by Jamie Duncan
In answer, Hamel pointed down the alleyway and took off at an ungainly trot, the rest shuffling after him, bare feet slapping in puddles. Sam cast a last look back at the house. Esa was in the doorway, his hand raised, maybe good riddance, maybe goodbye.
They hadn’t gone far when Sam brushed her hand against Teal’c’s back and waved him into the shadow of a doorway. She waited a beat while the extra set of footsteps came closer and then shot out her arm and caught the passing shadow by the back of the shirt.
“You don’t listen, do you?” she whispered roughly.
Aadi twisted out of her grip. He backed himself up against the far wall of the alley and planted his feet like he was expecting her to start dragging him back to the house. Up ahead, Hamel and the others were waiting in the diluted light of the lantern.
“You—” Aadi began.
Sam held up a hand and searched her memory for an angry mother voice. Coming up empty, she settled for “annoyed military commander”. That, she had plenty of examples to draw on. “Go home, Aadi.”
He thrust his chin out and didn’t move. After a second, though, he started to fold a little and wiped his nose on his sleeve. Water ran down his face and off the end of his chin. His skin was pearly blue-white with cold where it showed above the ragged collar of his shirt. He wrapped his arms around himself and looked up at her, his mouth pinched with the effort of not looking as scared as he felt. “You want to kill my father?” he asked, through barely moving lips.
Sam blinked up into the rain. “No,” she answered wearily, as she allowed her head to fall back against the corrugated steel of the wall behind her. “I don’t want to kill your father, Aadi.”
“If he will listen to reason,” Teal’c said, “perhaps no one will have to die.”
Sam lowered her eyes to meet Aadi’s. He watched her and Teal’c for a long moment, but she couldn’t tell what was going on inside his head, and frankly, at this point she didn’t have time to puzzle it out. “Go home,” she repeated and pushed away from the wall, waving at Hamel to lead the way. She didn’t turn around when Teal’c’s following footsteps were doubled by Aadi’s. “Go home, Aadi.” The footsteps continued. Finally, she stopped and faced him.
“I know the mine. And my father will listen to me. I’m not a—” He broke off to search for the word. “A liability. At least I have two eyes,” he finished, jabbing his finger at Behn, who offered no contradiction. When Sam looked skeptically at him, he pointed over his shoulder, adding, “I could go now to the mine, meet you there.”
“Fine,” Sam sighed, but she pinned Hamel with a stare. “He’s your responsibility.” Then, to Teal’c, “No weapon.” Teal’c nodded and she was glad that Teal’c, at least, followed her orders, even if she got worn down by a thirteen-year-old. “Let’s go get the Colonel, okay?” she mumbled as they got underway again. Let him deal with the kids.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“You know what?” Jack told no one in particular. “I really, really hate this place.” He sat in the middle of the passageway and pressed the heel of his good hand to his brow, trying to blunt the point of the ice pick behind his eye that was boring through his skull from the inside. He didn’t close his eyes, though, partly because he wanted to keep Aris and Sebek in sight, but mostly because there were tendrils of… something—visuals, maybe, only more than that—still trailing and twisting through his brain like the tentacles of some giant passing jellyfish, each with a sting on the end.
Whatever had happened to him, Sebek had recovered fast, way faster than Jack had, and was crouching in front of him, hands hanging loosely over his knees. His eyes were narrowed and his mouth was curled up in a thin smile.
“What?” Jack demanded testily. That smile was irritating and the clearness in Sebek’s eyes, compared to the Weariness Jack felt, was insulting. Of course, Sebek hadn’t actually touched the wall and he hadn’t felt his brainpan splitting to let… stuff… freaky stuff… in, and he hadn’t been ribboned six ways from Sunday, either.
“What did you see?” Sebek asked him. He raised his eyebrows like Daniel used to when asking that kind of question.
“I didn’t see anything,” he lied. Screw you, Sebek, he thought. He could still feel the prickle of intense heat, like a blast furnace against his face, and when he blinked, the after-image of a bare, stony plateau and two rising suns glowed behind his lids. One sun was swollen and red, the other tiny and blue. He tried to remember the designation of that planet, but nothing came to mind. He was beginning to think he’d never been there before.
