by J. A. Huss
Gideon puts his arm around me and pulls me in for a hug. "It's nothing, I'm sure. We're not gonna let it ruin your birthday, Junco. We're gonna have a nice time tonight, OK?" He leans down and kisses me on the head. "When's the last time I got to see you for your birthday? It's been too long. I'm gonna make up for it tonight."
God, I love him.
I know Tier thinks I chose Gideon, but it wasn't the same kind of choice. Neither was Lucan. I don't want them or need them in the same way I need Tier.
Gideon is just a very special friend and Lucan… Shit, I have no idea what Lucan is to me. I'm clearly not all that important to him if he finds it so easy to walk away from me. And I get it, Tier is like a son to him. Fine. He's allowed to choose Tier. But don't tell me you love me, will love me for thousands of years, and then walk away when I need you.
I can get that from pretty much everyone else in my life. I don't need any more fucking part-time friends.
This is what makes Gideon such an attractive choice as my eternal partner. He never wants more. And he never makes me choose. He's just there.
And he loves me unconditionally. He's seen me do things that will condemn me to Hell, and still, he loves me. Would do anything for me. Would die for me.
And I would definitely do the same for him and I do not regret my actions back in the Runout valley. How was I supposed to know Tier would save him? Tier wanted to kill him in the tunnels. I'm no mind-reader.
Our boat finally reaches the dock and we get off and slip into the crowd. Gid holds my hand like he's my boyfriend and Selia sticks to my shoulder like a bodyguard.
The crowd in the casino is not that thick but I can hear the cheering coming from the arena farther down the island and figure most people are probably going to the show.
Gid lets go of my hand and walks off to the bar to get us some drinks. I'm twenty-two now. Totally legal. It feels weird because it seems like it was just a few days ago when I was getting ready to turn twenty. The morph stole the time in between and there is no way to get it back.
Selia drags me outside to a table near the dance floor and we sit. The club is not crowded and the cheering from the arena tells me the rock star has arrived. I check my vision screen. An opera is about two and a half hours long. I raise my voice over the throbbing beat. "How long do you think that Cora show will last?"
Gid shows up and hands us drinks. Selia has some girly thing but Gid hands me a beer. Selia takes a long slurp of her concoction and then comes up for air and looks over at me. "About two hours probably."
"Two hours what?"
Oops. Gideon wasn't supposed to hear that. He'll catch on to my sneaky ways if I'm not careful. Selia doesn't respond so I just pretend I didn't hear him. I check my vision screen again and then Selia tugs me out to the dance floor with her. Gideon doesn't follow. Dancing is not something I do but the song ends and a slow song comes on.
"This is Cora, Junco. It's so fabulous." She grabs me and pulls me close and drapes my hands around her neck as she grabs my waist so we can slow-dance. Every guy in the place is suddenly interested in us which is not good, but she's just trying to make me happy so I let her cling to me and move my feet around a little.
She leans down into my ear and tickles me with her alcohol-laced breath. "Why don't you date Gideon, Junco? He loves you so much. Tier's no good for you."
"That's not what we have, Selia. Not that I know of anyway. If he feels that way about me, then he can come tell me himself. Because he's never let on that he's interested in me like that. Went out of his way as a teen to discourage any of that sort of stuff, in fact."
She pushes me away a little and looks down at me, her eyes very serious. "You could make him interested, ya know."
I sigh and look over at him. He's not even looking at us, in fact his eyes are following the ass of a very attractive brunette who barely has any clothes on. I look back at Selia and raise an eyebrow.
"Well, you can't blame him for looking, Junco. It's not like you're available."
I laugh. "Selia, I can't deal with this right now. Seriously. If Gid wants to sleep with me—"
Selia smacks me, sorta hard too. "He doesn't want to sleep with you, Junco! He just wants to love you."
