Evanescent

by Carlyle Labuschagne

  “It’s not me, it’s her.”

  “Well from where I am standing, it looks very much like it’s you.” I held Ava behind me. She twisted out of my grip and the two girls were at it again, grabbing hair and punching each other in the gut.

  “This is so not the time for this!” I shouted.

  Rion and I tried to pry the girls off each other, but the edge of the sand dune claimed them and both went tumbling down, a fine spray of golden dust scattered in their wake. We went after them, but by the time I got there they were already halfway down the dune. I pulled Maya from her and we fell back into the sand. Ava rolled a few times and stood. That’s when I saw it, why she was so different. It had all been an illusion. Tatos was right. Ava was not herself in every way. Ava bared her teeth and a dark smoke emanated from her hair; her eyes flashed like lightning. I immediately pulled Maya from me, jumped and held Ava to my chest. I had seen how my touch inhibited her shifts. I felt her pulse jump erratically before the pace slowed. She looked at me, almost confused over what had just happened. I turned her around, moved the hair from her neck and there it was; I hadn’t imagined it. I saw it as she tumbled down the dune. I had trouble touching her at first. My eyes bore into the dark mark on the base of her neck, a strange symbol curling around and into the ridges of her spine. I slowly moved my fingers over the dark etching tainting her gorgeous skin. He actually branded her! It was hard to keep back the red clouding my vision. I felt every hair on my neck rise, the punch rippled through my entire body. Clenching my fists, I held my entire being back. I wanted to jump out of my skin and rip Enoch’s head off.

  David gave me a quick shove from behind, smacking me right out of my fury.

  “Please tell me you didn’t know about this,” I told her.

  She turned slowly, the naked skin on her neck and shoulders glistened under the blanket of stars. I bit back anger and repeated my words to her, trying anything to pull me out of my misery.

  “Please tell me you didn’t know about the tattoo, Ava.”

  “She knew!” Maya spat.

  Her words were like a hammer to my head, but it was the unmistakable taste of the lie before it poured out of Ava’s mouth that hit me harder.

  “Knew what?”

  Maya pushed me aside, and I was thankful for that. Have you ever found it difficult to not unleash your anger on the person you cared for, without hurting them the way they hurt you? Not so easy. I turned away. Dave’s face was grim, because he felt my agony.

  “You need to take us to Ava right now!” Maya said.

  “I don’t understand,” Ava said.

  Loss of control: Phase Six

  Was I losing the ability to detect her lies? She sounded convincing. I turned back, finding myself scared of the next words that came out of either of our mouths.

  “I remember,” Maya said simply.

  Ava studied her sister.

  “What do you remember?” Ava moved forward, holding on to her sister’s arm.

  I studied her with extreme intensity. How had I not seen it before?

  “I remember enough to know what he did to me, blocking my mind like that when I knew he was using me to get to you, so you could get to him,” Maya stated, pointing at me.

  I saw the tempest within her intense gray eyes boil up. I knew I had a second to react, so I leapt forward and grabbed both of Ava’s arms. The lightning in her eyes faded at my touch, much quicker now it was almost instant. I stopped the shift before it had the chance to overpower her.

  “Let go!” she shouted, uncertain and disorientated.

  I smirked. “I know what you are, you’ve been clever about it, too.”

  “Thank goodness,” Maya said, rolling her eyes.

  “I even took in your innocent act.” I stared her in the eyes, dared her to lie to me again. “You hid behind the disease, but I should have known the real Ava would never let herself go the way you have.”

  “I don’t know what you are taking about,” she said again.

  Beneath the dark, starry night almost drowning in a sea of golden sand, her eyes appeared as green as backlit emeralds. I shook my head for clarity, her beauty made me a fool.

  “You are a clone.” I had to get it out, before I doubted myself again.

  I saw her swallow, trying to deny it. She tried to pull from my grip, watching my fingers bleed to white as I held on.

  “You are lying to me. I am Ava… I have to be.” I saw the flash of uncertainty in her stare.

  Her eyes spoke the truth, what she wanted was very clear.

  “You knew all along, didn’t you?” I squeezed her arm a little harder, prompting her to be honest.