But he felt like he’d been there. He could feel the thinness of the air as it rasped through his lungs, gritty with dust. The cracked sandstone was too hot to touch, and his palms itched, the pads of his fingertips burning. His hands. Why had he been on his hands?
Dropping the one from his forehead to look at it, he was momentarily surprised to see four naked fingers and a thumb instead of… what? Webs. Three scaly, webbed toes. And feathers.
“What the hell?” he breathed and resisted the urge to screw his fists into his eye sockets.
Sebek’s smile was wider now and he nodded slowly. “You did see something.”
“Maybe. But I see lots of stuff. It’s a side effect of being half-starved and sleep-deprived and, oh, maybe, being shot in the back every five minutes.”
Jack could still feel the percussion of the energy bolt from Sebek’s ribbon device, like an enormous, knuckled fist slamming between his shoulder blades. He focused on that. It was better than the lingering feeling that he was a feathered quadruped, and it made him angrier and more alert, instead of a little on the loopy side.
“We would not have to punish you if you were compliant. Whatever you suffer is your own doing. For instance, in this case.” He aimed the ribbon device at Jack’s forehead. “You can tell us what you saw, or we can cause you great pain. And, we should tell you that your friend finds your pain very distressing.” Sebek tapped his own temple with his empty hand. The crystal in the other glowed livid, causing ah anticipating flare in Jack’s head.
Instead of answering, Jack lunged forward, which wasn’t easy from his position sprawled on the floor, but he managed to get enough momentum behind it to throw Sebek onto his back. Jack scrambled on top of him and grabbed the arm with the ribbon device, barely feeling it when he brought the hand—and his own broken one—down hard onto the stone. He wasn’t thinking of much except breaking that damn crystal, but Sebek was strong, stronger than Daniel had ever been in sparring, and Jack couldn’t twist his wrist enough to get the hand turned over so that the next blow would smash the crystal against the floor.
But he didn’t have the time, either, because Aris was on him, an arm like a tree trunk across Jack’s windpipe pulling him up onto his knees and away from Sebek, squeezing off the breath Jack needed to shout the curse that was lodged in his throat.
As his vision was narrowing and going grey at the edges and Sebek was rising and leaning into the shrinking centre of clarity, Jack blinked. It wasn’t Sebek’s eyes on him anymore, but mirrors half the size of his palm, eye-shaped in a delicate face of iridescent glass, his reflection floating, distorted by the curvature, at the center of each mirror. Beneath the small, underdeveloped nose, the mouth opened to show a tongue shockingly pink against the bloodless white of the lips, and a thin, high voice seemed to tumble like water over him, soothing, soothing, the only thing left to hang on to as the world started to go black. It flowed through his grasping fingers.
Tell him, the hallucination said to him, gently. He will hurt you if you don’t tell him. It is a small thing, but the reward is great.
Jack pressed his lips together against the words that leaped up into his mouth.
Give this little bit, and I will give you everything.
The voice was so sweet, and under the cajoling words were others. Give up, give up, give up.
Jack meant to say, “No,” but what came out was, “A desert.” The words were crushed by the weight o
f Aris’ arm on his throat.
“What did you say?” Sebek asked, and there was a shadow of motion that Jack figured was Sebek waving Aris off.
The pressure on his throat lessened a little, enough for him to talk. Inside his head, the sweet voice crooned give up, give up, give up and Jack thought, Screw you, but his mouth was in full rebellion and was saying, “It was a desert. I saw my feet. My hands. Or maybe feet. Whatever. There were feathers.”
Behind him, Aris let out a snort of laughter.
“Hey,” Jack said, “you asked. Don’t blame me if it sounds stupid.”
Inside his head, the voice was gone, and he felt inconsolably lonely, which was surely a sign of the incipient crazies.
Sebek was standing now, looking down at him with an expression of mild irritation as he rubbed his wrist and settled the ribbon device back into a comfortable position. “You will not touch us again,” he ordered.
