Mindscape

by Tal Valante

  Shane finds Mark and Alex in the garden. Mark is looking down at his hands. Alex looks lost in another world. In Mark’s mind, Shane thinks, and his vision goes red. He crosses the garden and shakes the big nurse.

  “Get out!”

  “What? Shane—”

  “And stay out,” Shane says, baring his teeth. “I’m Mark’s Resonance partner. Me. You’ve got no right—”

  “I wasn’t in his mind!”

  Shane stops, breathing hard.

  “I was just thinking about what I saw there with you. The circle of cages, the tortured men, the bodies . . .”

  “I know what his mindscape looks like, thank you.”

  Alex waves that away. “I was thinking about it. Shane, what if we made a terrible mistake?”

  Shane frowns. “What kind of mistake? What crazy idea did you have?”

  “Imagine . . .” Alex springs to his feet and starts pacing. Shane takes his place on the bench, next to Mark. “Imagine being a prisoner behind enemy lines.”

  Shane does. It sends a tendril of bile up his throat.

  “Imagine the enemy is a telepathic race,” Alex continues. “And you’re an officer—a successful officer—in the Spavy.”

  Shane has already imagined it a thousand times, curled up alone at night in their king-sized bed. The questions, the torture, the mocking, the punishments . . . He swallows and swallows again. A hand drops on his shoulder, and he looks up, startled, to see the big nurse towering over him. He cringes and hates himself for it. Alex backs off.

  “You all right?”

  Shane nods, and Alex keeps on pacing.

  “So what about it?” Shane asks.

  “What if . . .” Alex reaches the far end of the garden, turns on his heels, and paces back. “What if you know things the enemy mustn’t know?”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know.” Alex makes an impatient gesture. “Troop movements, spaceship routes, whatever. Spavy stuff.”

  Shane licks his lips, and a tremor rushes down his spine. “Yes?”

  “All right, so what if . . .” Alex reaches the end of the garden again, turns, and stops. “What if it’s all the other way around? What if you need to keep the enemy out of your mind to protect that knowledge?”

  Shane thinks of the thick-barred metal cage and feels the world crack under his feet. “God.”

  “What if you keep everyone out so thoroughly that you don’t even know the war is over?”

  “Oh, God . . .” Because he can see it now, the endgame of Alex’s reasoning: What if you build a cage around yourself for your own protection? What if your Resonance partner slips into your mind and tries to ruin that cage? What if every move made against that cage is a move made against you? God, all the ideas they’ve had, all the things they’ve tried . . .

  “Shane, hey, it’s all right,” Alex’s voice comes from far away, as if Shane is lost in someone’s mindscape. His own, perhaps. He needs to get out, because Mark is whimpering—they must have upset him—

  “Shane!” And suddenly he’s wrapped in a hug, and it’s not Mark whimpering, it’s him, and Alex is warm and alive and there, and Shane leans against him and cries.

  “It’s all right,” Alex says, rubbing circles on his back. “It’s all right.”

  It’s not, and they both know it, but the mindless repetition soothes Shane until he can breathe again. He pulls back and brushes a heavy hand over his eyes.

  “God. We brainstormed ideas how to destroy that fucking cage.”

  “Yes.”

  “How to destroy Mark’s mind.”

  “If I’m right. And still, we didn’t know—”

  Shane looks up at Alex, tortured. “I could have killed him.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “If we both tried destroying the cage together—”

  “Shane!” Alex grips Shane’s shoulders and rattles him, and the panic fades a little. “That’s it,” Alex says. “Deep breaths. Let’s think about getting him out of there.”

  “All right.” Shane sniffs and wipes a hand over his face. “All right.” He looks at Mark, who’s still busy studying his own hands. “This changes everything, doesn’t it?”

  “Well,” Alex starts. He motions at Shane. “Budge over, will you? We’ll definitely be looking for new things.”

  “Like what?”

  Alex sits down on the bench and stretches out his legs. “We could try calling out to him.”

  “Already did that,” Shane points out.

  “Okay . . . What can we do that’s opposite to what we’ve done so far?”

