Sun

by J. C. Andrijeski

  She smiled knowingly, releasing my hand.

  Leaning back in her seat, she glanced at Revik, then back at me.

  You are right, she conceded. I do not know either of you well yet. Certainly not as well as I would like to know you both.

  Pausing, she added emphatically,

  Yet I know of no mated pair that has been through what you and your mate have been through. I know of no mated pair that has sacrificed what you have––for one another, for your children––much less with only a half-bond between you.

  She met my gaze, her green eyes sharper, holding a dense intelligence and warmth that hit me right in that sore spot of my heart.

  After all of that, she sent. After feeling your light entwined with Dalejem, after believing you carried Dalejem’s child, that you loved another… your mate’s only thought was how to save his marriage. His only questions to Uye were about how to win you back, how to help you with your pregnancy, how to be a better mate to you. He was desperate with this, Alyson. He still is.

  Pausing, she added,

  You have seemed the same to me, daughter, although you hide it better than your mate. You also have more reasons to distrust him. Even with this truth, it seems to me that since you’ve been back from Beijing, your only thought has been how to save your marriage to him. Even knowing what he did while you were separated, and everything else you have suffered with him, you have still done everything your mate has asked of you to that end. If that is not love, I do not know what is.

  Meeting her gaze, I nodded, my face and neck flushing with heat.

  Feeling that pain start up in my chest again, I took a swallow of wine.

  I thought she was done, but she wasn’t.

  I know you have not spoken to Dalejem out of guilt, she added, softer. You blame yourself for thinking about what might have happened if your husband never came back, for considering Jem in his place… but this is natural, daughter. Anyone would have felt this way, particularly with a child on the way. You should forgive yourself for this. You should forgive yourself for loving Jem. I say this not only as a mother, but as a sister… and a fellow bonded mate.

  I raised the wine glass to my lips, taking a longer swallow.

  The sickness returned stronger to my light and chest, catching my breath, nearly blinding me. Looking away from her serious gaze, I closed my eyes, opening them only to see the sun hovering just above the ocean’s edge.

  I don’t think I ever answered her.

  Even so, her words lingered, reverberating somewhere in my light.

  16

  FUTURE VISIONS

  BY THE TIME we finished eating, it was completely dark out.

  Stars blanketed the sky, so many that I tilted back in my chair, gazing up, balancing my weight with one foot on the railing. Pleasantly sleepy from the food and wine, I found myself kind of wishing we had a hot tub up there.

  From next to me, Revik grunted a laugh.

  I was fuller than I could remember being in months.

  They’d served us Mexican food, possibly at my mother’s request, or possibly at my husband’s, given that he knew it was one of my favorite kinds of food. Pulled pork chile verde burritos, beef tacos, chile rellenos, black beans with cilantro and tomato salsa.

  I couldn’t believe how much food there was.

  I didn’t ask how they’d pulled it off, or say anything but a grateful thank you when Tenzi and Sita came out with another round of drinks.

  The one good thing about all that food––there was little danger of me getting truly drunk.

  Revik had shoved his chair closer to mine, and had an arm wrapped around the back of mine, giving my head a cushion while I gazed up at the stars. With his other hand, he smoked a hiri, careful to blow the smoke away from me and the table, even though I’d never minded hiri smoke really.

  After we’d all been sitting there a few minutes, and I sat up with a sigh to take another drink of wine, Revik broke the silence, looking between Uye and Kali.

  “You told Allie there was some kind of vision? Something you wished to talk to us about?”

  He paused, looking between my parents.

  “Is now a good time?” he asked, polite.

  Uye and Kali exchanged a look, then Kali nodded.

  “Yes,” she said, her voice somber.

  Glancing at Uye again, she made a reassuring gesture.

  “I’m not entirely sure what the vision means,” she admitted. “And visions of this kind… anything involving the true prescience… the things I see are subject to change to a degree. I’ve been told that we generally get the most likely timeline, looked at from a higher level of patterns that evolve over longer periods of time.”

  I propped my elbow on my arm, taking a sip of wine as I thought about her words.

  “How long?” I said. “How entrenched are these patterns?”

  Her eyes shifted to mine.

  “It varies, daughter,” she admitted. “Sometimes months. Sometimes years, or decades, depending on the impulse driving the event. Sometimes much longer patterns emerge. Things that have been hidden in the threads of time for centuries… even millennia. Those visions tend to change the least over time. They are also more rare.”

  “And which kind was this vision?” Revik said. “Do you know?”

  Her eyes grew somber. “This was one of those longer patterns, I’m afraid. That being said, the intent behind it felt to be somewhat one-sided. For that reason alone, I suspect it is still only one possible outcome, not something carved in stone.”

  I swallowing, glancing at Revik. After a pause, I looked back at her.

  “Will you tell us what you saw?” I said.

  “I will,” she said. “However, I would like to show you first. Then I will tell you how I interpret what I saw, and what Uye and I have discussed. Would that be acceptable to you? That way, you are less likely to be biased by my own filters. Although some of that will come through in the memory itself, of course.”