I turn away and look at him again. This time he waves and gives me a crooked grin. I smile back and wave him over but he shakes his head and raises his beer to me. I picture a life wrapped up in Gideon's arms each night and my whole body gets warm. "Don't play matchmaker, Sel. Please. I love Gideon and I'd do anything for him, but I'm too fucked up to even think about men right now. OK?"
She looks at me with sad eyes. No. Pity eyes. She pities me. I look away and shrug her off as the song ends. We go back to our table and I watch as Selia gets giddy and drunk while Gideon relaxes and talks the ear off the guy at the table next about sports.
They are happy, comfortable, and sedated with alcohol. So when I get up and excuse myself to go the bathroom they never even think that I might never come back.
The crowd is thick now that the show is over and I get lost among the throngs of people easily. Even if Gid suspected what I was up to, he'd have a hard time finding me. I make my way over to the land transport line, activate Isten's invisibility gift, and slip onto a bus headed past the planet pad.
Cora's suborbital is the only thing in sight when I get there. It's flamboyant and pink, just like her hair. It even says ‘CORA!’ on the side of it next to her giant face. There are a lot of people milling around it but the passenger ramp is in place. I know from experience that this means the travelers are already on board so I walk out on the pad and sneak up to the entrance, trying to keep my boots from banging around too much on the metal stairs as I ascend. I peek inside but Cora is the only person I can see. She's standing in the middle of the cabin, her fingers busy flicking across the screen of some handheld piece of tech.
I enter, disengage my invisibility directly in front of her, and wait.
She barely reacts and I give her lots and lots of points for this. We stand there in silence for a few seconds and then she laughs.
"Why, if it isn't Astrid the mute, how nice of you to join me!"
I make a cheeky grin, I can't help it. This woman is not stupid and I admire her cool. "I need a ride to Texas. Can you help me out?"
She stares at me a little longer, maybe trying to make me squirm, but I don't squirm. She recognized me so easily for a reason, and there's only one that I can think of. She's interested in me, what I've done, and what I might do in the future.
"What will you give me?" she asks with a coy tilt of her head.
"I'll give you the same thing I gave Selia Manchen the night I left with the avians. A story to tell."
She throws her head back and laughs again. A real outburst that echoes out the door and across the planet pad. "Junco, I'd have settled for nothing. You, girl, are the face of the times. Everyone wants to know about you. They know you're back because the death and destruction has suddenly ceased. But what happened to you—or why that Satan replica has tortured and killed thousands of people over the past two years trying to find you? That is the most tightly guarded secret since the construction of the Pyramids. So your story is above and beyond anything I could've ever hoped for."
I stand there stunned by her words.
Chapter Eight
Her suborbital is manned by a private staff of six very nervous people who do not sit with us in the main cabin, but have their own area in the forward compartments. I don't know if they always segregate themselves like that, but I'm not interested in sharing my story and reactions with just anyone. So I'm glad this is how it worked out.
We're waiting on the pad for clearance when a woman appears from the front and leans down to whisper in Cora's ear. This suborbital has a table and chair setup like the ones my dad and I took on our birthday trips. Cora and I are sitting across from each other, not far at all, but the messenger is especially discreet in her revelation.
I watch Cora's face
and then prepare myself.
She smiles at me when the woman walks back to her station.
"People are looking for you. My pilot has been asked to verify that we have no illicit passengers on board."
I wait it out.
"He lied for you."
"He didn't have to. I'm free to do as I please."
She looks away for a second and purses her lips around a cigarette and takes a deep draw before answering. "Right." The smoke shoots out into the air around her words. "But these people you're with. They're not nice." Her eyes come back to mine. "Are they?"
I shrug. "I think they're nice. I'm not running from them if that's what you mean. I just have somewhere else to be right now and they're a little gun-shy about letting me out of their sight."
She nods and looks away. Takes another drag. I may have misjudged this one.
"So, you're OK with all the shit they've been doing over the past two years?" Her eyes sweep back over to me again and her anger surfaces. For a few heartbeats I wonder if I'm gonna have to kill the rock star before we even take off.
