“Thanks for coming with me today,” Raus said, turning to look at Jav. “It means a lot to me.”
“Of course.”
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He saw her face and remembered it. It was beautiful, and it made his heart ache. Jennifer, with her lovely hair like a silken bronze waterfall, framing her porcelain-perfect face. Jennifer with her bright, intelligent eyes, and the kittenish whims she saved only for him. She wasn’t his, but there could be no doubt that she was meant for him. And yet, perhaps that was justification enough to lose her. He saw her now as he’d seen her then, with that sad, wistful smile on her lips as the golden apparition before him—the Sun Lion, some part of him knew—rent her limb from limb. All he could do was watch and rail. He knew that the Sun Lion had been tricked, that it hadn’t meant to kill her, but this he learned afterwards and still wouldn’t believe or accept until it was too late and didn’t matter. He was a stone set into motion, rolling, rolling, and every possible course ran downhill.
Like a stone, he rolled indifferently through blood, through bone, through bodies live and dead. Everything was on display for him, but passing by at breakneck speed. He could only make sense of some of it, only what was vivid enough and shocking enough to pierce his tautly drawn awareness. And then he slowed.
When he slowed, he was able to find an anchor. It wasn’t Jennifer, and yet it was Jennifer. Or rather, she and Jennifer shared some underlying sameness, as if they were reflections—with minor distortions—of a perfect, radiant source. But then Mai, olive-skinned and black-haired, died as well. Taken from him as Jennifer had been, and just as unfairly. Mai. God, how he missed her. But didn’t he still get to see her? Certainly she had died, but. . .
Now the face he saw belonged to someone he’d nearly forgotten. Anis Lausden. Strange how all of these women, shared that underlying sameness. It wasn’t how they looked, though there might be some similarities now and again. It wasn’t in their speech, or in their manner. It was in their spirit, what lay at the core, at their centers. Poor Anis Lausden. What had happened to her, and why was it that she had to die? And she wouldn’t be the last to die, either. A succession of faces now competed for his attention, faces he didn’t recognize, women he’d never met and would never meet, but these women he knew just the same. Every one of them was a clear reflection—a resounding echo—of the source. One stood at the forefront. She wasn’t the source but she was physically close and he would meet her soon. She told him her name and smiled at him, making him feel warm and wanted and full of immeasurable potential. But then she frowned and everything faded.
• • •
Jav was suddenly wide awake in his bed, staring up at the ceiling in the dark. Mao was snoring quietly beside him. He was oddly excited and depressed at the same time. A name danced upon the dark waves of his mind. It bobbed, nearly took shape, bobbed again and was gone. So too was the image of a pretty girl’s face. He turned onto his side to look at Mao and was filled even more with a strange and overwhelming sense of bittersweetness. He reached out and gently stroked her cheek, not at all sure what his feelings meant.
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Jav and Vays did their sparring at Vays’s facility. On other days, Vays was making good on his promise to help train Mao, but Jav could tell that, though acquiescent enough, he didn’t enjoy his sessions with her. That Lowe and Set were there made up for it to some degree, but Vays wasn’t shy—nor, thankfully, was he particularly vocal anymore—about spending as little time as possible with people he felt were his inferiors.
When they’d first started practicing together, Vays had chosen a blunted, heavy plastic sword, but Jav insisted on a real, sharpened blade. After all, the competition that made them Shades in the first place had required such, and if they couldn’t get comfortable using their true weapons with each other, the training wouldn’t do them any good up against real enemies. Vays had consented without argument.
Today was their day at Vays’s facility. Both were in their grays, though Jav wore a white T-shirt and Vays a gray tank top. Both were dripping with sweat. Vays played his long, slim blade smoothly, expertly, but fruitlessly. Jav always managed to vacate the space that Vays’s blade carved through the instant before it came. Jav had unwittingly taken to operating in pure defense. Somewhere down below conscious thought, was the simple, matter-of-fact conviction that he could take Vays anytime he wanted to.
