Exile (The Oneness Cycle)

by Rachel Starr Thomson

  The last two decades in the fishing village had been a welcome respite. Warm, quiet, a balance of sadness and victory. Nothing like the early days.

  Not until April disappeared.

  For a moment Mary let her eyes lower. She closed them and breathed a prayer for April. She was still convinced that her friend was not dead—and yet, in some strange way, the connection between them felt weaker than it ever had before. The sense of weakening was so clear as she reached out in spirit that she trembled inside.

  April. April was why they were here.

  “One of ours has gone missing,” Mary said, raising her eyes again. “We’ve tried everything to find her. Things have been dark … she’s been impossible to track. But I think the pieces are coming together now. I think the hive may be responsible for her disappearance.”

  “That does not necessarily mean you should go in,” David pointed out. “Even if they did take her, it’s unlikely they’re keeping her here. Are you sure she isn’t …”

  “She isn’t dead,” Mary hastily answered. “Yet. Please, David, tell us what you know. We’re not asking you to send anyone in with us. We only want to find out what we can learn.”

  David leaned back, resting his hand on the armrest of the couch he occupied alone. “I don’t want to send you to your deaths. And it might well come to that. Mary, in twenty years I have never seen anything like this. It is far, far bigger than we can handle. We’re in defensive mode—just trying to hold things together and beat back the darkness if it starts to spread. But we can’t attack this. It would take a force a thousand times bigger than any cell.” He glanced over at Richard, ignoring the boys. “A million times bigger than yours.”

  “Point taken,” Mary said. “But you know the old saying: ‘Despise not the day of small things.’ We aren’t going to attack. Just learn.”

  David shook his head. “You can’t do it. You’ll never even get in.”

  “We just need to know where it is, David.”

  He leaned back again and surveyed her carefully. Her inner response to his scrutiny was unexpected: for a moment she felt unsafe.

  But that was nonsense. This man was Oneness.

  And yet … hadn’t he cut off Reese?

  What kind of person would even think to do such a thing?

  Taking a determined sip of coffee, Mary forced herself to shake off the thought and the premonition that had prompted it. It was only the memories that made her feel uncomfortable with him—the history they shared that both had spent two decades trying to forget. David had explained the exile. As far as he had been able to see, Reese was poison. And Mary hadn’t met her—she had nothing to go on to the contrary but the word of two young men who were only just beginning to see hints of the world they blindly dwelt in.

  David sighed again. Then he drew a piece of paper and a pen from his back pocket, bent over the coffee table, and jotted down an address. He handed it to her without a word.

  “Thank you,” she said, glancing at the address. Somewhere in Lincoln—she didn’t know the city well enough to say exactly where.

  “I can’t send anyone with you,” he said. “I’m sorry, Mary, but I can’t be responsible for exposing more of our own. They are already too aware of us.”

  “I understand.” She stood. “I don’t know for certain what we’re going to do when we get there anyway. No sense in you sending someone else to share in our uncertainty.”

  David stood as well, nodding at Richard, who joined them. “You have a man of prayer. At least you don’t go unarmed. But these two now …” here his eyes moved to Chris and Tyler, who both took on a defensive stance. “These two have no armament at all, unless I am sorely mistaken.”

  She sighed. “You’re not.” Truth be told, she wasn’t really sure why she had brought them here. To identify Reese if they found her, she supposed, and convince her to trust them. And because Patrick had spoken to Tyler. They clearly had a part in the plan.

  “Why don’t you leave them here?” David asked. “We’ll look out for them until you come back.” He left half his words unspoken. If you come back.

  “Thanks, but no,” Chris said. “I came along to help.”

  She breathed an inward sigh of relief that he said nothing more than that. The last thing she wanted was for David to know why they were really here—that they didn’t expect to find April, but Reese. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust him, she told herself. It was just that he wouldn’t understand. And whatever was going on with Reese, Patrick had indicated it was cloaked somehow. “Nothing is what it looks like,” that was what Tyler had said was the message from the cloud. It wasn’t David’s fault if he couldn’t see the truth.

  Whatever the truth was.

  Still, leaving the boys here didn’t seem like a bad idea. She turned around to say so and saw the answer in Chris’s eyes as clearly as if he’d been Oneness and they’d been closely connected enough to read each other’s minds.

  No.

  Tyler, then. He was the younger and more vulnerable of the two anyway. But she opened her mouth to suggest he stay, and he met her eyes full-on and told her, silently, the same thing Chris had. He was coming.

  Not, she realized, because of some macho bravado. Neither of the young men were here for an adrenaline rush or even to get answers for themselves—answers they deserved by now. They were here out of loyalty to a friend they barely knew.

  She smiled and shook her head. “Thank you, David, but no. We’ll watch out for them. I believe we’ll be all right.”

  “You have more faith than I do.”

  She shook his hand, as did Richard after her. “We’ll be careful.”

  Outside, on the sidewalk in front of the house, Mary let out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. She looked down at the address in her hand.

  “I forgot to ask him how to get there,” she said.

