The thunderous roar of the fire; the yells of the brigade nearby; the cries of lost children: all hushed.
Rubix turned. Julianne still had that wide-eyed look on her face.
“Hello, Julianne,” Rubix said casually. He nodded to the two children clinging to her. “What lovely children you have.”
Julianne set the red-haired child down on the cobbles next to his brother, stepped to Rubix, and, with tears glistening in her eyes, wrapped her arms around his shoulders. She stood on her toes, and touched her lips to Rubix’s.
White fireworks exploded in his vision. The kiss was unlike anything he had experienced before. It was distilled sunlight, concentrate. It was the peace of a thousand celestial years condensed into one moment. It filled Rubix’s center and overflowed into his limbs.
When Julianne withdrew, Rubix’s sensibilities had fallen to pieces.
“When I spend the next eternity shoveling brimstone,” he said softly to her dark, sweet eyes, “the memory of that kiss will have been worth it.”
And then reality came crashing back in. The yelling, the destruction, the roaring crescendoed as the rubble and smoke around them suddenly burst upward.
The children at Julianne’s side screamed and clutched her skirts. Julianne wrapped her arms around them as walls of fire encircled their small group, blazingly brimstone-hot.
Rubix could see the silhouettes of demons form from the red walls, horns of fire and claws dripping molten silver. Satan stepped forward at the head of them, now dressed impeccably in a suit and tie.
“How disappointing, Remus,” he said, breathing smoke. “You really did show so much promise.”
“Rubix!” Rubix snarled. “It’s Rubix!”
The walls of fire crashed down over them. It smothered and suffocated the world. And then it ebbed, back to the distant yells and crashes.
Julianne remained, clutching the two children, shaking, until another angel was sent to retrieve her.
❦
HEAVEN, SECTOR .00863. DATE: NULL
“Master Robert, please!” Julianne begged.
The archangel Robert frowned at the empty hourglass, adorned with pricks of wooden thorns, that Julianne had placed among the piles of records books on his desk. She had positively thrown herself into the Department of Life and Death, without even knocking, and in an instant was before Bob, the demon’s hourglass in hand, pleading with fervency.
“He’s good,” she said. “I know he is. He fought for our side!”
Bob frowned. “Then he would be paying for it, indeed,” he said.
Julianne rubbed her fingers along one of the carved thorns on the hourglass’s post. In the same files she had found Rubix’s name, she’d also dared to look up “Demonic Punishments.” The tortuous sentences of unending futility were simply unbearable. And Rubix would be spending the rest of eternity enduring them, because of her.
“All he needs is a chance,” Julianne said, sliding the hourglass to Bob. “I know—I know you can do something. You’re the Archangel of Life!”
“Miss Julianne,” Robert said, closing a tome full of names, “even if he had not forfeited his choice eons ago, there is nothing I can do. He has no Life Sand. Even I cannot change that.”
The emptiness of the hourglass shone mockingly at Julianne. She thought of her own hourglass—now in cabinet twenty-three—with the small bag of sand tied to it in a neat little bow.
I have sand, she thought.
“Give him mine,” she said.
“Miss Julianne?”
“My sand. It’s mine, isn’t it? I choose to give it to Rubix. You fill the hourglasses, you can do this!”
Bob stood and drew a hand through his silver hair.
“You can’t give up your sand,” he said. “You’re already cleared for mortality. You’ll be forever in stasis if you don’t have it—not unlike your friend Rubix.”
“Then we’ll split it,” said Julianne firmly, following him as he shelved the book of names. “We’ll both have sand that way, won’t we?”
This made Robert frown.
“I—suppose,” he said slowly. “Though such a thing has never been done before.”
“But can it be done?”
Master Robert was silent for a long moment.
“It can,” he finally said.
Julianne nearly leapt into the air.
“But it means that neither of you will live very long,” Bob warned. “You will only live half of your designated years.”
