The Bargaining Path

by T. Rudacille

  ***

  “Savannah, they are almost within shouting distance!” I called to her. She was sitting outside the door to Ellie and Oliver’s room, and through the large space between the bottom of the door and the floor, they had slid their hands. One of hers was grasping them, and when she became aware of the fact that I was standing beside her, she whispered to them that she had to go, but that she would be back soon.

  “You really want to stay.” I told her, because I had heard her woeful thoughts.

  “Of course I do.” She replied, not defensively at all. “Don’t you?”

  I had been accusing her, however vaguely, of disloyalty to the cause. Her immediate regret when I had told her it was time to go was taken by me to mean that she did not wish to see this mission of saving our people to the end. But when she asked me whether I, too, would have liked to just call it a night, as they say, I realized that I did, and in realizing that, I begrudgingly had to admit that she had bamboozled me into re-thinking my distrust of her once again.

  “You really want to push me away.” She told me.

  Before I could answer, the door next to Ellie and Oliver’s opened, and Elijah, moaning loudly, began to shamble out.

  “Where’s the bathroom in this place?”

  “How did you get up?”

  “No one strapped me down.” He replied, before moaning again, “I swear to God, I think I pissed myself twice… Walnut bladder and terror… Not a good mix.”

  “I love how you are talking to me like nothing negative has transpired between us.”

  “Brynn… Not now.”

  “Not now? Not ever, Elijah. Make no mistake about that.”

  I stormed ahead of Savannah, who followed in my stead.

  “Wait! Brynna, wait!” Elijah called, and without even looking back at him, I knew that he was still stumbling and shuffling, reaching out to me, and that those movements, coupled with his severe dishevelment, gave him the appearance of a zombie shortly after reanimation.

  “I know I fucked up, okay? I know that it was all me, and that you didn’t do anything, and I let myself get too mad and defensive, and I’m sorry. Okay? I’m so sorry.”

  “And I do not care in the slightest, Eli. You have now experienced what I did, only you did not have to experience it knowing someone you loved had caused it to happen all because of some stupid woman! A woman, who coincidentally, is using you to get back at me!”

  “That’s not true!” He exclaimed, loudly and indignantly. “She came up to me the second we got here, and she flirted with me. Then, she immediately asked me to…”

  “Thank you, I do not need to hear the rest of this. If you would like to believe that Janna is in love, or at the very least, in lust with you, that is your prerogative, though you must know that she has admitted to me outright that she is out to make me suffer for trying to ‘steal’ Adam.”

  I was at the front door, and with somewhat more force that I intended to use, I flung it open, causing it to bang against the wooden railing and come flying back towards me. Before it could hit me, though, I easily reached my hand out to stop it.

  “And also, just to keep you totally informed on your raven-haired goddess, she is seeing other people.”

  “Yeah, Adam, maybe. Her husband.” He replied, and his voice was beginning to shake. The way he had said ‘her husband’ led me to believe that he had been trying to wound me. He, like most other people, had gathered that Adam and I had grown closer, and he had guessed that I had not known Adam was married.

  A rather hysterical, very taunting fit of laughter burst from me suddenly.

  “No.” I said through my giggles, “It wasn’t Adam. It was James, actually.” At first, his face fell, but then, his eyes widened, and his mouth dropped open slightly. “Yes! Right after our confrontation during which you so rudely pushed me over the ash-circle, they had sex. And while James and I have settled that issue quite nicely, you might have a slightly more difficult time reconciling it in yourself.”

  “You’re lying. You’re lying, Brynna!” He shouted after me as I walked down the stairs.

  “Which is why James and I did not live together for almost four months. Yes, your powers of deduction are keen and enviable, Eli. Let no one tell you otherwise.”

  He shouted after me as Savannah and I trudged along, but I ignored him.

  “Brynna!”

  “My stars, if people do not stop requesting my attention when I am in battle mode…” I murmured irritably.

  Don came stumbling down the steps, and Savannah froze beside me. I walked over to him, my face contorted into a grimace of disgust when he retched violently and vomited what appeared to be three days’ worth of hearty meals onto the ground.

  “Oh, what a terrible thing… They’re the worst… The absolute worst…” He told me, “I am so sorry that this happened to you. I didn’t understand it before. I didn’t understand why you were making such a fuss for so long, but God… it’s awful!”

  “Yes. It is.” I replied dryly, “Now, if you will excuse me, Savannah and I are doing the job that you and Adam should be doing.”

  “No. I searched around for a heart that wasn’t sick with whatever is in the air, and I found you two. I’m ready to help. I think it’s passed.”

  “And I think it has not. So, go back up into that house and wait until morning. Then, it will definitely have passed, as will the threat of the Old Spirits when Savannah and I either parlay with them peacefully or kill them outright, though the latter option is the more favorable one for me, and the most probable one.”

  “No.” He stood up straight, wobbling only slightly now. “I need to be there. I’m alright. I’m ready.” He cleared his throat, and when he spoke again, his voice had steadied. “You’re right that this is my job. You shouldn’t be doing this alone.”