  I nodded, thinking. That made sense.

  “Okay.” I gripped my armrests, sitting up straighter in my chair.

  Giving Uye a semi-nervous look, Kali met my gaze, then nodded, once.

  “All right,” she said. “I will show you both now.”

  There was a bare pause.

  Then the space shifted.

  The table covered with our drinks and the last of the flan we’d had for dessert, my mother’s worried eyes and pursed lips, my father’s caution, the flags whipping over the control tower just behind where my parents sat…

  It all vanished from my view.

  There was almost no gap, no transition between states of consciousness.

  Images bombarded the spaces behind my eyes, coupled with feelings, emotions, thoughts, a sense of time and timelessness that hit at me with an odd familiarity. It didn’t feel familiar in the sense of Kali herself––more that those images represented something I had a vague memory of knowing or seeing, maybe even feeling before.

  I fought to catch up, to sift through everything coming at my mind, to make sense of it.

  I felt Revik struggling with the same from next to me.

  Then, abruptly, the image righted.

  The sun rose in front of me, filling my eyes.

  A massive, orange and gold orb, it hung silent in a deep black night sky, heat waves rippling off it on all sides, blurring the distant stars. My whole view was filled with the boiling, churning, living, breathing surface.

  I floated next to it, unable to look away.

  The power of it surged through me, vibrating my aleimi in thick heartbeats of molten light. It hung there, huge and blindingly bright––shocking oranges, yellows and golds pulsing, breathing, rotating in a way that made it feel lumbering, yet alive.

  Flares shot off the sides in gorgeous arcs, floating silently out into space before curving back to morph back into the boiling surface. Heat shimmered off each arc, so much energy and brightness I held up a light-drawn hand inside
the Barrier space.

  It didn’t feel like we were looking at the sun; it felt like we were inside it almost, resonating with every particle of it, feeling it as a separate being.

  It felt like we floated over it, in space, just Revik and I.

  Something physical tugged at the edges of my awareness. Something not about the sun, or about where we were in space. A throbbing, blinding pain fought to crush my head in a vise. My skull felt like it was bending, cracking apart…

  It hit me that I was feeling Kali.

  I felt her holding back that pain, fighting to keep it from us, from Revik and me both. I glimpsed her screaming in a gray-green room in the hold of the ship, her eyes tightly shut, her nose bleeding as she lay on the floor, Uye’s arms around her, trying to calm her with his light.

  Her presence nudged my mind carefully back to the vision itself.

  I turned back to that shocking view of the sun, to the flaming orb in space, the stars visible in the distance on either side.

  As I did, I realized Revik and I weren’t alone.

  I could hear voices.

  Far away at first, they grew louder as I focused on them.

  After a silent stretch of time, I realized those voices weren’t in space, like us.

  I looked behind me, and saw the blue-green world that was my home, bright from the hot swath of the sun’s light. I watched the moon continue its journey around it as it revolved and rotated through space. I saw the light dim on one side only to reemerge on the other, slowly uncovering every inch of the surface of the Earth.

  The voices came from there.

  I could see them now, like blazing campfires, sparking and rising all over the globe.

  The voices called up to the sun.

  They echoed in concert, but they weren’t all different voices––it didn’t sound like a normal crowd, filled with every variety of tones, timbres and pitches. Rather, the voices sounded eerily the same, like carbon copies of one another, echoing up to the heavens.

  The voices also sounded familiar.

  When they grew louder, a shock reverberated through my light. The voices sounded really familiar. They sounded so familiar, my heart hurt.

  The voices sounded like Revik.

  I heard Revik’s voice…

  It was him but not him.

  It was a warped version of him, or a thousand warped versions of him––like he’d been smashed into a thousand, million fragments, each broken and alone, each made up of jarring, shockingly bright flames. It was as if each of those copies of him then screamed up at the sun, their lights different from his, their voices disturbingly the same.

  Their words echoed, duplicating over and over, so they grew unintelligible. In the end they merged together entirely, becoming one droning chant. There were dozens of him, maybe hundreds of him, maybe thousands––all chanting up at the sun.

  It sounded like a prayer.

  The louder the chanting grew, the brighter the flares coming off the sun.

  Those flames curled out wider each time, making more dramatic arcs, like halos around the star. I watched those arcs burst out further into the black of space, until they were the diameter of the sun itself, making the star look like it had rings around it, made of gold and molten fire.

  The chanting got louder.

  The voices rose, growing more intense.

  I felt them pulling on the sun, pulling it closer, all of them screaming together, pulling it, both inside and out.

  It hit me they were using telekinesis.

  They were pulling the star into Earth––or maybe the Earth into the star.

  Light filled their voices, endless light.

  I felt them going deeper, their light winding into atoms, pulling and tearing at the structure of the living star in front of me. I felt a shudder begin to form, from the inside out, one that echoed through the solar system, that blew clouds of heat at the faster-spinning Earth. I felt the power being funneled from the star to those tiny flames on the surface of the planet.

