage her wounds, but within a heartbeat it became something much more. Jetta gasped as Triel filled her soul to the brink, illuminating the totality of her being as something far greater than she could have imagined.
As they overlapped each other on a different plane, Jetta held onto the Healer’s body and tried not to cry out. It was beyond any sensation she could have imagined. Their minds twined together as physical boundaries fell away, merging them in perfect unity. For the first time in Jetta’s life she knew wholeness; every action and reaction made sense to her, her senses not at war with each other but aligning in a harmony that soared toward something high and bright.
Jetta’s was still heaving for air when Triel rolled off of her and laid her head on her chest.
“That was better than anything I’ve known—or could have expected,” Jetta said between breaths.
Triel smiled. “I beat out thousands of years worth of stolen lovemaking?”
Jetta was still wide-eyed and breathless. “Definitely.”
They laid there quietly for some time, each other’s heartbeat drowning out the raging storm.
“Do you love me, Jetta Kyron?” Triel asked softly.
Jetta rolled toward her and lost herself in the blue serenity of Triel’s eyes. “I always have,” she whispered back.
Jetta put her arm around Triel and pulled her close, enwrapped in her warmth despite the barrier of clothing between them. As the winds battered their shelter and the storm raged overhead, Jetta’s eyes drifted closed, and for the first time in a long time, she slept.
TRIEL WAS JUST AS EXHAUSTED as Jetta but didn’t find sleep so easily. She drifted in and out of fitful dreams, never certain what was real and what was nightmare.
“She is not ready for what she must do. She will try and stop you,” she heard Arpethea saying again. Triel was back in the stone garden, the skies swirling with putrid greens and angry streaks of lightning. “She will not let you fulfill your destiny.”
The garden disappeared, and all Triel could see in the shadows were Arpethea’s fiery eyes. “Do not hesitate to end her life to save your own.”
Jetta materialized in front of her in the darkness, smiling and laughing with arms outstretched, until a gnarled hand emerged from nowhere and tore into her abdomen.
“Kill the Apparax!”
Triel woke with a start, sitting up straight, disoriented and unsure of where she was. After a moment, she remembered.
Crash-landing. Earth.
The shelter door had swung open in the wind and was banging loudly against the wall. The candles had blown out, leaving them in almost total darkness.
Something wasn’t right.
“Jetta,” Triel whispered, nudging her sleeping companion. Jetta rolled over with a yawn and sat up.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, stretching her neck and back.
“We’re not alone.”
Jetta immediately homed in on something moving in the shadows. Triel backed up as Jetta climbed over and put herself in front of Triel.
“Show yourself!” Jetta demanded.
The thing breathed noisily, sending out curls of vapor into the air. A boot moved into the low light, then a mangled thigh.
“The dead man—”
The words had no sooner left her mouth when the corpse came rushing at them. Jetta angled herself to redirect the attack and threw him against the far wall. The dead man slammed into one of the steel beams only to bounce off seemingly unharmed and rush them again.
“Grab the six-shooter!”
Triel fumbled with her helmet. Using its night vision mode, she dug the gun out of their pile of supplies.
“Kill it!” Jetta said as she wrestled the dead man away from Triel.
> Triel took aim but couldn’t get a clear shot. The dead man’s eyes glowed in the light filter of her night vision, his teeth dripping something oily that didn’t look like blood or saliva.
She closed her eyes and squeezed the trigger. Something fell heavily to the ground.
“Nice shot,” Jetta said. She rummaged around in the dark until she found her own helmet.
“Right in the head. And I thought you hated guns,” Jetta said, kicking the dead man’s skull. It bounced limply off her shoe.
Triel threw the gun down. “That’s not funny.”
Jetta inspected the corpse more closely this time. “I think this is a Necro. Or he became a Necro. These must be bites,” Jetta said, overturning his arm and exposing a black and purple patch of skin, “and these are claw marks.” She bowed her head. “This is my fault. I should have checked Agracia’s memories. She would have known better than to leave a body unattended on the surface. We should have burned him.”