Without waiting for Jack’s pithy and cutting retort, Sebek turned to the wall and ran the gold-capped hand across its surface. Nothing happened. But when he raised his empty hand, the wall came to life under his almost touch. With the other hand, Sebek flicked his fingers at Aris, and Jack found himself suddenly on his feet, Aris’ fist bunched up in the shoulder of Jack’s jacket to hold him upright until Jack got his boots fiat on the floor.
“Why do you think you saw this place, the desert, the feathers?” Sebek asked him, slowly moving his hand across the tiles of glyphs and watching the color flare and follow the motion of his hand.
Jack shrugged.
Sebek paused over a tile at Jack’s shoulder level. “It was this one, I think.”
Jack shrugged again. The floor was sort of corkscrewing up-down, left-right, and he was sure that if he could look in the mirror, he’d see the ice pick in his skull stabbing out through his left eye. He didn’t want to think about mirrors. He wanted to lie down and sleep until doomsday. But, seeing how things were going, that might not be such a long nap.
While he was having these cheering thoughts, Sebek snagged him by the cuff of his sleeve and lifted his arm. Before he could react, the Goa’uld closed his fingers around Jack’s hand, squeezing him with bone-crushing strength, and pressed Jack’s fingertips against the wall, sliding his fingers sideways over the rough symbols.
This time it wasn’t desert. It was water. He surged upward through shafts of light, breached the surface with a shriek of escaping air, a shudder in his guts, and a wheeze as a new breath filled him. The sky overhead was one swirling nebula, purple winding around a green center. His jaws gaped open as his spine arched, impossibly supple, and he slid backward again into blackness. But before he did, he caught sight of something else, poised like him between sea and sky, a massive bullet-shaped head, a maw full of teeth, a single glassy eye, the sinuous flip of a tail, and he thought, clearly, although in no language he’d ever heard: love.
Jack lurched backward as Sebek released him. He put his hands over his eyes, surprised to find them open. When he hit the opposite wall of the passageway with his shoulder, he could see the flare of light between his fingers—glyphs like animals dancing in stone, lit up from the inside—and then the ocean was gone and he was floating against the stars, weightless, and below him was a slowly turning space station, eight rings on a central spindle. Beyond it was a planet wrapped in bands of red and yellow. As he watched, a gun turret at the stationary center of the array swiveled toward him, glowing, firing silently.
Then he was on his knees beside Sebek, his forehead on Aris’ boot. The bit of food he’d eaten was making a comeback. He didn’t bother to turn his head. With a grunt of disgust, Aris kicked him away, then took a step forward to wipe his toe on Jack’s pant leg.
“Nice,” Aris said, grimacing.
“Blame your boss,” Jack answered, slowly dragging himself to his feet. He almost reached out to steady himself, but caught himself in time and instead pressed three fingers against his throbbing eye. He waited until Sebek, who also seemed to have fallen to one knee, raised his head, and then Jack said, “That was unpleasant.”
“Sorry, Jack,” Sebek said, in Daniel’s voice, lifting his hand to ward off an expected blow. “I know, you said you didn’t want to hear my voice again. But it’s not like I can help it.”
A familiar, humorless grin flitted across his face. Daniel had used that grin a lot before he’d ascended, in those last months when he’d been weighed down by doubt. It was the smile he’d used when he’d sat across from Jack in the infirmary and described the effects of terminal radiation poisoning. Ironic, resigned, impotent. Jack had seen that smile every time he closed his eyes for months after. Right now, he wanted nothing more than to kill Sebek for using it.
It must’ve shown on his face, because Sebek stood up, too, and backed away a little. Above his head, the light in the grooves along the ceiling came to life and followed him, the darkness retreating behind him.
Sebek closed his eyes for a moment and sighed heavily. “It’s me,” he said. “It’s me and I don’t know how to make you believe me, Jack. I just…” His arms rose and fell again to his sides, defeated. “Can’t you see it?” His face was pleading.