  “You have your secrets. I have mine.” A cunning answer.

  I took a deep breath. “You sound just like him.” I held on to my anger. “You can’t deny it, can you?” I pulled her in deeper to my chest. She looked up, there was no way she could lie to me when I held her so close. The air between us almost palpable.

  “I don’t know,” she whispered.

  I felt relieved at her attempt at honesty.

  “What was it that made you realize?” I asked.

  “You,” she replied.

  “How?” I felt a wall fall between us.

  We stared at each other as Robert and Rion made it down the dune, and they were not quiet about it either. If we had been closer to the fortress, I was pretty sure we would hear them from inside.

  “Guys, there is a war breaking out, we don’t have time for this right now…” Robert started to say as he stomped through golden sand, working his feet to tread carefully.

  I cut him off with a vicious stare when he tried to interrupt again.

  Ava’s suspected clone kept her desperate stare on me.

  “I need to know what you are,” she said to me.

  Was this her asking, or was Enoch hiding behind his creation? The one thing he knew would get him the answers.

  “You know what I am.” I knew she had to have known; she had felt it. No words could explain what I was. I was ready to explode at that point. It was not for her to feel! I had finally been able to give myself, and then it turns out it was all for nothing. I wanted to blame the girl before me, but it was hard to wrap my mind around the insanity that stood mocking me with Ava’s beautiful face.

  She cocked her head to the side, studying me.

  “I am broken blood.”

  She smiled. “That’s not what I am talking about. You are the Ignited one.” And as she said it, I could almost see Enoch’s face behind hers. His father had told him. I almost laughed, because he’d been so sure he was the Ignited one once. This was how badly he wanted to be part of a prophecy that would change everything forever; he’d actually written himself into the damned thing.

  “No one knows what it means.” I kept a close distance to her.

  “But you haven’t told them, I can see by the look on their faces,” she smirked as she spoke. “Do they know what it’s like to be bound to another, to be a puppet?”

  “You should know,” I said plainly.

  Somehow, Enoch was pushing his thoughts through hers, these were his words, not hers. I gripped her arms, almost shaking her, unable to control my resentment. How come, if she was anything like Ava, would she let him push her that way?

  “You always knew this day would come,” she said. “I got you, again.”

  I had no words, yes, he had fooled me by the one thing that I could not see past – her.

  I pulled my blade, ready to slash it across her throat. This was not Ava, I told myself. The blade went up, and all I saw was a crooked smile on her face as she accepted her death. At that, I pulled back – he wanted me to kill her, why?

  “What?” Robert said, from behind me. “What did I miss?”

  “Shut up, Robert!” David yelled.

  “Stop it!” Maya hissed. “Take us to Ava, right now!”

  “Why don’t you just kill me?” the clone asked.

  “I never want to he
ar those words come out your mouth again.” Maya slapped the Ava look-alike across the face. “I don’t care who you really are. But we do need you to get us to Ava before it’s too late.”

  “What if it’s already too late?”

  Maya pushed her face against the girl who was an exact copy of her sister.

  “You are playing with lives here. If you have any compassion in you, and I know you do, because my sister had…”

  The clone pulled away suddenly, one arm almost escaped my grip. She hissed in Maya’s face.

  “You all care about one thing – the prophecy, screw the lives wrecked in the aftershock. Why would I compromise myself for anyone?”

  Maya laughed. “Remember this; I am not scared of you.”

  I knew with a vicious taste in my mouth, I had messed up big time. Still, I could not disengage from her, she blinded me and Enoch was betting on it. Was it because I would not accept the illusion for what it was? My weakness was her, in any shape or form, she had me a drunken fool. Enoch had counted on my guardianship to trick me from seeing the truth. But, how had everyone else not seen it? As her soul-guide, I was bound to all that was Ava, even her copy.

  “This is ridiculous,” I mumbled.

  “Good thing I brought those cable ties along, huh?” Rob said for the hundredth time.

  “Yes, Robert, thank you very much, Robert,” Maya shot out.