“But Rubix will have a chance, won’t he?” said Julianne. “It will get him out of Purgatory, won’t it? And it will give him another chance, just like all of us. I know he’ll choose Good,” she said emphatically, handing Rubix Jarhnam’s hourglass to Bob. “I know it.”
❦
BKD, PURGATORY. DATE: NULL
In the sweltering, choking pits of molten lava, a black ocean cracked with red, a solitary demon shoveled. He’d lost count of the days, weeks, years, millennia he’d spent in the same repetitive motion of jabbing the shovel into the kindling—wrenching upward, carrying the stuff for a mile or so, dumping, returning to the original spot, and beginning again. Satan had been right. It wasn’t the task that was so harrowing, it was the fact that it would never end. Ever.
Rubix lacked hope, but he did have one thing: the memory of Julianne’s kiss on his lips. He could still feel it. With every step he took, each pile he shoveled, the idea that someone could love him in spite of who he was... he would shovel forever and never regret his decision.
“You’re slowing down, Rubix Cube,” jibed the taskmaster, rising up behind him. He laughed at the nickname like it was the funniest thing in the world. Rubix did not laugh, because it wasn’t funny and it wasn’t clever. A child living in the twentieth century could have come up with it.
The taskmaster himself was a man who wore old jeans and a grubby t-shirt. He was a once-lived who had earned his sentence with each boxing he’d given his wife. Now he continued his actions in life with his actions in Purgatory.
Rubix ignored him and dug his shovel into the coal—then stopped. The strangest sensation swept over him, like being showered in a million little sparks. Rubix removed his hands from the shovel and looked at them. They pulsed and glowed, as though silver blood was suddenly being pumped into them.
“Rubix!” came the taskmaster’s hoarse cry.
Rubix disintegrated into a thousand embers of Light.
❦
LITZMANNSTADT, POLAND. DATE: 1942 AD
The Polish factory smelled thickly of fabric and sewing machine oil. When the sun beamed through the grubby windows, its rays of light illuminated air heavy with fabric lint. Since the Wehrmacht had invaded several years ago, their ranks had grown ever larger, and the soldiers needed uniforms.
At one of the long factory tables, a girl—sixteen years old, with dark eyes, long, black hair, and a nose that she had inherited from her mother, grandmother, and generations all down to Abraham—wore an armband bearing a Jewish star as she cut yet another bolt of fabric. Her fingers had become calloused from forever holding scissors, cutting, cutting, cutting, and she had to wrap her wrist with a rag, it hurt so at night. Her face was drawn from lack of food, and she knew she had nothing to return to that night in the Ghetto, except an empty cupboard and a blanket made out of burlap.
But she had not yet been taken to the other factories in distant cities, as her parents had been. She was still in Lodz, and she was deeply grateful for that. It was here in Lodz that she had met him.
The girl pinned the last pieces of the cut fabric together and went to get another bolt of the thick uniform material. As she passed, a fellow worker—Karin, a girl of fifteen—slipped a note into her hand.
Butterflies fluttered inside her as she tucked herself away behind the tall bolts of fabric leaning against the wall, and opened the note to reveal the German soldier’s handwriting. The girl knew German, and read with ease:
I need to have my uniform fitted�
�I’ll whistle for you.
Whistle. That meant he’d meet her at the usual place and time, as the factories’ whistles ended the day and the Lodz people plodded back to the Ghetto. They’d had to come up with their own code, in case the notes were intercepted. It made her feel quite daring! The girl quickly tore up the note, but the words fluttered inside her for the rest of the day.
When the whistle blew, the girl had packed up her scissors, signed her card, and nearly took off running into the press of people, all wearing armbands. As they neared the barbed wire entrance, however, she deftly made a sharp turn and hurried down an old alleyway, down a few stairs that submerged below the street, and into a tiny basement coal room. There was only room enough for the large stove and two people: her, and him.
He was a German soldier, with golden hair and eyes so bright blue they were ice, and he stood tall above her. His uniform fitted him to perfection, a picture of what a Nazi soldier ought to look like. Yet, unlike a German soldier, he grinned and opened his arms when he saw her, and the girl flew into them. They held each other tight for a long moment.
