He felt her! And she felt him. Then, his relief expanding at the same rate as her despair:
The crying had seeped all the way into her mind. The sadness. It was as if she wept from within, words slurred even in that intangible medium.
She sobbed aloud.
He paused.
Even in her mind she was speechless. After a breathless moment, feeling she might never breathe again, she managed:
But he was slipping.
There was nothing she could do.
Even his voice was weaker. Distant.
It was no use.
His voice came to her from somewhere far away.
He shifted and she felt it.
She would die with him. Go with him, to whatever came next. She had no idea, she was so scared, but she was going. Zac was fading and she was surging, expanding, feeling a hundred feet tall and rising after him. She would be with him, forever, wherever and whatever, and it didn’t matter what came next she would be there and he would be there and they would go, as one, and she was rising into that unknown space, grasping for him and …
He was gone.
With finality.
She nearly fell forward into the snow. Like a vacuum, and he was gone, and she was still there, Zac in her lap, blown out of her head and floating but still, undeniably, there, in the cold, such a buzz of potential and she should have a firm grasp on him, she just knew it, she should be with him, right then, as hard as she held, wherever he’d gone …
But she wasn’t.
He was gone. So complete, so total, and the absence of him seized her with a vengeance and she felt she was slipping too, dying as she intended but not together. Alone. No more grip on Zac and no clue where he’d gone. She would die alone and they would both be lost. Consciously she pulled back; Zac’s body in her arms, so warm, so with her. The Zac she knew, exactly how she always knew him, feeling so alive …
Gone.
“Zac!” a shout of anguish and her voice echoed on the field.
She wept.
This was no coma. No temporary seizure.
Zac was dead.
The cold breeze blew against the tears on her face, freezing them.
Her heart, her love, her everything … She was alone and she felt the weight of his absence so acutely it brought real pain. Ache. No one, nothing; a void, her entire life, ripped away. The world had become a vast, empty place, no one in it but her, so painfully alone and the ache ran deeper than she could bear.
“Jess …” Tentative. A voice, far away in time and in space, reaching her faintly on the wind.
Bianca.
Her friend was there. Jess latched onto that as with the other sensations. Held fast to the world even as she fought so hard to be free of it. She sensed other things, reality impinging. Kang was there, others behind Bianca in the distance; friends, a world was alive right there beneath her; others were alive in the universe; Anitra, elsewhere; seven billion souls on Earth and who knew how many more across the vastness of the cosmos …
Zac was gone.
Her existence felt as if it was done. Agony continued its squeeze, pressing from all sides on that heartless field of ice, a suffocating absence, no one else in the world, but … the pain was no longer transcendent. Bianca was here. The hurt took a more recognizable form and returned her to the moment. Fresh, angry tears rolled from the corners of her eyes; hot streaks on her cheeks, and she let them run as if a badge of what she’d lost, proof of her resolve.
Driving the rise.
Rebounding, as she did, rising, as she always did, when all was lost, and it was fury, but it was her, pressing outward from that unbreakable core, and the grief would have to wait. Like floating out of her head, it felt; an expansion, the likes of which she’d experienced before, only this time stronger, and she saw herself as if from afar, kneeling in the snow, and the rise intensified and she laid Zac gently aside and was on her feet. Kang stood before her, watching, having been standing there the whole time, bloody nose and broken horn, waiting. The tears flowed hotter but she was suddenly calm beyond anything she’d ever known. On another plane.
The clock started. Time began to move.
Kang’s end was near.
“Looks like that’s it for Horus,” he sneered. “Too bad for him. Too bad for you. Kazerai die. Humans die.” At that he grinned. “Not me.”
Jess found her focus. Brought herself to the scene before her though she continued that rollercoaster of expansion until … she felt as if the entirety of the setting was within her, not the other way around. The world did not contain her. In that impossible moment she contained it. A construct of her own design, and it was the strangest sensation. A vaguely worried look began to creep across Kang’s expression.
She locked his eyes.
Asked: “Where have you been?”
He started to speak, then realized the depth of the question. What it implied. The words caught in his throat.
She pressed. “Standing there. Watching.” She let that sit. “Waiting for me to be done. Waiting for me to be ready for you.” Steadily she breathed in. Out. This new expansion of self was racing almost out of control, oscillating in a way that was at once terrifying and …
Exhilarating. A harsh shift from the pain.
She was “on” in ways she’d never been.
“But then,” she managed a sneer of her own, “it wasn’t really your choice. Was it.”
His bravado was failing.
“Now,” she said, “I hope you’re ready for me.”