I dial down my paranoia and try and defuse the situation. "I was—"
I was what? How much do I tell her? My silence makes her face harden and I decide to go for the truth. She's not all that predictable—this pink-headed woman is not quite what I expected. And why should she bow to me? I might be a global interest right now, but so is she. Cora doesn't see me as above her, if anything I might be below her. "I was taken by a—" I stop again. It's really not that easy to explain.
She waits it out. Patient.
"OK, look. I'll tell you the whole story. The truth, but it's gonna sound far-fetched. So, no judgment. Deal?"
She cracks a smile and we both know she's won. Somehow, even though I've got powers she cannot even comprehend and I could kill her in an instant, she is smug.
"OK, but this is the short version, got it? I'm not gonna go into detail because it's too much. The details, Cora. They're too much."
She nods but holds her words.
"I went with the avians willingly. I chose that so they could morph me into one of them. I'm the product of some very strange bioengineering that took place out in the Rural Republic over the past several decades. And they did change me. I was avian for a while. But then I was told, shown actually, that their gene pool was, well—let's just call it a complete disaster. They had to stop their reproduction and because I was part of this group of specially engineered children, I had a role in helping them restore their gene pool and I play the final part in some sort of avian prophecy."
I stop to gauge her reaction so far but all she does is take another drag on her cigarette. The suborbital has apparently been cleared for take-off because I am slammed back in my seat with the new velocity. I wait for the lift of air that tells me we've left the ground and then continue.
"So I came back to Earth with my team of warriors and we went into the Mountain Republic and took back my brothers and sisters. We are the avian Seven Siblings. Moju, Soli, Tukker, Esta, Sariel, Irin, and me."
"And?" Her eyes narrow, becoming more hateful than interested.
"And? And what?"
"The bomb? You blew up a nuclear reactor up in the mountains, Junco. Surely you didn't forget that part?"
I want to look away but I force myself to maintain eye contact. "If you saw what I saw up there, you'd have done it too, Cora. They had copies of us. Thousands upon thousands of replicas of us, only they weren't really us, right? They were sick amalgamations of—shit, I have no idea how they made those things. But the RR had them too, which is why my dad—"
"—fucked up the entire Central Republics with his nuclear bombs. And then you went and decided to do the same thing."
I shrug. "That's not quite how it went, but whatever. That guy you saw me with tonight? Gideon? The one who's probably looking for me right now? He's from another group of children like me. He's my partner and he was in my lap dying by the hand of the monster who represents humans in my little prophetic struggle. He was dying because when I was asked to make a choice back on that battlefield in the Runout valley, to choose humans and Earth or the Fallen Archers of the Band—"
Her jaw tenses as she clenches her teeth.
"—I chose Lucan."
She nods her head, but it's not in agreement, more like a confirmation of what she already knew. "That demon thing that's been terrorizing the entire planet for two years. You chose that thing over us?"
I let out a long sigh. I'm so fucking tired of this us and them bullshit. "Well, I mean, he doesn't always act like that, Cora. He's a pretty cool guy."
She stubs her cigarette out in an ashtray on the table and sneers over at me. "You know what? If I wasn't harnessed into this goddamn seat and we weren't about to enter free-G, I'd beat the shit out of you right now."
I laugh and raise my eyebrows at her. "Would ya now? I don't know you, so maybe you could." I watch her face as I prepare the threat. "But I'd just like you to know that I killed more than a hundred people in free-G when I lived with the avians. So I'm ready to go when you are."
"You have no remorse, do you?"
"Remorse for what? I didn't drop those bombs on Peak City and Council 3! That place was like my fucking hometown! Besides, I was busy killing my best friend back in the Band the night that happened. I wasn't even on Earth, so fuck you and your righteous judgment because everyone that lived in Runout knew what they were involved in and if they didn't, then fuck them for being so stupid. You can't live in a small mountain neighborhood that's better protected than most countries and not suspect there might be secrets."
