by Myke Cole
Ninip frowned, annoyed at having his voyeuristic thrill interrupted. He pulled their shared hands back. What are you doing? This is their affair. Let them have at it.
There’s nobody to break it up. Someone is going to get hurt.
Ninip only looked at him, and Schweitzer saw the situation as he knew the jinn saw it, a couple of peasant foot soldiers, squabbling over something beneath his notice. The event was only notable in its capacity to amuse.
But the shouting and scuffling was growing louder. He’d seen lover’s tiffs spin out of control, ruin careers, lives. There was a dull thump which he knew was a human head rebounding off the wall. This was going ugly, fast.
Schweitzer tried to wrench their limbs back to their work on the shutters. He wouldn’t be able to get there fast enough if he had to fight Ninip the whole way.
Fortunately, the jinn was nothing if not predictable.
Schweitzer dug in his mind for the worst images he could imagine, a male soldier murdering a female, knocking her head into the hard floor until her brains leaked out her ears. Screaming, blood, eyes wide in horror.
Ninip surged. The jinn abruptly reversed course, pouring his energy into their shared body, Schweitzer’s purpose suddenly going from half to double.
He drove them at the shutters, getting the bone spikes of their claws into the seams, yanking down with all the big muscles in their arms, feeling the metal joint in their shoulder engaging, the stitches pulling taut. The doctors had done their work well, the limb held as they strained. The metal was strong, stronger than anything Schweitzer had encountered before. They pulled, felt their muscles engage, lock, straining the tendons and bones beneath. At last, he felt something break in the mechanism as their magical strength overcame the strength of the metal, bending it aside with a shriek.
An alarm sounded, a low trumpeting behind a machine-woman’s voice, calmly issuing instructions. Through the transparent panel revealed by the parted metal, Schweitzer could see lights flashing from metal cages set into the ceiling, spinning their orange warnings across the white paint of the walls.
Schweitzer stopped to consider the transparent pane, definitely not glass, palladium most likely. He wondered if they could break through the thickness, but Ninip had no time for such cares. The jinn threw their shared body into it, magically enhanced bones reverberating at the impact, sending them shuddering back. The jinn charged forward again, driving with the horns this time, and Schweitzer felt the impact almost snap their neck.
Calm the fuck down! We’re not going to . . .
But as the jinn pulled their shared body back for another charge, Schweitzer could see the faintest white spiderweb of cracks in the transparent material. He let Ninip have his head. It would be a fight to control the jinn once they got through, but it was better than letting whatever was going on outside escalate into something worse.
Even as he battered them against the palladium pane, felt it begin to give under the repeated blows, a part of Schweitzer echoed Ninip’s doubt. These people were his resurrectors, but also his jailers. Any obligations he’d had were absolved when the bullet had gone up through his chin and sheared off the back of his head.
But that wasn’t right. Ninip had talked about roots and branches. He’d said that combat was the root of the warrior. But Schweitzer’s instinct reminded him that it was something more. Any thug could be a warrior. Schweitzer’s wars were sanctified. His roots ran deep in soil called paladin, guardian. The roots told Schweitzer’s branches to preserve, to defend.
So he did.
A final blow and the pane gave, the fragments holding together as they punched through, leaving a shattered cone of an ovipositor that birthed them onto the hard floor of the corridor outside their cell. The chill fog followed them out, dissolving in the warmth of the free air.
Schweitzer had been partially right. His guard had been a female. Her uniform was rumpled, her carbine sling twisted around her back, hung up in her magazine punches, the weapon wedged uselessly between her legs. Blood trickled from the corner of her mouth, a bruise already forming over one eye. She looked dazed.
The man was a civilian. His khaki pants were unbuttoned, his white shirt rumpled beneath a skewed tie. An ID badge, much like Eldredge’s, was clipped over his pocket.
His eyes were already going wide with terror, face drained of color. The guard was fumbling with her weapon, desperately trying to haul it into use, succeeding only in getting the stock stuck under the lip of her body armor. Ninip’s filter snapped into place, and Schweitzer saw them as they appeared to the jinn, tiny, weak, ripe for the hunt.
He reversed course, dug in with everything he had, hauled back against the jinn. Ninip howled and fought back, beating Schweitzer senseless against the walls of the darkness they shared. His vision went red, then black, then white, his hearing filled with an inhuman scream that he belatedly realized was issuing from their own mouth.
But Schweitzer hung on. Ninip raged, pushed like a tidal wave, but only succeeded in holding their shared body crouching on all fours, tongue reaching, darting in and out of the distended jaw, gnashing dagger teeth.
And then the jinn turned inward, slamming Schweitzer up against the perimeter of the space they shared, forcing him through it. He felt the void gaping behind once again, heard the boiling chorus of screams. He turned his attention from controlling their shared body and refocused on remaining inside it.