“Damn, Holson,” Vay’s said, panting. “Your extra work on the gravity block is starting to piss me off.”
“What do you mean?”
“I can’t keep up with you.”
“You could.”
“Yes, I could use my power. I’d be able to keep up and even surpass you. For a short time.” Vays shook his head while he danced, lunged, recovered, tried again. “I don’t want to rely on that.”
“If it wins you the fight, it doesn’t matter if it’s only for a short time.”
“Maybe, but I don’t think I’d be too popular or doing any of us any favors by killing you at practice.”
Jav chuckled. “No. Least of all me.”
“I need to be pushed. My father did that for me up until the time came that I could beat him. No, I need to be pushed. And while I can’t seem to lay my blade on you, I don’t think you’re really even trying. You haven’t attacked in the last ten minutes, and I don’t think it’s for lack of opportunity.”
“Oh,” Jav said awkwardly, realizing that Vays was right.
“Come on, Holson. I can take it.”
“All right,” Jav said, but he sounded a little unsure. He stepped forward, almost artlessly, striking the flat of Vays’s blade with his forearm, knocking it out of the way easily, and ending up in position to put a clawed hand to Vays’s throat.
Vays gasped in shock, his mouth closing and resolving into a sneer.
Jav backed off and allowed Vays to regain his composure.
“Okay,” Vays said, trying to master his burgeoning anger. “Let’s try that again.”
Jav nodded. “Right.”
Vays held his sword before his chest, tip pointing straight up, in the signature salute of the Single Element Ghost Sword. He knocked the blade with his knuckles and a sonorous tone began to sound from the steel’s core. Jav knew that a Union Blade could kill him in one stroke, but he was unconcerned, because he also knew that the only way Vays could touch him was if he allowed it or if Vays invoked the power he’d perfected at the Locsard Psychic Academy.
“Use what you’ve got, Vays,” Jav said. “If you don’t, you might as well still be using that plastic practice sword. You said you needed to be pushed.”
Goaded to new and swelling anger, Vays rushed forward, but Jav matched his movements easily. If anything, Jav had become more elusive than before, all liquid grace and impossible precision. Vays could see some of Dolma Set in Jav now. What frustrated him about this was his knowledge that it was unintentional. Recently, he’d overheard Set and Lowe talking about Jav, about how he was like a savant, picking up techniques and unconsciously adapting them and working them seamlessly even naturally into his Eighteen Heavenly Claws. Truly, his superior grade F-gene was a terrible thing.
Humility wasn’t something that came easily to Vays. He’d respected his father. He’d come to respect Kalkin. He’d never lied about respecting Holson, but he’d always considered them peers, near equals with Jav having some distance to cover before they could be called true equals. But now, he was seeing the truth. It hadn’t always been like this. Jav had simply gotten better. Vays had been naive to think that Jav would progress no further and it vexed him to no end.
His vexation mounted when Jav once again got inside his defense and drove a palm, like a cotton hammer, into his chest. The blow unrooted him and sent him sprawling, so that he landed heavily on his butt. He was so angry that he thought his eyes might explode right out of his head. But he gathered up the anger, focused it into the blade, and invoked the psychic mechanism which increased his physical prowess in ever
y way to one hundred and twenty percent of his normal ability.
Vays performed an easy kip-up and powered forward, his sword tracing intricate figures that, for the first time that day, harried Jav with a real challenge.
“Good!” Jav cried, increasing his speed to match his opponent’s.
Vays ground his teeth. Jav was giving him exactly what he’d asked for, but it was biting into his ego. Raising the stakes was what it was all about. There could be no improvement without such. He worried Jav with his blade, all the while preparing mentally for one of the Single Element Ghost Sword’s most deadly techniques.
In the space between seconds, time stopped for Vays. He marked with his impossibly fast eye the one hundred and eight targets all across Jav’s torso, head, and arms to be lanced by the Star Factory. When time resumed for Vays, the blade was in motion, a blur of horizontal rain, every streak perfectly parallel to every other. And as he let the Star Factory begin, he noticed the light go out of Jav’s eyes. Though time had resumed, it moved slowly, and he could see that Jav’s attention was somewhere else. Something had seized his consciousness, and he appeared to be completely vulnerable to the Star Factory.