Jack narrowed his eyes, cocked his jaw. Do not engage, he told himself. Then he said, in spite of his own good advice, “What I see is a snake with a sadistic streak this wide.” He held his arms out to illustrate.
Again with the smile. “Well, I’m not going to argue with that.” Sebek squeezed his eyes shut and bowed his head—the way Daniel did when he was trying to bully through a problem, or when thick people weren’t listening to reason—and when he looked up again, he seemed to have made a decision. “Okay,” he said. Jack waited for more, but that was it.
Sebek held up his hand, palm outward, the crystal in the centre of the ribbon device cold and black. Jack braced himself for another shot. Aris took a step away. But instead of shooting him, Sebek lowered the weapon and started pulling the caps off of his fingers.
Jack almost said, “Daniel?” in the way that invariably made Daniel reply, in the same overly-patient, bemused tone, “Jack?” He ground his teeth together for a second and then asked, in as flat a voice as he could muster, “What are you doing?”
“I’m giving you the ribbon device.”
“Well, that’s… stupid.”
The snake angled his head in a half-shrug of acknowledgment and looked at Jack from under his raised eyebrows, like he would if he were Daniel and was glancing up at him over the rims of his glasses. That smile again. “That’s the point.”
Jack’s own eyebrows shot up. “Stupid is the point?”
Sebek huffed out a laugh as he wriggled out of the coil brace wound around his forearm. “No,” he answered patiently, like Jack was one of the slower, if good-natured, kids in the class. “The part where I trust you is the point.” He tossed the device to Jack, who caught it against his chest. “Even if you don’t trust me.”
The device was warm, and Jack suppressed a shudder as he hooked two fingers through the coil and let it hang at his side away from his body. He had to give the snake credit. This was a whole new level of sinister. A wave of nausea churned through him and the ice pick twisted and twisted in his eye. The man in front of him—Sebek—was watching him, nothing in his expression except a trace of hope, there, in the slight dimple at the corner of his mouth where that resigned smile was trying to get out again.
After a few silent seconds, the man raised his now naked fingers and pinched the bridge of his nose, swaying a little. “I’m sorry, Jack,” he said, rubbing his eyes with a finger and thumb before dropping his arm like it was too heavy to carry anymore, his whole frame slumping. “This situation… I know this sucks. But you have to decide what you’re going to do. I have some control here. I really do. But Sebek is close, and he’s not happy. If he gets control again he’s going to punish both of us for this, so I’d like this time to count for something.” He spread his arms, open, exposed. “Trust me, or kill me.” When Jac
k didn’t move, he aimed his gaze at Aris. “Okay, you do it then. It’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”
Aris shifted his weight, but his face betrayed nothing. “I’m here to serve my god,” he said. Jack had to give him points for managing that without rolling his eyes.
Sebek gave him a painfully Danielesque “oh, please” expression. “Sebek knows, Aris. He knows about your little arms-smuggling venture. He knows about your sister and her blasphemous cult, as he thinks of it.”
Aris’ jaw muscle twitched, but that was it.
Clearly frustrated, the snake went on, faster now, steamrollering the opposition, his eyes blazing, lips thinned, teeth showing—Daniel on a tear. “The only reason he’s brought you in here is because the Jaffa get sick and he needs you to ride roughshod over Jack. He knows you’ll do as you’re told because he knows you love your son. But as soon as he finds what he’s looking for, he’s going to kill both of you, and then he’ll find your sister and all her followers and he’ll wipe them out, and he’ll do it as brutally and publicly as possible as an example to the others, and all that is going to happen unless you either listen to what I have to say or you shoot me. Put me out of my misery before Sebek comes back. Do us all a favor.”
Aris snapped the blaster up, stiff-armed. The power-pack whined as he keyed the safety off.
Jack stepped in front of it.
The ice pick was grinding against his skull like a drill, and in his grip, the ribbon device was heavy and warm and coiled like a snake, and in the pool of light around the three men, seconds stretched out and out until he could feel every heartbeat building, striking, ebbing. Aris didn’t pull the trigger. Behind Jack, that thing, whoever it was, stood still and quiet and was radiating despair and anger and impatience.