But the jinn was strong enough to multitask. He occupied Schweitzer with half his attention. With the other half, Ninip took control of their limbs, rose, turned toward the guard and her assailant.
Schweitzer managed a brief foray at their shared mouth, uttering a single word. “Run.”
But they weren’t listening. Their eyes were cast over Schweitzer and Ninip’s shoulder. Ninip followed the direction of their gaze, saw Mr. Axe and Mr. Flamethrower barreling toward them. Axe hung back while Flamethrower took a knee, leveling the nozzle, blue pilot light blazing malevolently below. Schweitzer watched Mr. Flamethrower’s finger drop down to the trigger and begin to tense.
Ninip howled again, too lost in the swell of predatory lust to understand what was about to happen. There was no way to reach them in time. Ninip was in the cattle chute of his own senseless rage, but Schweitzer knew the fuel gel moving through that nozzle would heat the air around them to twelve hundred degrees in an instant.
It couldn’t kill them. As far as Schweitzer knew, nothing could.
But reducing their shared body to ash would do the trick. He thought of the void, the swirling storm of souls, and shuddered.
Ninip gathered himself to spring, and Schweitzer redoubled his efforts to hold him back. Mr. Flamethrower was just doing his job. If they were to be destroyed, it wouldn’t be in the act of hurting innocent men following orders.
Ninip turned to fight him, and Schweitzer turned to the darkness. Maybe, somehow, he could find Sarah and Patrick again in that tangled hell.
A sharp voice. No heat. Tension slowly leaking out of the corridor.
Schweitzer looked up. Eldredge stood beside Mr. Flamethrower, one hand on the weapon’s barrel, gently pushing it down. His eyes were fixed on Schweitzer, but he was speaking to the soldier in low, gentle tones.
The jinn battered him again and again, shoving him to the limits of their shared space. Schweitzer dug in his memories, thrusting images at Ninip, napalm reducing jungles to ash, fuel air bombs bursting over Afghan villages, metal turned to dust in seconds. Humans screaming, burning, dying. Over and over again. He sent the images, felt Ninip’s attack lessen in response, until the jinn finally took his meaning, dialed back his madness, until the slow ebb of his passion left them on all fours again, shaking in the corridor while Eldredge and his men looked on.
When Schweitzer at last was able to focus on seeing the world outside their body again, he noted the wide peripheral vision he always slipped
into when on an op was still in place, giving him a view of the guard and her attacker, gaping in shock, no doubt processing the thought that the flamethrower would have incinerated them just as easily as it would have the monster that crouched before them, that Mr. Flamethrower wouldn’t have hesitated for a moment.
The silence stretched, all motionless in the long space, no sound save the soft clicking of the spinning lights as they continued their silent, orange-hued warning across the white walls. Eldredge took a cautious step closer. Schweitzer could smell his fear, different from the others around him, but fear nonetheless.
The guard and the man with her both began to speak at once, but Eldredge silenced them with a wave, squatted down on his haunches. Schweitzer could see the shimmering silver candle tips of his own eyes reflected back at him in the deep brown of Eldredge’s. “What happened?”
Ninip stirred, looked at the flamethrower at the low ready, pilot light still burning, and thought better of it. Schweitzer tested his control over their shared body, found Ninip was letting him drive. He sat them back slowly, keeping their clawed hands well clear. He did his best effort at jerking a thumb over their shoulder, painfully aware of the bone spike making the motion menacing. “Fight.”
Eldredge looked up now, taking in the woman’s battered face, the scratches on the man’s forearms. “I see.”
Schweitzer stood their shared body up, careless now of how the others in the corridor shrank away from them. He’d done what he’d set out to do. Whatever ill end was evolving with those two, it wasn’t going to happen on his watch.
Eldredge was saying something, the knot of soldiers breaking up and moving with the exaggerated purpose of those seeking to corral fear. The man and woman were talking over one another, pointing.
Schweitzer ignored them all. He took control of their shared arm and pushed the broken transparent cone back the other way, sending fragments tinkling to the floor and widening the hole enough for them to slip back through, landing lightly on their feet and returning to the pile of books. There was nothing else to do.
Schweitzer sat them back down on the floor, trying to wrap his head around what had just happened and why the aftermath felt so different.
Suddenly, a certainty tore through him. A gust of feeling. The smell of rosewater filling his nostrils, cloying. Sarah. Sarah floating in a lotus position, eyes closed. I’ll get past this. But I don’t want to.
He shook his head internally, noticed that his physical one had followed suit. Impossible. Sarah was dead. He’d seen the bullet take her.