“Missed you, Liebling,” he said softly.
She kissed him in reply. As though just remembering, he retrieved something from his knapsack on the floor and gave it to her. It was an English chocolate bar.
“You’ll need this,” he said.
“Chocolate!” she exulted, clasping it between her hands like a treasure. “Where did you get it?”
“Black market. Traded my cigarettes for it.”
“Oh, no!” the girl said, trying to push the chocolate bar back into his hands. “You shouldn’t have traded your cigarettes away. They’re good for you!”
“I like chocolate better,” he lied. “Anyway, you’ll need the chocolate. We’re leaving the city. Tonight. Right now. That’s why I’ve been gone so long. I had to get everything sorted out for our escape.”
The girl looked at him with wide eyes. It struck the soldier to his center with a sudden familiarity. He’d only known the girl for a few months, but those eyes—it was almost like he’d seen them long before.
“I’ve—packed,” he said, trying to get his bearings. “I’ve got enough in this knapsack for both of us. For a few days. Cheese, bread, that kind of thing. Money, too. And train tickets and fake visas, see?” He unfolded his wallet and showed her the forged papers. “I told you about my Swedish friend, right? Well, he has a friend who works in the shipyard in Hamburg. They can secure us a place in the hull of an old ship headed to Stockholm. Then north we go, until this stupid war is over.”
“Hamburg!” the girl cried. “Back into Germany! We’ll both be killed!”
“No, we won’t. You’ll have to wear a scarf to cover your lovely nose, but it’s winter. No one will think twice. Take off that ridiculous armband, though. You’re Leisl for now. And me? I’m going to pretend to be a wounded soldier headed home. We’ll give them the slip and head for Sweden. Then we see what we can do to get your parents to Sweden, too. Look, J—Leisl,” he said, noting that the girl was trembling, “I’d die a million times over if it meant I could save you.”
The girl’s eyes glistened. “You’d do that for me?” she said.
“I would, and I will,” said the soldier. “You’d do the same for me. I know it in my heart.”
The girl opened the chocolate bar and split it into two equal pieces, and for a long moment they savored the taste. Then he took a small knife from his pocket, cut the stitching from her armband, slid it off and threw it into the stove.
They left the tiny basement room, the girl wrapped in a scarf and the soldier with his knapsack slung over his shoulder, and dared step out into the deepening sky.
In the reflected light of Julianne’s hourglass, Bob watched them as they hurried into the night.
“What do you know,” he said. “She was right.”
Onyx
❦
ALICIA MICHAELS
“O, beware, my lord, of jealousy;
It is the green-ey'd monster, which doth mock
The meat it feeds on. That cuckold lives in bliss,
Who, certain of his fate, loves not his wronger:
But O, what damnèd minutes tells he o'er
Who dotes, yet doubts, suspects, yet strongly loves!”
- IAGO, OTHELLO
Chapter 1
Napet Space Station
Laro Pub
3015
The low buzz of conversation filled the crowded taproom, mixing with the obnoxious electronica music blasting from the speaker system. Scantily-clad waitresses in metallic miniskirts served neon-colored mixed drinks and foaming brews. The majority of the bar’s patrons consisted of men in uniform—soldiers of Earth’s army dressed in plain black-and-gray uniforms with their ranks denoted by pins attached to starched collars.
The atmosphere felt jovial, despite the many problems plaguing the human race as a whole. As Isaias Royce hunched over his foaming mug, he eyed them all with undisguised disdain. They acted as if their planet hadn’t been destroyed by their own negligence and waste, as if they didn’t float, homeless, on a space station, just waiting until a new planet could be found and prepared for them. They acted as if they’d forgotten the countless lives lost, decimating the population to less than a million. No, all they cared about was their liquor and their half-naked waitresses.
Meanwhile, he had problems of his own.
Sighing, he tipped the mug back and drained it to the dregs, throat bobbing as the cold brew made its way down.
“What’s eating you?”