  I had tied Ava’s clone to one of my wrists, knowing that my skin contact kept her nasty shift at bay. As we made our way down the last of the dunes, I glanced at her sideways, noticing how the fight in her was beginning to ebb out. She was possibly starting to accept what she was. A clone. The words twisted horribly in my gut. What am I going to do with her? Horrid thoughts pounded into my head, droning themselves into every inch of my mind. But each time I looked at her, her beauty gripped me. Some part of her is Ava, and we were counting on that to help us find the real Ava. I took in her bittersweet scent. Everything about her was designed to lure me in. Enoch was using her as bait, but there had to be some other reason he’d done it this way. He could not control her anymore, so he’d made one he could. “Sick bastard,” I grumbled.

  “Watch your mouth.” Rion turned with a gruff stare. Minoans believed swear words were actual curses.

  I gave him an apologetic stare.

  “You like the improved ties?”

  “Robert, I swear, say it one more time!” Maya yelled.

  “I just hate the silence.”

  And that statement was met with silence.

  David frowned, the deep line right above the ridge of his nose a tell that he was infuriated, and I couldn’t blame him.

  With the green lake way behind us quicker than I thought possible, I knew the advantages of this raid were piling up. Maya, me, and the clone, had a collective knowledge of the layout of the stoned fortress. We managed to assemble a number of warriors all hell bent on vengeance on a common enemy. I was sure our mission would be accomplished: find Ava, destroy the dark army, disable the fortress, and leave. Enoch, we would come back for later, for now we’d leave him to drown in his miserable existence for a while. We all huddled together in a single line with our backs against the large, grayish rock wall, ornate iron gates to the back entrance of an outlet pipe just a few feet away from us. Ava’s look-alike mumbled something to herself. Dave just shook his head. The clone was becoming restless and I wondered if Enoch was spying on us right now through her, so I really had no choice but to do it. She was showing signs of extreme dementia, her mind bouncing between personalities. Something I was sure were the final stages of turning right into the Shadow herself. I looked to Maya and gave a quick nod.

  “Ava.” Maya couldn’t help calling her anything else either.

  She looked up from a low crouch beside me, gray eyes big and wide, begging for a release from her inner turmoil. In that moment, she looked somewhat defeated. But I wouldn’t make the same mistakes again, she could not be trusted, the Shadowing disease was much stronger in the weakening spirit of a clone. I would not trust her disease anymore. Nor could I trust her design, either. She was designed as a lure, as a spy. I kept my eyes on the clone as Maya drew power from her pendant, the white glow reflecting like a dying star in the clone’s fading, gray eyes. What Maya had done, I knew only Arriana could do, so I was a bit surprised it came so easily. She used her telekinetic energy and locked a door to the clone’s mind. I caught her head as she fainted into my hands, without feeling too bad about it. She was better off this way, for now. She was a huge, unpredictable distraction, her ability to go from our side to that of our enemy was like the flip of a coin. As her head fell back, a heavy breath left her. I looked up to find Dave giving me that ‘I told you so’ look. I didn’t get mad, I’d known from the start I was in over my head with that angelic face. I smiled at him, because we loved like that – with all we had. It was because we were so ruthless with our emotions that we would always rise above any situation. I pulled Ava’s clone into my lap, her body soft and hot against mine. It was so damn hard to think of her as anything but a living, warm, gorgeous creature.

  Dave pushed my arm. “Focus,” he said slowly.

  I nodded. “Maya, you think you can take us to the power source?” We needed to move quickly. We had given the others about an hour before they descended on the fortress.

  “I remember enough,” Maya said, drawing up the hood of her gray cloak.

  “We need to get to Enoch, find his power source. If we can kill off his army before the raid, lives will be spared.”

  Rion pulled a face. “Don’t let your father hear that. He has it in his mind to save those beings.”

  Dave and Robert both gave him a surprised glance.

  “Let Greg and the others know we’re heading in.” I nodded to Robert, ignoring Rion’s comments. There was no way the dark army could be saved.

  I held Ava’s clone seemingly close to my body, the more we touched, the stronger my effect on holding back her shifts were. Well, I hoped that was how it worked. We kept close to the gray fortress wall as we started to move along its shadows, cast like tall outstretched arms into the golden night.