“What are Necros?”
“Infected humans—well, really any living thing. Twenty-first century bioterrorism. ‘Dead things that don’t die,’ as Agracia liked to think of it.”
Triel remembered the link she made after healing the twins. “Similar to the plague on Tralora.”
Jetta raised a brow. “Yeah, I read your report on that. Very weird. The Deadwalkers must have taken their cue from Earth’s past.”
Jetta zipped up her lifesuit and started to gather their things. “It’s time we take off anyway. No use staying around here.”
“Jetta—I need to tell you something,” Triel said as Jetta hoisted their supplies onto her shoulder.
“Can it wait until we reach the nearest Pit?”
Triel played with the webbing between her fingers. She wanted so badly to tell Jetta about her vision with Arpethea, but she didn’t know how. The Seer’s words still rang in her head—
She will not let you fulfill your destiny
—but when she looked at Jetta, she only saw a young woman who confounded her, sometimes even frightened her, but found undeniably attractive.
Kill the Apparax.
And somehow she knew she would have to.
“Y-yes. Yes it can. Let’s go.”
The storm had tempered but not abated, and it was still a constant battle to stay upright against the wind and debris that whipped across the wasteland. The evening was deepening, making it hard to see even in night vision mode.
Jetta led the Healer inside a ruined building marked by fallen archways and rusted girders. The wind followed them, making strange whistling sounds through the breaks in the walls and sections of collapsed ceiling. Triel advanced slowly and kept a careful eye on what was happening in the shifting shadows of the dugout corridor. The dead man had probably been attacked somewhere in the vicinity of the shelter, meaning that there were probably Necros lurking around nearby.
“Down these stairs,” Jetta whispered through the helmet mike. The Healer spotted the staircase up ahead, reinforced by shoddy post-war construction.
Jetta touched Triel’s shoulder before handing her the six-shooter. “Hold onto this, okay? We’re almost there.”
They descended three flights of narrow stairs before entering a subbasement with a carved-out hole near the old sump system. Jetta stuck her head in and listened for a full minute before reemerging.
“I’ll go first, okay?”
“Jetta, don’t leave me—”
Jetta took her hand. “It’s okay. This is the passageway to the Pit. It’s clean. I’m just not sure about the fall, so let me test it first, okay?”
Jetta dropped the supplies first, and then stuck her feet down the hole. “Wait for my call, okay?”
And then she disappeared.
Triel gripped the six-shooter, aiming it at nothing in particular. It was very dark in this place, and because it was completely sheltered from the storm, unnervingly quiet.
A noise like the sound of a cockroach skirting across broken tiles pricked her ears. She adjusted the zoom on her visor and shakily aimed the gun at the movement, but nothing was there. Just her imagination.
Maybe Arpethea was my imagination, she thought to herself. Maybe I’m just afraid of what could be...
“Triel!”
The Healer looked over the dark lip of the hole and saw the faint glow at the end of a long curve.
“Jetta?”
Nobody called back. The voice was gone, the glow diminishing.
She looked back and was sure she saw something in the shadows this time. The noise was back, too, the scurrying sounds mounting to the tempest of insect wings. “Gods—please,” she prayed, trying to adjust the magnification of her visor.
Fingers, petrified and blackened, reached out from the shadows.
Triel, you must obey—
“Father?!”
She glimpsed only a flash of his cerulean eyes before she pitched backward and headfirst into the hole. She spread out her arms and legs to slow her descent, but the walls were strangely corrugated and irregular.
The curve in the channel lessened the impact of her fall, but she couldn’t tell up from down as she shot out the other end to land in a heap.
“Are you okay?”
The entire room was spinning away until Jetta took hold of her hand.
“Didn’t want to wait?”
“I thought I heard you call my name,” Triel said, rising on unsteady legs.
Jetta shook her head and picked up the rifle and gear off the ground. “No. I wasn’t done securing the area.”
