by Chloe Garner
“Divergent dimensions,” Jesse said.
“So… right now… a version of us is standing on the other side of that, having this same conversation.”
Jesse paused. Turned. Held up a finger at Cassie, who sighed and crossed her arms.
“Go ahead.”
“You have no idea what statistics do, in the real world, do you?” Jesse asked.
“What?”
“The odds that the same sperm would find the same egg enough times in a row that you would even exist… the hubris of it is astonishing. Just breathtaking, Troy. The universes are old enough that none of them have anything in common. Maybe they did, once, but it hardly matters now. Gravity does the same thing, every time, but beyond that, the random chance involved in everything around us… The human race doesn’t exist anywhere but here, Troy. Nor do Palta or Gana or anyone else. Another dimension is just another space for life to create itself in an entirely unique fashion.”
“You’re the only you, anywhere in any space, any time, any probability,” Cassie said.
Olivia was standing next to him, still looking cold.
“It makes everything more important,” she murmured.
“That it does,” Cassie said. “Back to the important stuff, now. Midas can claim the intersection, as you can see, but his immense powers are a bit strapped, at that point,” she said, dripping sarcasm. “And he needs a Palta to get him the rest of the way home.”
“He’s had two,” Jesse observed.
“Both broken, as it were,” Cassie answered. “Mab was good enough, she just had a machine in her head that drove her crazy. And I’m not good enough, because while I think and act like a Palta, I don’t have your enormous history and culture to draw on.”
That was bitterness. It didn’t sound like she wanted approval so much as that she had had this argument before.
“I see,” Jesse said.
“So,” she said, facing the wall. “There you go. I did it. Your turn.”
She took a step back, going limp from the waist up and spasming like a puppet throwing up, then, after a moment, she stood and drew a breath. She looked at Jesse.
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly.
“You did what you had to do,” Jesse said, taking a step forward.
“No,” she said. “It ends, now. I just had to get him out of my head.”
Her voice was subtly different. All this time, Troy had thought that Cassie was not like herself because she was Palta, but, without any doubt in his mind, this was his Cassie, back from wherever she had been. She held an arm up.
“Step back?” she asked. Jesse came to stand next to Troy and Olivia. Cassie looked up at the huge wall.
“Too late, Midas,” she murmured. “I’ve destroyed in your name, but you’re out of time. You can’t control me, and you made a mistake. Twice, actually. You don’t try to leash a Palta.”
She put her hand in her pocket and took a large step back, holding out the metal ball Troy had seen her playing with. As he watched, it rose up out of her palm and began to spin, the top and bottom hemispheres spinning faster and faster in opposite directions. Jesse pulled him back several more steps, and Troy took Olivia’s elbow, pulling her back as well.
Cassie leaned away from the wall, as though she were in danger of falling into it, taking one more small step back and leaning at a harder and harder angle.
“What is that?” Troy whispered.
“It’s hers,” Jesse answered with a small smile that was slowly becoming a grin. “I can guess how it works, but nothing like it has ever existed before. She made it.”
And then the wall wobbled.
Liquefied.
Pulled toward her in a bulge that turned drop-shaped, and then ripped free like a curtain, splashing on the floor and becoming…
A shape. A distinctly humanoid shape.
He was short.
Very short, and very stout, and very motionless.
Cassie put the metal ball back into her pocket, looking down at the figure laying on the floor.
“That’s got to hurt,” she said. “Going to take him a while to recover.”
She shook her head at him, then turned, walking most of the distance to where Troy and the others stood. She drew a long breath and sighed.
“And then there’s the hard part,” she said. She looked at the open space next to Jesse.
“I can’t tell you how impressed I am at what you accomplished,” she said. “To have not just him but a computer in your brain, fighting over who got to be in charge, and to manage to lay a trap for him like you did… It’s astonishing, Mab.”
There was a pause.
“I didn’t… know,” Jesse said. Cassie nodded.
“Your daughter was a remarkable woman,” she said. “And if it helps, she chose death. She found you and she did what she could… to make sure you wouldn’t be alone, and then she chose death over being controlled. Of all the things I’ve done as a Palta, I regret killing her the least.”
There was a big, wide, silence, then Cassie pressed her lips and turned to Troy.
“You, I owe the simplest apology to. I ruined your life. I wanted to protect you, but I couldn’t do that with Midas in my head, so I had to ruin your life instead. It’s…” she glanced over her shoulder at the prone figure. “It’s his nature to destroy. It’s why he couldn’t ever figure out how to rule anything outside of this asteroid. But he had mind control beyond anything I’ve read about anywhere. And… She looked at her hands, then back at Troy. “I couldn’t ever do what I wanted to do without being destructive about it at the same time. I can’t make all of it right, but I’m going to start here.”