  They sit together in silence. Shane feels Alex’s mounting frustration; it Resonates with his own.

  “Maybe if we enter his mind,” Alex says after a while.

  “You’ve seen it enough.”

  “Yes, but not like this.”

  They made it out of the killing zone without taking any more hits, thank God. Mark doubted the Tomahawk could take much more without spilling her precious human cargo to the cruel void beyond.

  “Suit up,” he said to Becca, and then on the ship-wide comm channel, “All hands, prepare to evacuate. I repeat, all hands, prepare to evacuate.”

  A spacesuit came floating his way; he caught it and nodded thanks to the gunnery officer. Suiting up in zero-G was a handful. Finally done, he pulled himself to the navigation console.

  “Sir? Aren’t you coming?”

  Mark waved Becca away. “Go on, I’ll be with you in five minutes.”

  “She might not hold another five minutes—”

  “Go on,” Mark said again.

  He looked at the crowded display of the battlefield. Each blow landed upon the enemy brought him that much closer to a future where Shane and he could settle down in married life. And God help him, he still had one weapon to contribute to the fight.

  The Tomahawk herself.

  Shane and Alex meet again on the blasted earth of Mark’s mindscape. Somewhere in his physical body, Shane swallows hard. He focuses on the metal cage in the center. How different it seems now: not the foul punishing tool of a foreign race, but the desperate hideout of a lonely man. His passionate hatred for the cage fizzles and dies.

  “Now what?” he asks.

  Alex looks around. “I don’t know. What’s up with the tortured men in the other cages?”

  “I’m not sure,” Shane says. “Everything you see here is presumably some aspect of Mark’s mind.”

  “Hmm.” Alex wanders off to where a flag hangs torn from a broken pole. “What’s this, then?”

  Shane joins him. “His broken military pride? His confidence in the Spavy?” An ingrained sense of honor makes him right the pole and re-tie the flag to it. It looks passable when he’s done, and that’s when the realization strikes him. “That,” he says to Alex.

  “Huh?”

  “That’s what we can do differently.”

  Alex frowns. “What do you mean?”

  “The Redorens trampled his mind,” Shane says, gesturing at the destruction around them. “We can fix it. Well, maybe not fix it.” He grimaces at the strewn corpses. “But set it to peace.”

  “I guess . . .”

  Shane nods, fervent with hope. “If my mind ever looked so ravished, I’d stay away, too.”

  “All right,” Alex says, and they start working.

  There’s not much they can do with the shot-down spacecraft, but they lift each corpse and put them in a single row under the flag. Gently close the unseeing eyes. Alex says a soft prayer over them, and Shane, listening awkwardly, adds a silent plea for Mark’s return.

  They approach the cages where the half-naked men sprawl in misery. These are made of a light, durable material, bamboo-like in shape and color.

  “Can we break them open?” Shane asks. “Or would that be another assault on his mind?”

  “I’m not sure,” Alex says. “Wait here, I’ll go, um, back to see what it does to him.”

  “All right,” Shan
e says, and waits until Alex disappears from view.

  “Okay, go ahead,” he hears Alex’s physical voice say. “Slow and gentle.”

  Shane wraps his hands around two of the bars and gradually tightens his grip.

  “Still looking good,” Alex calls from the real world.

  “I’m starting to push,” Shane calls back, and applies a steady, soft pressure on the light cage. “Anything?”

  “He just lifted his head.”

  Shane pauses. “Is that good or bad?”

  “I don’t know. He doesn’t look distressed.”

  Shane gnaws on his lip. The last time he’d tried to interfere with the metal cage—with Mark’s defenses—Mark had whimpered and thrashed. Compared to that, lifting his head is probably nothing.

  Shane pushes.

  The light cage disintegrates in a flurry of sticks and dust. The injured man inside groans and covers his head with both arms.

  “I’ve got you,” Shane says. “It’s okay.”

  He crouches next to the man—a soldier by his torn clothes and military haircut—and clears the debris off him. Wipes away the mask of blood that seeps from a gash on his forehead. He’s not sure what else he can do, but then Alex reappears again.

  “It worked?”

  “It worked. Help me with him.”