Triel looked around. The concrete hideout seemed to be a staging area for access to and from the surface, its walls lined with the broken-down remains of an old subterranean wastewater management system. Decorative lights were strung around the walls and piping, though only a few were still flickering.
“I must be going crazy,” Triel mumbled to herself.
Jetta lifted her visor and scratched her forehead with the tip of the gun. “I think we might have spent too much time in the Temple of Exxuthus.”
“Agreed.”
“Come on,” Jetta said, helping her up. “I can smell the juke joints from here.”
“Jetta, wait,” Triel said, stopping her from lifting the decorated cardboard flap hiding the next descent. A dirty word was scrawled in red paint over the picture of a nude woman, but Jetta didn’t seem to notice. “There’s something I have to ask you.”
Jetta turned around and looked at her curiously. “What?”
“What do you think is going to happen to us? Where do you think this will lead?”
“What?” she repeated, this time confused.
Triel closed her eyes. “I need to know. Where is this all going to lead us?”
Jetta’s dark brows crossed in perplexity. “What are you worried about?”
Triel couldn’t tell her the truth. She couldn’t tell her friend about Arpethea’s warning and her spectral father’s demands. It was all nonsense anyway—her vision was most likely a result of ingesting the llalana leaf, and seeing the ghost of her father was most likely the manifestation of her oldest guilt. No, it wasn’t real—
—then how do I know that it is true?
Jetta looked at the ground, defeated by Triel’s silence. “Honestly?”
Triel hugged her chest to conceal her shivering. Fortunately Jetta was struggling too much with her own truths to notice her discomfort.
“I just know that it will be me and Victor in the end. Just the two of us. I don’t know why or how, but I’m right. And I have to be ready for that. I have to know what exactly he is—if he’s human or something else. But more importantly, I have to know more about myself, about why I am the way I am, to be able to face him. What’s inside of him—I don’t know how else to say this—but it likes me. It understands me. We share the same voice. And I’m worried that when I face him I’ll be... tempted.”
It was a startling confession, one that Triel wasn’t prepared to accept. “Jetta—from
what you told me, he’s completely bereft of humanity. You couldn’t possibly share anything in common with a beast like that.”
Jetta shrugged her shoulders and let her eyes fall back to the ground. “You know what I’m capable of. You know what I’ve done. I’m ashamed of the things I’ve done to harm others, but that doesn’t make that part of me go away.”
Jetta kicked a crumpled advertisement for the fighting rings and looked at her with the gaze Triel knew all too well. “I have no choice. I will have to face Victor, and when I do, no one can come with me. It’s something I have to do alone.”
“Not alone. Never alone,” Triel said, touching Jetta’s shoulder. The Healer’s hand moved to take her hand, but Jetta shied away. “What about me? What about your sister—and brother?”
Jetta snapped her visor back in place and turned back toward the entrance to the Pit. “There are some places that decent people shouldn’t go; they’ll just never come back. And where Victor’s heart lies is a place that only I can find.”
THEY WERE DESCENDING the series of ladders and crudely forged stairs in uneasy silence when Triel stopped at a junction and started to hyperventilate. Jetta removed the Healer’s helmet and saw that her skin was pale and clammy under the dim arrangement of buzzing electric light bulbs.
“What’s wrong?” Jetta asked, helping her into a sitting position.
“Reht—something is very wrong with Reht.”
Jetta’s words came out sounding surprisingly hurt. “I didn’t think you two had that kind of connection.”
“We don’t,” she said between gasps. “That’s how I know something is wrong.”
Jetta closed her eyes and searched Triel’s impression, but could gain nothing from it.
“Your sister—ask your sister,” the Healer pleaded.
“Triel, I can’t—”
Triel grabbed at her chest, the muscles on her neck standing out taut against an invisible force.
“Okay, okay—just hold on,” Jetta said, holding the Healer down.
Jetta didn’t know how to begin. She had shoved her sister’s aura so far out of reach that it rode the edge of her mind’s horizon. When she faced it for the first time in days, she winced at what had become of their once unfettered connection.
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