She takes out another cigarette and I snatch the pack from her before she even knows what's happening. I slide one out and strike it up, then throw the pack back, smacking her in the chest.
I take a long draw and then enjoy the nicotine as it courses through my body. "I might look approachable these days, what with the lack of battle scars and all the pretty new curves. But let me tell you something right now, I've got no conscience to stop me from killing. None. So do not fucking piss me off with your half-ass threats."
She says nothing, just glares at me from behind those bloodshot gray eyes.
"That bitch Inanna, the goddamn representative for humanity and Earth? She took me against my will, stripped my entire body of skin until the flesh beneath was exposed, the nerve endings firing off into red tank gel, electrifying the entire apparatus until my body buckled and writhed in the agony. She broke every bone in my body, ripped my muscles apart, stole my fucking wings for Christo's sake. And then morphed me back into this girl you see before you. I never asked for any of this. I never wanted to be anything more than a silly wife to some backwater hick farmer in the RR, so fuck you and your remorse. I have zero remorse."
She turns her head now.
"And I don't know what Lucan was doing during that time I was being tortured but he was there when I made my choice. He knew I chose him and then she tried to kill Gideon to make me change my mind. The next time you see my partner, and believe me, you will—he'll pay you a visit, I'm sure—you look for the thick white scar across his neck. That's what Inanna did to him to try and force me to bend to her will. He's only alive today because the avians saved his ass. And when I didn't give in, when I was firm in my defiance, she broke me."
I take a long draw on my cigarette to calm myself. It's a lot easier to talk about than I thought it would be. Maybe because I can channel my anger against Cora. Or maybe I just don't give a shit about anything anymore. It's kinda hard to tell what motivates me these days.
"So whatever Lucan did? Whatever it took for him to be there a few weeks ago when he rescued me? When he put a stop to the pain she was inflicting on me for two goddamn years? Well, it was worth it. And I could give a shit who had to die for it. I'm sure"—I look her straight in the eye—"positively sure, that if people were killed as part of Lucan's death spree, then they deserved it. He might not have final judgment powers, but it's pr
etty motherfucking close."
We sit in silence for a long time. I'm done. I have nothing more to say and if she's done too, well then I'll just stay quiet and bide my time until we land in Texas, then go invisible and slip away.
The woman attendant appears again and notifies us that we'll be landing in Dallas in ten minutes. I just stare out of the window and concentrate on the Gulf of Mexico.
"So how much of this should I keep quiet?"
I turn my head towards her slowly. "I could care less what you blab about. The world is gonna be seeing a lot more of me real soon. That's a fucking promise. Lucan might've gotten his revenge, but I haven't gotten mine. And I will get it, Cora. They took something from me that haunts me every waking second. And I will kill every single being involved in the creation of the Seven Sibling clutches. No matter where they live on this planet, I will find them and I will kill them."
"You're on the wrong side of history, Junco. You're gonna find that out the hard way, I think."
"We'll see," I say with disinterest. "Whoever knows what side of history they're on anyway? To the victor go the spoils, right? You make the best decision you can based on the facts at hand."
"That's not how the quote goes, you know. And it's not a good thing, it implies high-level corruption."
I sneer at her now. "Don't insult me. I know what it means. History is subjective, so how can you possibly know which side I'll come out on when I'm still in the middle of creating it?"
"So this is the best decision you can come up with? Revenge and killing?"
"Cora, you have no idea what you're talking about. A few dead people here and there in my selfish revenge scheme mean nothing, because my role in this whole mess might involve annihilation of entire cities. And if that's what it takes to hold it all together, well then, fuck. The world is about to find out exactly what I'm made of. I'll do whatever I have to because in the end, you just gotta get the job done. I've caused too much death and lost too many friends to let it all be pissed away for nothing."