The voice of Reid Blackford, a specialist from his unit, snapped him out of his reverie. Isaias frowned. As a captain, Isaias outranked him, yet Reid seemed to have forgotten that. The fact that they were distant cousins had made Reid overly familiar and downright annoying.
“Nothing,” he snapped, signaling the bartender for a refill. “Sit.”
Reid obeyed, ordering his own beer as Isaias’ was delivered.
“Nothing, hm?” Reid mumbled, drumming his fingers against the bar top in the most bothersome way. “Less than twenty-four hours after Cronius March makes first lieutenant, and I find you sulking in a bar. And you say it’s nothing.”
Isaias’ scowl deepened. Reaching across the space separating them, he grabbed Reid’s wrist in a tight hold, dragging the young man toward him until the legs of his stool scraped against the floor and they sat almost nose to nose.
“Watch yourself,” he growled.
Shoving Reid back into his seat, he hunched back over his fresh mug.
Straightening his rumpled uniform, Reid frowned. “Geez, relax! I just thought…”
“That’s your problem. You don’t think. It’s just so… it’s unfair,” he muttered. “Several recommendations from his fellow officers, added to my list of achievements should have been enough. I should have known he would give it to someone else. That black bastard and his damned superiority, thinking he’s better than everyone else just because—”
“Would you keep your voice down?” Reid hissed, glancing around nervously. His gaze landed on a black couple laughing and talking nearby.
Isaias laughed. “God, you really are an idiot. The major isn’t black like them. It’s unnatural, that black skin and those eyes.”
“It’s why they gave him the name Onyx,” Reid remarked, “because his Ethelene name was too hard to pronounce.”
“That’s another thing,” Isaias scoffed. “He isn’t even one of us, how can they promote him to lead?”
Reid shrugged. “I don’t like it any more than you do, but what can we do about it? Nineteen years old and already a major. I can’t stand the prick, but you have to at least admit he’s accomplished a lot, considering how he came to be here. The last of his kind, I heard.”
“I don’t have to admit anything,” Isaias countered. “All I have to do is bide my time.”
“I hear you were offered a position as his ensign. A cushy job with more money, and you g
et to be his right hand.”
“His right hand, huh? Maybe that idea has some merit. As his right hand, I could kill him and make it seem like he did it to himself.”
Reid’s eyebrows furrowed in confusion. “Huh?”
“Nothing,” Isaias replied, brushing him off with an absent wave of his hand. “You wouldn’t have understood anyway.”
Reid had always been incredibly dense.
“Won’t last long anyway,” Reid said between gulps of beer. “When the general finds out what he’s done, he’ll discharge him faster than you can blink.”
This got Isaias’ attention. He straightened on his stool, eyebrows raising toward his hairline. “You have dirt on the major? Spill.”
Reid gazed left to right, ensuring no one could overhear them. “Word has it, he’s been screwing the colonel’s daughter.”
A wide grin spread across Isaias’ face, and glee filled him so quickly he almost couldn’t contain the chuckle welling in his chest.
“My God, that’s insane. And he has no idea?”
“He’s clueless.”
Isaias frowned. “Didn’t you have a thing with her once?”
Reid lowered his eyes, seemingly embarrassed by the reminder. Twin spots of red appeared on his cheeks. “Yeah, but it wasn’t a big deal.”
Isaias snorted. “Right, and I’m sure seeing them together has no effect on you. Thinking about him touching her with those alien hands—”
“All right!” Reid snapped, his entire face red now. “Maybe it does bother me. Whatever. It’s not like there’s anything I can do about it.”
Isaias paused, his mug lifted halfway to his lips. “Or, is there?”
Reid set his mug down and perked up, turning to face him. “I’m listening.”
“Well, I see this sort of thing all the time. Just because Colonel Tian likes Onyx as a soldier, doesn’t mean he wants the Ethelene sniffing around his daughter. Why do you think they’re keeping it a secret?”
“You’re not thinking…”
Isaias stood and signaled the bartender to close out his tab.
Perchance to Dream Page 17