And with that, she turned to Olivia.
“You love him. I danced with you to Dinalae music, and while I know that you don’t speak the language, I do. And you spent that entire night telling me how much you loved him. Couldn’t help yourself, that’s how hard and how much you love him, and I broke that apart. On purpose. What happened between the two of us wasn’t his fault. And this isn’t me making excuses for him. I manipulated him beyond his ability to resist, and then I broke him even harder to keep him from telling you right away, because I knew that would make it worse.”
She glanced at Troy.
“I am so sorry.”
The fog suddenly made sense. He opened and closed his mouth, just once. No good thing to say, so don’t say anything.
She looked back at Olivia.
“Troy is my best friend, and if life had worked out differently, we would have been together, and we would have been insanely happy. I know that for a fact, strangely, the only real truth I’ve had since I’ve been Palta, and if you can’t live with that, I understand and I respect that. But life didn’t go that way.”
There was a wrenching in Troy’s chest to hear those two statements up against each other. He wasn’t Palk. She wasn’t Starn. There was no running away from it. He kept his mouth closed.
“I’m Palta, for one, and for two, our lives have turned us into people who don’t fit together. But you two do. I’m asking that you’ll consider forgiving him for things that weren’t his fault, forgiving him for being friends with me at all, and trying again. I can’t promise I won’t blow it up again, but it won’t be because of Midas.” She looked at him and Troy’s heart broke as he saw Starn’s face one last time. “It’s because I will always love him.”
She licked her lips and drew breath again, looking at Olivia again.
“Your choice. But I wanted you to be here to see it with your own eyes.”
She dipped her head, and Troy looked at Olivia. Her eyes glistened, but she didn’t look back at him.
“Not yet,” she whispered. “Not yet.”
He nodded.
“Okay.”
Cassie turned away, going to stand in front of Jesse.
“And you,” she said. “The most complicated of all.”
He grinned.
“Complicated and yet very simple,�
�� he said, putting his arm around her neck and kissing her. Troy looked away. He didn’t miss the look from Olivia, and he shrugged helplessly.
“She means a lot,” he said quietly, “but it’s never going to be anything more than what it is now.”
She pressed her lips and looked away. He didn’t know if she would be able to accept it or not, but there was hope, and that was more than he’d felt for a while, from her.
“You’re incredible,” Jesse murmured. Troy looked back to find Cassie resting her forehead against the side of Jesse’s face.
“There’s more to do,” she said, then abruptly stood free.
“There are other people here. A whole staff. I only ever met one of them, but we need to get them home. We need to get everyone home.”
Jesse nodded.
“I assume you know where all the levers are.”
She gave him a saucy smile then shook her head.
“I didn’t ever get her to speak to me. Do you recognize a species with a roughly triangular green head, segmented body, limbs…” she described with her hands, “and an hourglass waist most human women would kill for?”
“Dorla,” Jesse said.
“I need you to call her,” Cassie said. “She knows how to find the rest of them.”
“She can get in here?” Jesse asked.
“They’ll be hiding, but yes,” Cassie said. Jesse spoke a few words to the open air, and they waited. A moment later a green creature peeked out at them from behind a feature Troy hadn’t even known was there.
“It’s over,” Cassie said, glancing at Jesse, who translated. The green woman came out, looking from Cassie to the others, then scurrying over to where the tiny man lay on the floor. After a moment, she kicked him, scurrying away again and disappearing. Cassie grinned.
“That’s a good start. He’s been kidnapping people as they were convenient for some time, now. His house staff.” She shook her head. “We get everyone home, we take care of him, and then…” She shrugged. “And then we start new.”
The base was in tatters. His best friend was an alien. The woman he might have been in love with couldn’t bear to look at him or speak to him. Troy felt Cassie watching him.
“It’s going to be a long road,” she said. “But it’s going to be better than it ever was. I promise.”
Her head turned as there was another noise from where the green woman had disappeared, and a half-dozen foreign terrestrials came into the room, looking cautiously at Cassie and then running over to Midas to encircle him.
“Everything that happened was because of him, at some level,” Cassie said quietly. “But that’s done, now. Now we write our own future.”
Olivia took a step closer, standing so that her shoulder touched Troy’s side, and he very carefully put his arm around her.
They stood and they watched Midas’ house staff celebrate his fall from power. It wasn’t a solution to most of their problems, but it was certainly a damned fine start.
About the Author
I'm Chloe and I am the conduit between my dreaming self and the paper (well, keyboard, since we live in the future). I write paranormal, sci-fi, fantasy, and whatever else goes bump in the night, I also write mystery/thriller as Mindy Saturn. When I'm not writing I steeplechase miniature horses and participate in ice cream eating contests. Not really, but I do tend to make things up for a living.
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