  “Why? Because I’m…”

  “No, not because you’re a woman.”

  I gaped at him, shocked that he had known exactly what I was going to snap at him.

  “Come on, Brynna, it’s been almost two years. You think I don’t know you well by now?”

  “Whatever. We are wasting time, and they are here.”

  “Where?” Savannah asked from behind us.

  “Don’t even look at her.” I hissed at Don, and he obeyed, casting his eyes to the ground. “They are about five minutes from us. They are coming from the South, so we had better run.”

  They did not need to be told twice. I ran in the front, leading them in the direction from which the stream of thoughts was coming. As we ran, it got louder and crisper. I could hear their relief that they had found us. That relief gave way to thoughts of pillaging, raping, and killing, all of which were so disturbing that I immediately pulled my prying mind back a few steps so that the specificity of their thoughts greatly diminished; after that, all I could hear were indiscernible whispers growing louder but not clearer the closer we got.

  I stopped running, and Don and Savannah almost ran into my back. By the way the tension seemed to settle between the three of us like a blanket of lethally heavy pressure, I knew that they could hear the voices now, too. Not the thoughts, but the voices of the men who were approaching.

  “Don, after this is settled… However it is settled… If we are still standing, we will have no choice but to leave here.”

  “I know.” Don replied, and in my peripheral vision, I could see him staring straight ahead with his frighteningly large eyes.

  “I am sure you know that I have spread the word amongst our people.” I continued, “I acknowledge that I should have spoken to you first.”

  “Don’t worry about it. That’s all in the past now. It doesn’t even matter at this point. Plus, I was never mad about it. We’ve been needing to break from Adam for a while. He’s holding us back.”

  “From what?” I asked.

  “From greatness.” Don looked over at me, and I looked over at him. His expression could not have been more solemn, and that convinced m
e that he could not have been more serious about what he had said.

  “The Red Anarchy is destined for greatness, then?” I asked.

  “Of course it is. I’ve seen that, Brynna. You may think I’m just an old drunk…”

  “…and drug addict…” I added.

  “…and rapist…” Savannah added with quiet yet resonating venom.

  “Don’t hold back, ladies.” He said somewhat bitterly. “Regardless of what you two might think, though, I have seen things. My power lets me see things.”

  “Only I see things, Don. You see phantoms of your own hopes and dreams. I see what is real.”

  “No. I see the colors and sounds of the world before those colors and sounds become real. I see the heart of this world and the last. I might not see the concrete images that you do, Brynna, but I can see things. And we will be great. They will fear us. Their darkness will cower in the face of our red light. Can I ask you something?”

  “Well, that was a random ending to your monologue. But sure. Ask away.”

  “Did you really make that deal with Paul?”

  I looked at him, and I knew my gaze was fiery, set in stone, unyielding.

  “Yes. If you call me a traitor to our kind, then I will grin slightly and shake my head in condescension at your blindness, just like I did to Adam.”

  “No. It was destined. It was what breaks us from him. But Brynna…” His cold hand grasped mine, “It will also be what pulls your lights… your hearts… yours and Adam’s… back together.”

  I wanted to dismiss that assertion with a curt snort through my nose. But for some reason, I could not easily sniff at what he had said.

  “You cannot know that.”

  “I can. Colors and sounds, remember?”

  “I have a question, too.” Savannah said, and I looked over at her to quiet my new, inquisitive thoughts regarding all Don had just said. “Did you really kill those men?”

  I answered her in the same way I had answered Don: with no hint of apology, but also with no hint of defensiveness.

  “Yes.”

  She nodded, and her dark eyes looked at the ground first, and then out at the forest. It became evident from the ebb and flow of her thoughts and feelings that I frightened her. Her fear was not crippling, nor did it accompany the animal reflex to get away from a threat as quickly as possible, but it was there. She thought I was ruthless. She thought I would take whatever I wanted, and trade lives as easily as I would trade trinkets and crops when I could not just take. Her biggest concern was that because of my new powerful position beside Don, I might one day decide that her life was worth trading. If one of the Bachums came looking for those whom we had taken in from their batch of unfortunate exiled souls, I might find it prudent to hand her back to them, and though her fear of me was minimal, she was terrified of Mary, Rich, and especially Tyre.

  “You may think me ruthless and heartless, Savannah, but I was a human just like you. I came from Earth just like you did. What I did to Donovan and Rene was what you would have done, now that there are no penalties for it. It is what all mothers would do. In fact, that protective instinct is one of the only things that we share in common.”

  “Who?” Savannah asked, somewhat more gently than I expected.

  “The Pangaeans and us. It is important, to recognize the few similarities. Some other knowing is beginning to form right now as I speak to you, telling me that soon, the differences between Earthean and Pangaean will be quite crucial to how it all plays out.”

  “To how what all plays out?” Don asked.

  I looked back at them both and said with purposely emphatic resonance:

  “Everything.”