Jav watched as Vays rose up from the ground. He could see that Vays was incensed but that he was already turning that anger to his use. And finally he’d gone one hundred and twenty percent. Now the real challenge began. But then something snapped inside Jav. Something in the sponge of his brain had been drawn taut and become hard, and succumbing to immeasurable pressure, it broke. What had broken and what had broken it he did not know, but it was devastating. His mind felt like a desert, barren and empty. Lonely. Cripplingly lonely. Vays’s blade had gone plural before his eyes, but he had no time for this. He closed his hand around the blade just before it could pierce the layer of muscle that offered thin protection to his heart.
Vays didn’t move. He simply gaped. He’d never seen nor heard of anyone ever catching, let alone holding, the blade of the Star Factory. The speed with which it was delivered, the strength that Vays could put behind it, the finely honed blade of the sword itself, empowered with the Single Element—not quite a Union Blade, but far more than any normal blade of coarse steel or treated ceramic: any one of these should have been reason enough for the success of the Star Factory. He simply could not believe that all three of them combined had amounted to failure. Nor was he disappointed. For a moment, he thought he might have actually killed Jav with such an attack, making the earlier joke into some kind of terrible prophecy. He eased the blade back and Jav let it go.
“Holson, your hand,” Vays said.
Jav looked absently at his palm. He studied the two pale ridges of parted white skin surrounding a wet line of bright red blood, which was welling up, soon to overflow. He looked at it, amazed at the detail he saw and the clarity of his vision. Each of his fingers bore a similar cut in miniature and he thought for a moment, because of the color and the lazy flow of the blood, that his hand had been caught in a flash freeze. He looked at his hand, so close and yet it seemed so very far away. Everything seemed so far away but right in front of him within easy grasp at the same time. Everything was disjointed and surreal. His head swam and the room began a gentle spin that seemed to continue endlessly, but somehow remained at the same maddening cant. What was it he was thinking just a moment ago? Something in his head. He wasn’t sure if it actually hurt or not, mostly there was the sense of pressure. Suddenly he was sure that he’d lost something. He closed his fingers over the wound, sending drops and a thin stream out either side of his fist to the floor. Still staring at his hand, he said dully, “It’s okay. I heal fast.”
Vays at first frowned at this response, but then said with some interest, “You do heal fast.”
“It’s the Bones. Or the Mask. Maybe both. I usually scar up pretty good, though.” Jav didn’t seem to be engaged at all, his tone was completely flat. The words came without any thought.
Vays scrutinized him for a moment and said as he realized, “You don’t have any scars on your face.”
Jav turned to him, and Vays started somewhat at the slight sign of animation. “Let’s see that you don’t make it your goal to change that,” Jav said.
Vays laughed a little nervously at that, but his concern returned. “Are you all right, Holson? I’ve never seen you lose your focus in a fight before. What happened?”
Jav shook his head noncommittally.
“The scary thing is, even when you lost your focus, you still managed to catch my damned sword in your bare hand, and I couldn’t budge it. If I didn’t know better—and maybe I don’t—I’d say you might actually be the monster some people say you are.”
Jav looked at him with eyes that were still far away and yet seemed to see into and through him. Vays hissed his breath in as a chill racked him suddenly.
They stood like that, regarding each other for what seemed a long time until finally Jav spoke in the same flat, unaffected tone, “I have to go.”
“O-okay,” Vays said, unsure of how else to respond. Jav was already passing through the exit when Vays called out after him, “Get that hand looked at anyway, huh?”
• • •
Jav had to go, but where he had to go, he had no idea. He couldn’t help feeling a sense of loss, of desolation that painted everything gray and hopeless. He’d never felt like this before. Had he? He started to think that this feeling was not so unfamiliar to him, and it frightened him a little.