He worked to maintain his composure. The mirth buckled and was gone. He pulled himself straight. “Horus was a failure!” A glimmer of fear; uncertainty. Confusion at what he beheld. “As are you.” Holding out his chest, holding up his chin, outwardly defying this thing he was beginning to realize he did not truly understand. That this girl, somehow, had a hold on the moment. That his actions had been held in check, that time passed and he’d done nothing but watch and now …
He was afraid.
But this was Kang. Forcibly he jacked his belligerence until he shoved that fledgling fear aside. “You failed to save him.” He found more. “Now it’s your turn to die.” Tried to laugh. “How tragic. The name Horus died on this field today, and now so will yours. And both at my hands.”
Jess could sense the others behind her. Hear them, feel them, though they were completely out of her line of sight; Heath, Pete, Willet. Bianca was closest, further back Darvon and Satori. Bianca had come too close, but ther
e she was. Jess felt the expansion of awareness continue, nearly out of control, like she could see everything, all around, Kang and everyone and everything, though not with her eyes, and she was rising, higher, hair blowing in the breeze. At first it was the breeze, then … her hair began to float of its own accord. She felt it. Around her head, in all directions, weaving, snaking like an infernal halo. The action of it by then had nothing to do with wind. Power coursed through her.
The rise continued.
And she was looking down on Kang. His eyes widened to absolute circles and his last effort at bluster fell crashing to the ground.
“Zac was right,” her voice had power, looking down from altitude into his upturned face. “You’re through.” By now Kang’s eyes were so wide the whites were visible around the entire pupils.
“Today you die!” he shouted, defiant to the end, a bellow that rocked the landscape.
But he didn’t move. Couldn’t. Like a child, fists bunched and looking up at its parent with impotent rage. And in that final moment she felt sorry for him, though she was completely unfazed. Her long hair snaked slowly around her head, a mesmerizing dance driven by whatever charge built against her, an energy the likes of which …
“You’re a witch!” Kang wanted so badly to strike, to leap and kill her and grind her to dust. “It’s true! It’s all true! Everything they said! You’re a witch!”
“I am many things,” Jess gazed on him with pity. The power wrapped her, a field of immeasurable potential and she held it. Fearing it herself in those final seconds, but the emotion that drove that crescendo overwhelmed all fear, the power a channel unto itself, poised to unleash. “I am Jessica. I am Aesha. I am names you’ve never known. I am and have been many. I am me, and I see there’s something you’ve just realized.” She held steady. The air around her hummed. She could swear it had even started to glow.
“I’m more powerful than you ever imagined.”
Kang fell to his knees.
Her arms were out to her sides, Kang beneath her, on his knees and looking up. He would’ve begged for his life if he could speak, but he couldn’t. Not in that final instant. And as she felt the peak of the thing that consumed her hit its limit, awareness expanding beyond the confines of that small battlefield, she had the mind-shattering epiphany that this was not Aesha. This, whatever this was, went much further.
Much further.
This developing force, surging so hard she could scarcely contain it any longer, was not anything she’d known. Not then. Certainly not now. This was something coming to her from infinitely far away in the emotional bomb of that moment, and this was not anything she’d experienced for a long, long time.
This was ancient.
She released it.
The full weight of that primal energy, just as the threshold passed and the terror of it seized her in full and nearly inverted …
Released.
Direct. Aimed with laser focus and pouring straight into Kang, through him, shredding him before her eyes, utterly; an invisible yet brilliant thing, flashing the entire landscape and beyond, as if lighting the sky with a force that had no place in reality, striking the land with the opposite of sound; a no-sound that was as deafening as it was loud and in that terrible instant nothing could be heard; like a blanket of silence snapped over everything, fleeting, suffocating, and for that tight, discrete slice of time the entire world experienced an infinite hush.
And the moment was gone.
Sounds returned. The soft breeze, all that could be seen and heard, and Jess was looking down from where she’d been, unmoved, hair still snaking about her head, writhing in the aftermath of the discharge …
Kang was gone.
One massive, dramatic moment, energy beyond measure; impossibly not an explosion—nothing at all in its wake—simply a force that had no description and Kang was …
Erased.
She floated.
I erased him.
Where he’d been kneeling … nothing. No stain. No mark. No remains. Even the depression in the snow, the space he just occupied …
Swept away by the gentle brush of the breeze. Like a poof of wind had come along and erased all sign. Completely …
Gone.
After a time, the echo of that tremendous release fading, power amping down, she sensed Bianca. Her friend, remarkably, remained where she’d been the whole time, standing right behind her. Looking up in awe. Jess stared into the distance but her peripheral senses enveloped her, not yet returned to normal, and it was in that total awareness she saw her friend.