  Alex is better at tending the man’s wounds, so Shane goes off to free the other prisoners. Every now and then he glances at the metal cage in the center of the clearing and pushes forward a wave of love.

  Mark waited for the rescue pods to deploy one after the other, carrying the Tomahawk’s hands to relative safety just outside the battle zone. Then he set course for the Redoren flagship and fired the auxiliary engines. The Tomahawk grunted and shuddered, but turned about and slogged forward.

  Mark petted the navigation console. “Come on, girl. Give me everything you’ve got. For Shane and me.”

  He locked course and shunted all power to the auxiliary engines, then pushed himself away from Navigation. A blaring collision alert filled his ears. Mark pulled himself from handhold to handhold, trying to outrun the devastation he himself had set in motion. Finally he made it to the rescue pods, but the bay was empty—no, they’d left him a pod after all. He slid inside and hit eject.

  Nothing happened.

  He slammed his fist on the eject button again and again, until finally, with a lurch and a silent rush, the pod was expelled into space.

  The Tomahawk’s momentum sent him flying toward the battle zone. The pod had minimal thrusters, designed to avoid debris at low speed. Mark fired them once, twice, trying to alter his course and hoping he didn’t crash into anything. The bursts of energy spun the pod around, and for a second, Mark had a perfect view of the enemy’s flagship and the charging Tomahawk, like a train wreck bound to happen—inevitable and majestic in its scope.

  A ball of fire erupted when the two ships met. The Tomahawk buried its nose into the side of the flagship, creating a grotesque sculpture of twisted metal and licking flames. The fire died almost immediately, but the damage to the flagship was visible—until the pod continued turning on its axis and gave Mark a view of empty space.

  He grinned and flicked on his mayday signal. It didn’t take long for the pod to jolt and stop spinning, caught by some ship or another. Mark exhaled long and hard. Maybe after this battle, he could return to Shane in peace. Maybe he’d done enough of his duty. Maybe—

  The pod’s hatch opened, and Mark’s smile faded as he saw the furious face and gunpoint of a Redoren soldier.

  Then his world turned black for a long, long time.

  Shane looks around Mark’s mindscape with the warring senses of accomplishment and frustration. The dead bodies are laid out in a row, cleaned up. The small cages are demolished. The wounded people, tended by Alex, have wandered off. All that remains is the central, metal cage and the scorched ground.

  And still Mark is locked inside his own mind.

  “Now what?” Shane asks.

  Alex looks up at the leaden sky. “Can you make it rain?”

  Shane gapes at him. “How?”

  “I don’t know.” Alex scratches his close-cropped hair. “You’re the Resonance expert.”

  So Shane closes his eyes and calls up all his love for Mark, all his sorrow and longing, and sends them out to wash over Mark’s mindscape. A droplet splashes on his cheek, and another. He opens his eyes to see a gentle rain falling.

  They watch in silence as the moisture soaks the ground like ointment on a wound. The rain takes the edge off the blasted soil. It will take a while for things to grow there again, but for now, the thirsty land is sated.

  “And now we wait,” Alex says.

  Shane nods, because the longing wedged in his throat will not let him speak.

  When it comes to Mark, Shane is not too proud for anything. And since it’s against the ward’s regulations to stay the night, he has to beg Nurse Delgado for permission.

  “Just this once,” she finally says, and Shane feels like hugging her.

  No one has replaced the Burping Man yet in Mark’s room, so Shane shoves the spare bed up against Mark’s. He doesn’t have nightclothes or even a toothbrush, but he doesn’t care this one time. He intends to wait for Mark to finish dinner, then help put him to sleep. But he hasn’t counted on his own tiredness. Long before Mark and Alex arrive in the room, he’s fast asleep.

  He dreams.

  He dreams of sitting with Mark in the garden by the willow tree. Mr. Furrypants is there, weaving loops around their ankles and brushing against them with feline force, and Mark laughs.

  “I’ve missed you,” he says to Shane.

  His voice, God, how Shane has missed it. Not grunts of misery or wails of distress, but soft words that ring with merriment, the way he’d been before . . . before.