He returned to his quarters, stripped his clothes off, leaving them strewn about on the floor, and crawled into the shower. He sat beneath the spray, letting the water rinse the blood covering his hand and the last of the blood coming out of it. His cuts had already sealed at bottom and would be thin white scars by morning. When he concentrated on it, he could feel the minute itch of the skin mending. Through that though, that feeling of desolation once again overwhelmed him. The hopelessness that came angered him, and he sensed in himself the capacity for black hate. A return to black hate? He tried not to think about it. Tried to think of nothing at all.
Eventually he pulled himself from the shower and got into bed, curling up in the fetal position, clutching his hand which no longer bothered him in the slightest.
• • •
Hours later, Mao returned to the quarters she shared with Jav and was surprised to find him in bed.
She bent over him and gently turned his face to hers. When his eyes opened, they went wide with something akin to shock.
“Mai!” Jav shouted. “Thank god you’re here.”
“God?” Mao shook her head in confusion. “Jav, it’s me, Mao. Are you all right?”
He looked at her for a moment, his sleep-muddled head clearing. “Mao. I’m so sorry.”
She shook her head again, but this time she was smiling. “It’s okay. Just as long as your still glad I’m here.”
Jav’s lips trembled, and for a moment Mao thought that he teetered between tears and a smile. It was the latter that won out and he threw his arms around her.
16. YOUTH & CONSEQUENCES
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Salton Stoakes rarely left his concealed quarters within the Palace, but did so on occasion, if only to stretch his legs or to keep certain people company. As yet, no one knew or even guessed at his true identity. He was always careful to avoid contact with the current generals or anyone from Blue Squad. They would know him, but he was discreet and good at going unnoticed. Immortality brought with it its own brand of boredom, and being confined to a small space only intensified that boredom to unendurable levels. His quarters had been expanded and equipped with a small gravity block to allow him to train, but there were times when he simply had to get out.
There was a small group of middle-aged women, all of them still quite attractive, who, unknown to each other, awaited his unexpected visits with the remembered blush of youth. They were always so astounded by his stamina, which was rare in a man his age. But a man was only part of what he was and a man had to ke
ep busy, or so he thought, and this was justification enough.
He would need to leave that behind for a time, though. The new system harbored an assignment for him.
There were twelve planets in System 284. Planets six, seven, and eight were populated and had exceptionally close orbits which were nearly synchronized. Regular contact between these three planets had been observed, and it was the last of them, the eighth planet, to which Stoakes would be sent. Another hapless soul echo awaited.
He stood over the sleeping form of Ana Tain. She was his favorite with her appetites, her freckles, and her red curls—on her head, under her arms, and between her legs. She lay totally exposed upon the bed they’d put to good use not more than an hour ago. He placed a hand upon her smooth, white belly, feeling a useless charge rush through his body. No more time for that. He finished dressing in his charcoal field gear, raised the special collar to cover the lower half of his face, and went Dark.
He breezed through the empty corridors, a figure of streaming black smoke, taking his secret shortcuts, and making his way back to his quarters. There was no door, but from where he entered, his meager accommodations were laid out before him. To the left was the aperture leading to his claustrophobic gravity block that barely afforded him room for practice. His bunk was straight ahead. Immediately to the right of that was a low table and next to that was the Tether Launch Tank, which was set into the wall.
Stoakes took the control device from the table, fixed it to his left wrist, and stepped into the Tank. He adjusted the settings on the control device, and ghostly jellied Vine matter spurted out from unseen nozzles, enveloping his torso.
“Salton Stoakes, ready for launch,” he said.
The Tank revolved 180 degrees with a single jolting lurch, turning Stoakes towards the black of open space. An audible but muted countdown from ten concluded and Stoakes was converted to energy, into a crackling bolt of lightning that lashed out from the Palace, streaking to touch down upon the eighth planet, a wilderness of ice and snow.
The Blood Solution (Approaching Infinity Book 3) Page 24