  “We’ll find it.” Richard’s voice had a grim note to it. She looked at him, questioning. Yes, he’d felt it too … a need to hide. To keep their intentions secret. Coming to this house—when they’d walked up the driveway, the presence of so many other Oneness had wrapped both Mary and Richard and welcomed them home. So why their caution?

  “I’m glad you’re with me,” she said quietly. He would know what she meant.

  It was good not to rely on one’s instincts alone.

  The boys were already on their way back to the truck. Chris started to jog when he caught sight of someone leaning against the passenger door. Mary frowned. “Who …”

  A step closer and she recognized him: the teenager from inside. Olive complexion and thick dark hair identified him as Mediterranean, maybe Italian or Greek. His back was to the truck and his arms wrapped across his chest.

  He straightened up a little as they approached, and his eyes found Mary’s.

  She caught her breath. The boy’s expression was tortured.

  “Are you going after the hive?” he asked.

  Mary looked over at Richard.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “It’s a warehouse where their power’s located. A horrible place,” the boy said. “Something happened there …”

  “The exile?” Mary said quietly.

  The boy’s eyes widened. “You know about that?”

  “David told us,” Mary said. “A girl called Reese.”

  His expression grew more pained. “She was my friend. My sister and me, we went out on missions with her. I was with her … on the night they said she betrayed us.”

  Richard’s brow darkened. “You sound like you don’t agree.”

  The boy held out his hands beseechingly. “What do I know? Things went bad … Patrick got killed. But I never thought Reese was the problem. She thought she was doing the right thing. Following the Spirit.”

  A slight pang of guilt—the thought that David might not approve this conversation with a boy from his cell—twinged in Mary. But cell leaders weren’t autocrats, after all. And the boy wanted to talk.

>   “Can you help us?” Mary asked. “Tell us how to get to this address?”

  The boy glanced at the paper. “Yeah, I can take you there.”

  “Take us there?” Richard interjected. “You coming with us?”

  The boy stepped away from the truck, unblocking access to the passenger’s seat. “Yeah. If you’re okay with that.” He stuck out a hand. “My name’s Tony.”

  “Good to meet you, Tony,” Mary said, returning his greeting. His grip was strong, and knowledge of who he was flooded into her as their hands touched. Honest, brash, undyingly loyal. Oneness in every part of his being. Gifted—in warfare, she thought. Sword-handling, quickness. And there was something else.

  She smiled, her heart quickening to an unexpected ache. “You’re a twin.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Angelica—my sister—she’s here with me.”

  “I was a twin,” Mary said. “Long ago.”

  She repeated, “It’s good to meet you.”

  Richard smiled suddenly. “Well, well,” he said. Mary looked in the direction he was looking. A girl, Tony’s age and strikingly like him in appearance, had stepped out from the other side of the truck.

  “I want to come too,” Angelica said. She shot Tony a look as he started to protest. “You left me behind last time. I hate being left behind.”

  Mary tuned the twins out as they argued with each other. As far as she was concerned, the question was settled. These two were a gift. They were coming.

  * * *

  The warehouse on Kliff Street looked, from the outside, like any other building in the industrial part of Lincoln. It was sandwiched between other warehouses, the outside facade corrugated tin painted a dull rust colour. Loading docks lined the back where Reese lingered in the shadows of a dumpster, watching.

  Saturday morning, the industrial zone was quiet. No extra activity was happening here either—nothing to identify the warehouse as different from its neighbours. Even the spiritual darkness was remarkably damp—indistinct, low-lying, hard to sense. But then, that was a characteristic of this hive. It was better cloaked than any demonic operation Reese had ever encountered; it was part of how it had stayed undetected for so long, gaining an enormous foothold without the Oneness catching on.

  It had been Reese who insisted there was more here than met the senses, something bigger going on than anyone realized. Reese who treated the war against this place as a full-scale assault—an offensive rather than ongoing defensive tactics. Reese who was sure she knew the way of the Spirit in this and had led teams in to follow that way.

  Reese who had gotten Patrick killed and had inspired more conflict and dissension in the Lincoln cell than the Oneness had known perhaps ever.

  She swallowed the lump in her throat. She couldn’t dwell on the sorrow, on the grief, now. She had come here to die, but not without inflicting damage first. And she couldn’t do that if she was emotionally incapacitated.

  She felt weight, pressure, in the palm of her hand. Spirit gathered and concentrated its energy against that which was counter to it: against the dark powers of evil, hatred, and negation. The Spirit—life—found a thousand expressions in this world, but the one Reese wielded did more to express the potent reality of the world as it was than any other.

  Sword.

  They were at war.

  An irony struck Reese: that as an exile, as one cut off from the Oneness and thrown into the world alone, she was acting toward the enemy as she had thought it was acting toward her: as a renegade. She would strike a blow for the sake of those she loved but was no part of.

  Let me die in a blaze of love, she thought.

  She stepped out from behind the dumpster in the oppression of memory, the trauma of victory ended in soul-cleaving defeat cutting at her heart. She stepped across the parking lot toward the inauspicious door next to a closed loading dock, carrying the absence of Tony and Patrick, the absence of the Oneness, with her—bearing the emptiness that undid her. But the sword was coming to hand, not denied her this one last time. She gripped it and pushed the door open.