Crazy, foolish Bianca. Bianca, who loved her as much as any friend ever could, as much and more than anyone ever had, right there with her in the end.
Jess held to that love.
“What …” B’s voice was meek, lost in the wide, open space, fear in it, speaking into the bitter air, unsure of anything right then. “What did you do?”
Jess looked at the spot where Kang had been.
Indescribable.
“I erased him.”
There was no other way to put it.
B accepted that. What choice did she have? She’d seen it with her own eyes. Jess, simply, made Kang go away.
Bianca’s marvel raced on. More concerns, other, alarming things that needed to be said, voice stunned with everything that was happening, her next words so quiet Jess could barely hear—but she could hear; what failed in volume Bianca more than made up in intention, and her strained whisper came through loud and clear:
“Jess. You’re flying.”
Jess looked down.
She was.
Had been fleetingly aware of it. Hovering, beginning to feel numb but riding the residue of that arcane, unknowable force, the power that just annihilated a thing that could not be destroyed, and she realized she’d been flying all along. Ten feet above the ground and holding.
I’m airborne.
It was incredible.
Her hair twirled languidly in the air about her head.
“I know.”
CHAPTER 66: A NEW DAY
It was a Kel ship. A big one. Jess saw it, in the distance. No time to regroup or process the terrible events that had just taken place. After alighting to her feet Bianca and the others were rushing her, grabbing her in their embrace, not fearing but loving her, disregarding of all else in the wake of Zac’s loss and it overwhelmed her, impossible questions written starkly on their faces. They were afraid, but above any and all of that they loved her, and they felt her pain, and they knew how much she needed them. And so they held her, and before any of their disbelief could be voiced … there it was, a giant movement in the sky, through the clouds, snatching their attention, and the Kel warship was coming. Advancing slowly on the small group of humans just outside the Queen’s fortress; tiny figures in the white nothingness. Jess expected an army to have emerged by now, a fleet to be chasing the Reaver or any number of other, fatal scenarios, but none of that was happening.
Not yet.
“Come on,” Bianca urged, taking her firmly, yet cautiously, by the shoulder, as if forcing Jess might illicit some terrible reaction. Jess knew it would be some time before any of them got over what she’d just done. If ever. Bianca pointed her toward the Reaver. “We’ve got to get aboard.”
Satori agreed. “Let’s go.” Hurrying them. On to the Next Important Thing but … Jess was done. With all of it. She just wanted to sit in the snow. Just … right there with Zac, and grieve for what she’d lost.
Her world was at an end.
The ship drew closer. Heath and Pete went for Zac, bodies in motion. Everyone was suddenly rushing. The two American soldiers wore earpieces and were talking to Nani aboard the Reaver, trying to get her take on what was happening but so far Nani knew nothing. Heath and Pete each threw one of Zac’s arms over their shoulder and lifted him. The pain of seeing him lifeless, limp as they adjusted his deadweight to carry him, shot through Jess and her chest seized harder than ever. She felt mortal again,
so weak, and the accumulated agony gripped her and she turned away. Her attention fell to the approaching ship, which continued to close. A dark shape, far larger than the Reaver.
“Come.” It was Darvon. “Come, Jessica.” He took her hand and she looked at him and, suddenly, the real absence on that field struck her. If Darvon was here then where was …
Egg.
Her expression fell. “Where is she?”
But she knew. Somehow she knew, and the strained look that passed across Darvon’s face, sweet Darvon, was as deep as her own, and she knew at once the terrible thing that had happened.
The tragedies of this day might never end.
“Oh Darvon,” she drew him to her.
But this moment would not be held. Too much was in play and they were forced to release and Satori, and Bianca, were trying in vain to get her to move. Willet and Darvon too.
The Kel warship was hovering now. Struts unfolded beneath the behemoth and Heath and Pete still had no word from Nani as to what it was doing and it began to land. Far away yet not far at all, by the scale of such things.
Jess drew herself straight.
Told them: “If they were here to kill us they would’ve already.”
“Then they’re here to capture us,” Satori argued. “Either way I’m not sticking around. Come on.”
Jess turned to them. All of them. To her best friend, Bianca. To Satori, red hair bright against the infinite white. Willet. To Heath, and Pete, holding the tall, heavy Zac between them—no man left behind. Earth soldiers till the end.
To sweet Darvon.
“There’s nothing left for me,” she said. “Go. They won’t capture me. And if it’s a fight they want,” she glanced to the descending ship. “I’ll give it to them.”
Bianca was plaintive. “You can’t! We came for you! We came all this way and now we’ve got you and I’m not leaving you!”
“Then wait.” Jess turned her attention fully to the ship. It was down. A ramp was extending.
Star Angel: Prophecy Page 70