  I felt them drawing on that power, pulling on it…

  But it was unstable. They were pulling too much.

  I felt it when the collapsing began.

  Something inside the sun was breaking.

  I felt it breaking––

  I screamed inside that space, oblivious to the heat slamming into me, going through me, ripping apart my body inside the Barrier.

  It wasn’t heat, it was like the sun itself was alive, like they were killing it and its aleimi was bursting apart with living explosions of light. The radiation ripped through my living light, pulling me apart, pulling Revik apart, disintegrating all of what we were.

  It felt like watching a god die.

  It felt like watching the death of a consciousness so distant, so vast and unknown to mine, I could only mourn its passing, without being able to comprehend what I’d lost. I knew its death was killing me too, but somehow that bothered me less than the death of the giant itself.

  The screaming on the ground grew louder.

  It turned triumphant, into a wave of glory.

  Doors began opening all around me.

  I felt them in the distance. The familiarity of those doors, of the pulling, collapsing power of them, made it all seem to happen within me, or right next to me. I felt the triumphant ripple of light on the ground brighten.

  The doors were on Earth.

  Those voices opened the doors, using the sun to power them. They forced those doors open through raw force, a brutal ripping of their very fabric.

  I felt presences passing through, disappearing into a light-sucking vortex.

  I felt the Dreng there.

  I felt their satisfaction.

  Not joy. There was no joy in those silver, writhing strands. But I felt their satisfaction, their triumph, a kind of gloating surge of power and knowing. I felt vindication, the final win in a battle they had fought for hundreds, thousands, even millions of years.

  The doors were finally open.

  They were finally free.

  They’d kicked open the doors, without the Bridge, without the Sword, without the gods or the Ancestors.

  They were finally free.

  17

  DOORS TO THE OTHER SIDE

  THE LIGHT SNUFFED out.

  I found myself hunched over my chair, gasping, holding my stomach with one arm.

  Miraculously, I still gripped my wine glass in my other hand. I set it down on the table now, my whole arm shaking. I was sure I’d crush the glass in my fingers if I didn’t release it.

  I looked at Revik, and saw pain in his eyes, a kind of disbelieving grief.

  He gripped the back of my chair where he’d hung his arm around it earlier, holding onto the metal backrest tightly with his hand.

  His other hand had dropped the hiri, which lay smoldering on the deck, the unlit end dark with resin. I felt an impulse on him to touch me. Maybe it was more than just a desire to touch me. Pain whispered off his light, just before he closed his eyes.

  He looked away from me then, seemingly with an effort.

  For the first time since we’d gotten back from Beijing, I felt that sex compulsion on him, so intensely it brought a wave of nausea, followed by pain to my throat and chest. His pain keened higher while his light seemed to be exploring mine, noticing mine in his.

  He pulled both his light and pain back with an effort a few seconds later, and then he was shielding from me, even as he reached down to pick up the hiri he’d dropped.

  I backed away from him with my own light, but with a reluctance that bordered on resentment. I made myself look away from his face, but not before a shock of pain made my body clench all over again, gritting my teeth.

  Truthfully, I was so done with this celibacy bullshit between us.

  I felt like I couldn’t say that to him, though.

  After all, everything he’d proposed, everything we’d been doing and trying to do together was an attempt to fix things between us, to finalize
the bond. The more mature part of my mind appreciated that. I appreciated how hard he’d been trying. I even agreed with him, knowing this approach was right.

  The less mature side of me didn’t give a shit.

  Forcing my eyes back to my parents, who were watching the two of us, a faint concern on their faces, I picked up my wine glass, taking a longish sip before I placed it carefully back on the tablecloth. My hand still shook.

  I cleared my throat.

  “What was that?” I said. “What does it mean?”

  Kali continued to watch me carefully, concern in her eyes.

  Uye was the first to speak. His voice was blunt, businesslike.

  “What did you get from it, daughter?” he said.

  I frowned, thinking about what I’d seen. Briefly, I receded back into the memory, the voices I’d heard, that feeling of presence that didn’t go with the voices, their light. I thought about the feeling of those doors, of the vortices I felt behind them.

  “Telekinetics,” I said, glancing at Revik. “Those were telekinetics doing that to the sun, weren’t they? They sounded like…”

  I looked at Revik, still gripping the armrests of my chair.

  Shaking my head, I looked back at Kali.

  “They felt nothing like him. Even if he’d somehow been broken apart, like Feigran was, they still didn’t feel like Revik. Their light was all wrong. If I had to guess, I’d say they were clones. Maybe like what Dragon was.”

  Giving Revik a grim look, I added, “They were positively drenched in the light of the Dreng. Maybe they were made like Lily, with their light and aleimic structures warped to resonate with the Dreng from birth. Likely before birth, if they were grown in a lab.”

  When none of them spoke, I continued to think, frowning.

  “There were a lot of them. They weren’t all in one place, but they were connected somehow. I saw those lights in clusters but the clusters were scattered, located in different continents all over the earth.”

  I looked back at my parents.