  The sound of empty, cobwebbed silence greeted her, the warehouse vast in its disuse. A cluster of pallets, six by six, stacked with cardboard boxes, sat in one corner. The rest of the empty concrete floor, shiny and smooth from the traffic of hundreds of feet, spread out from the door unencumbered and disappeared in shadows on all sides. On one high, wide wall, scrawled graffiti indicated that the warehouse had recently been broken into and vandalized. But there wasn’t much here to vandalize.

  The emptiness, like everything else about the hive and the creatures that powered it, was deceptive.

  As she took more tentative steps into the gloom of the warehouse, Reese could feel the tension in the air, a low buzz growing with every inch forward. The sword took full form in her hand, slicing into visibility in the shadowed room. Slowly she became aware of a smell—a reek in the atmosphere, familiar, rotten.

  She reached the middle of the floor and stood scanning the warehouse from wall to wall, floor to ceiling. Nothing moved.

  They were here. Waiting.

  For what?

  She licked her lips and thought a final prayer.

  Spirit, I come back to you. If you will take me, take me. If not … even so, I give myself to you.

  Slowly they morphed out of the shadows. She saw them first as flickers, movements caught in the corner of the eye, flares of light—eyes glaring. The shapes gathered form, still vague as though she saw them through a screen.

  “What are you waiting for?” she called.

  No response, but the movements, the flickers, increased.

  She stretched her arm out, holding the sword high. “I am alone,” she called. “You remember me. I come alone, and I challenge you.”

  A creature over six feet in height, broad-shouldered like a man, melted out of the shadows directly across from her. Its face was a pair of eyes staring out of a mass of white scars.

  “You,” it rasped, “are not alone.”

  The words cut her to the heart.

  And in her pain, she screamed out a battle cry and charged forward, swinging for the being’s head. A sword of its own flashed out of the dark and met hers in the air, deflecting the blow and then slicing down at her. She ducked and spun out of the way, but the blade glanced her shoulder, cutting through her shirt and drawing blood.

  Demons formed everywhere and charged from all sides. Reese fought like a wasp in a spider’s web, entangled and doomed but determined to wreak as much destruction as she could. They hissed and shrieked and fell away from the bite of her sword, but there were so many. They were underfoot, tripping her up; latched onto her shoulders; biting at her neck and arms and legs. Fangs, razor claws, and the terrible chatter and noise of their words, ceaseless, pouring at her in a flood.

  “Remove! Back, creatures of the dark!”

  Another voice boomed through the warehouse and reverberated off the walls. From all around Reese it rose like a pillar of fire, thrusting her assailants away and flinging them to the ground and careening into the walls.

  Reese turned to see a tall black man standing in the warehouse door with his hands lifted. His eyes and hands were blazing with light.

  A man of prayer.

  To her shock, Tony and Angelica appeared behind him.

  Why were they here?

  The demons regrouped and flew forward again, attacking both Reese and the newcomers in the door. Again the authority in the man’s voice arrested their advance and flung them back. “Away, abominations!”

  Reese gaped at the power the man displayed. The very air was vibrating and sparking with it. When the demons came forward once more and the man’s voice boomed “Away!”, the surge of power knocked her off her feet along with them.

  She blinked up at the warehouse ceiling. Silence. The creatures had not re-formed this time. She could not tell if they were still there or if they had actually fled.

  Everything hurt. Her neck and hands were stic
ky with blood. She was still clutching her sword.

  A small woman knelt beside her—not old, but no longer young. Reese knew her for Oneness immediately. Her bearing and expression radiated wisdom and kindness.

  But why were they here?

  She licked her lips, tasting rust and dirt. The woman was smoothing Reese’s hair back from her face and examining her wounds. Finally she said, “Are you all right?”

  “I … I don’t …”

  Movement behind the woman drew Reese’s attention. It was hard to see—harder to see than it should be. It took a moment to make sense of what she was seeing. But she managed to get out, “Chris?”

  He said nothing. Just looked down at her with his protective, good heart in his eyes. And Tyler was there too—talking to her.

  “Why did you leave? What were you thinking? You could have got yourself killed in here!”

  Tony and Angelica’s voices joined in, subdued but pressing her for answers too—wanting to know why she was here, wanting to know how she could still wield a sword, wanting to know if she was all right.

  But it was the last of them that she wanted to see most, and it was he who appeared finally, standing over them all with an air of deep authority.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  As though the others were not even there, he answered, “Richard.”

  And she knew that he could do what no one else could. This man who carried heaven’s power in his voice could give her back what her heart wanted more than anything in this world—more than life, more than death.

  “Tell me who I am,” she said. Her voice sounded thick. The loss of blood …

  He gazed solemnly down on her.

  “You are Oneness,” he said, and she closed her eyes and lost consciousness.

  Chapter 10

  They hustled Reese out to the truck as quickly as they could without risking further injury to her and laid her down on the back bench. Richard motioned to the empty truck bed. “Get in,” he told the younger crew. “We need to get away from this place.”