  “Hey,” I called to Robert, “did Shane get those glasses working?”

  “Oh, yes, I almost forgot about those.” He pulled the glasses from his gray hoodie pocket, placed them on his face, and pulled the hoodie over his head to create more shadow, strengthening its purpose. The glasses looked more like goggles with huge, round lenses and copper hinges. They were indeed Amelia Earhart’s goggles from Earth, another prize I had found upon one of my many visits inside the Council’s treasuries.

  “Whoa!” he said, after turning them on.

  “You can see all of it?”

  He looked at the ground. “I know where the mines are, every last one of them.”

  Behind the glasses, he raked his vision over the floor beside us, then looked up the steep, stone wall.

  “You have to see this.”

  He secured the glasses over my eyes. The leather strap got caught in my hair and he tugged.

  “Do that again and I’ll throw something at you.”

  Robert laughed. “I’d like to see you try.” He motioned to the girl in my arms.

  I ignored him, staring up at the fortress wall. Through the glasses, the interior of the wall looked like one solid, glowing, blue web of energy. Beneath my feet, below the small dots that were landmine heat signatures, the glow of the castle’s fibres bled into the sand dunes. The lenses penetrated the dunes, and yet more mines dotted the landscape like far spreading stars in a sea of gold.

  Robert gently pulled the glasses from my face. “I’ll go first.”

  He moved to the front of our mob as we all stuck close to the wall. Stone was not conductible, but gold was, and the sand was made up of fine, golden flakes. If a mine exploded nearby, the electric current would be carried all the way to us. We practically plastered ourselves close to the stone wall.

  “You know the way, s
o stay close to me.” He pulled Maya to take her place in the front.

  Rion’s nostrils flared not liking that very much, but as was their custom – the mission came first. Maya led us through small, iron gates situated on the side of the stone fortress. We crawled through its small opening – a very difficult task to accomplish with an unconscious girl in my arms – but the navigation through tight corners in narrow tunnels became a little easier after that. Once we conquered the outside trenches, we entered a maze of underground tunnels. Upon entry, we could hear the rush of water beneath the tunnels, the current was strong and moved the earth beneath our feet. No doubt he was drawing power from the extensive movement. Tunnels gave way to tunnels, but Maya kept going, piloting the paths like she had done it a thousand times before. Our eyes adapted quickly to the dark, but I could see Rion was not having such luck. The thought took me back to a time when David had first discovered what he was, how to push his body without the mind-numbing drugs. I had approached him when I was ten years old. Father often let me wander the skirts of the military base, he’d had a feeling that was my way in, the Council’s weakness. For me, it was easy to make friends with David, we kind of had a bond from the very first moment we met. I guess his will was what drew me to him. The meds never affected him the same way as the others, his mind was stronger. Once I discovered that fact, I knew what to look for in the others. Small gestures of human emotions, little habits that came with hints of individual personalities. By the time I convinced the others to purge their meds for an entire week, Dave had already experienced quite a few emotions. It wasn’t easy as the meds were either dissolved in the water, or hidden in the food, so Father and I had to find a way to purify the water and get them to eat almost nothing for an entire week. The one thing I needed Dave to feel was the rush we got when unleashing all our abilities. It almost cleared one’s mind. Emotions are what bring on super abilities, and I guess the Council was afraid of that, because I was slowly discovering just what the Broken were intended to be. I dabbled in the memory a little longer. It was a very hot day, one of Poseidon’s last true summers before the idle of weather cycles. One day, Dave sneaked off with me, further than ever before. I found a deep, wide ravine to experiment on, with water below just in case he freaked out and plummeted ten stories down. I ran from one side as fast as I could, felt every muscle blister with heat as I pushed my body to the extreme. I pushed with my legs, felt the balls of my feet leave the rock and I knew I had to make it – I would not make a fool of myself in front of my one and only friend. My lungs sucked in hot air out of surprise at how far the other side was, how fast my body was propelling through the air. My breath rushed from me as soon as I hit the other side in a low crouch. I turned, thrilled and excited.