  Mark reaches out and bridges the small gap that separates them. His fingers make Shane’s cheek tingle and burn. He leans in, and they breathe the same air while the heat of their skin rebounds and redoubles between them. Then Shane closes up the distance, and their lips meet, soft as sand; a groan, then it becomes hard as colliding stars, hungry and demanding, remembering, reasserting. Their kiss finally ebbs because they must have oxygen, and so they pull back and breathe together.

  “I never stopped loving you,” Shane whispers.

  “Neither did I,” Mark whispers back.

  And Shane, despite his best efforts, awakens.

  He lies unmoving in the partial darkness, feeling content, and wonders why. The bed is hard and alien beneath him, but he’s also wrapped up in familiar warmth. Rigsby, he remembers. Mark’s room. It feels nice to sleep curled up against Mark’s body, with Mark’s arms around him. Mark never touches him, these days.

  Mark never touches him . . .

  Shane peers up at Mark’s face, a face turned to him with a small smile and brimming eyes.

  “Hi,” Mark says.

  The single word erupts like fireworks in Shane’s mind. There’s so much he wants to say in return, but when he opens his mouth, all he can say is, “Hi yourself.”

  And for the moment, it’s enough.

  It takes two more days before they release Mark. Shane stays with him all that time. Mark is still prone to semi-catatonic spells, but these come and pass within hours or even minutes, and they’re nothing like the cage in his mind. PTSD, the doctors call it.

  “Join the club,” Shane tells him, and Mark laughs.

  It never tires for Shane, getting a response from Mark.

  There’s one response in particular he both fears and yearns to see. He holds Mark’s hand tightly and watches as Alex approaches. The big nurse is wearing a huge smile.

  “Hi,” he says. “I’m Alex Park. I was your nurse here. Welcome back.”

  Mark tilts his head, and there’s only a whisper of a smile on his lips. His forehead crinkles. “You . . . I felt you in my mind.”

  Alex blushes and rubs his cheek against his shoulder. “I’m sorr
y. Should have asked permission first, except I couldn’t—”

  “But how?” Mark asks, turning to Shane. “Aren’t we . . .?”

  “Always,” Shane says. Then he thinks the word and pushes it gently into Mark’s mind. “Always. It’s just that he . . . is too.”

  He recalls everything he’s done with Alex: the talks, the meditation, the attempts to overcome his flashbacks and enter Mark’s mindscape, the evening calls, the endless brainstorming, the cup of coffee, the break and the breakthrough. He sends all these thoughts trickling softly into Mark’s mind.

  Slowly a smile spreads on Mark’s lips, and he nods.

  “Thank you,” he says to Alex. “For everything.”

  It’s not all a bed of roses, Mark’s return to life. Shane takes him to visit his parents and his very pregnant sister, but when the car door slams shut after Mark, he has an attack. Shane maneuvers him to the porch and sits him down, then sits by him until Mark comes back.

  “Hi there,” Shane says.

  Mark peers around, and his puzzlement floods Shane through their link.

  “My parents’ home,” he reminds Mark.

  “How long?”

  Shane looks at his watch. “Three hours.”

  A sound between a groan and a moan emerges from Mark’s throat. He hangs his head and lets his hands dangle between his knees. “I can’t do this.”

  “Yes, you can.”

  Mark shakes his head. “Take me home.”

  “Okay,” Shane says, and helps him up. “Okay.”

  He escorts Mark to the car, then hurries inside to explain to his mom—“Of course, hon, off you go.”—and hurries back to the car. Mark is gazing out the window.

  “Still with me?” Shane asks as he takes the wheel.

  Mark nods without looking. But Shane has to fight a cold, cold feeling that Mark is somehow slipping away.

  It comes to a head three days later, in the middle of the night. Shane wakes up because Mark is thrashing and crying. Has been for a while, Shane thinks, but he only woke up now. Damn it. He tries to rouse Mark, but he knows it’s hopeless. The episode has to run its course.

  His own nightclothes are soaked through with sweat, and his throat feels raw. He gets up to pour a glass of water and brings one for Mark, too. When he returns to their bedroom, Mark is sitting up, wide-eyed and panting.