He turned to Ninip but noticed Eldredge looking through the hole in the glass, eyes crinkling with, what? Sympathy?
“You did a good thing, Jim,” Eldredge said.
Ninip paced, and Schweitzer tried to process the words.
He’d died, come back, shared his body like a close apartment with a thing out of hell.
And in the midst of it, done good.
CHAPTER XIV
HINT OF A LIE
It took Steve longer to call than she’d expected. The days stretched on, growing long and hollow, the space filled with a string of excuses not to return her mother’s and sister’s increasingly frantic calls. She endlessly turned the thought of pregnancy over in her mind before dismissing it. By her normal calendar, her period should have just finished, and it should have been fine. But the stress and injury had thrown her cycle into chaos, and there had only been spotting at odd times. You should take a pregnancy test. No. She couldn’t deal with that, couldn’t handle the answer either way. Not yet.
So she played with Patrick, searching for glimmers of progress, snatching at a word or an expression. The therapist assured her that, while it would take time, he would make way, that children were remarkably resilient. But all she could do was think of Peg’s recounting of how she had slowly realized that her own son was autistic. It was the one time Peg had broken down in front of her, not so much crying as having too much liquid for her eyes to contain, running down a face whose expression showed no hint of grief.
No, Walter was fine. For the longest time he was fine. Then . . . it was like something broke inside him. He started going backward. He wouldn’t make eye contact, he stopped trying to talk to me. He . . . he regressed.
What if that happens to Patrick? Sarah’s mind whispered, what Jim had called her inner reptile, the piece of her whose sole job was to jump at shadows, to plan for the worst, to overreact, to do anything it had to in order to keep her safe. They’d trained Jim’s reptile mind until he lived in the space he needed to occupy in order to do his job. Sarah had worked not to follow him there. One family member in constant condition yellow was enough.
Not that it had done him, had done any of them, any good. When the threat condition yellow prepared them for had finally come knocking, readiness wasn’t enough.
So she knelt in front of Patrick, lowered her head until her ear almost touched the floor. She trembled with worry until he finally met her gaze, and she saw recognition in his eyes. Then, relief would flood her with such force that she would lie on her side, panting, struggling and failing to hold back the tears, to be strong for her son.
Sometimes Patrick stared. Sometimes he ignored her. What he never did was come to her, crawl into her arms, ask why Mommy was sad.
It was in those small moments that she regretted turning Steve away. It would have been wrong to keep him, but in those troughs she thought that maybe any lie was better than the empty gulf that stretched across her days. Unwilling to leave Patrick, she’d stopped going to the gym, whiled away the hours in front of her laptop, scanning e-mails she couldn’t bring herself to answer, watching her social media scroll by, a flowing current of a world that kept on turning as if nothing had happened, as if her life hadn’t been suddenly snatched away from her, crumbled into a lumpen ball, and handed back with a note attached that read, FIGURE THIS OUT. GOOD LUCK!
Only one man had managed to pierce that fog, both for her and Patrick, and she’d kicked him out for his trouble. For at least the tenth time, her hand went to her cell phone, touched it, left it. No. She couldn’t give him what he wanted. Not until she’d closed the door on Jim.
What the hell is wrong with you? she yelled at herself. Jim is dead. It’s time to accept that. Steve is alive. Patrick is alive.
You are alive.
Her hand went back to her phone, drew it out.
She was so startled when the phone lit up that she tossed it in the air, then fumbled it a few times before finally settling it back in her hands, buzzing like an angry insect, the screen filled with an image of Jim and Steve, in uniform, arms draped across each other’s shoulders. It was the profile pic she used for Steve.
She tried not to take it as a sign.
She brought the phone to her ear, the warmth of her cheek picking up the line. “Steve.”
His voice was level, determined. “Don’t hang up. I need you to listen to me.”
“I’m not hanging up.”
That, he wasn’t prepared for. “Right . . . well.”
“I’ve missed you,” she said. She knew right away that it was the wrong thing to say even if it was true. “I don’t want to . . .” She couldn’t find the words. Be alone?
“Let me see you. I need you to see my face when I say what I have to say.”
She closed her eyes. She dreaded that meeting as much as she hungered for it.
“Can you keep your hands to yourself?”
“I’ll try not to be offended by that question,” he said.
“Can you?”
“You know damn well I can.”
“Okay, fine.”
“I’ll be there in thirty minutes,” he said, and hung up before she had a chance to change her mind.
Patrick stared, expression unreadable.
“Uncle Stevie’s coming over,” she said. “Would you like to
see Uncle Stevie?”
Patrick went back to his trucks without answering, his muttering a little louder now, a running interview in a language only he could understand.
She snatched up her laptop, leaned against the back of the couch, and tried to wait. Her mind seized in time with her stomach, and she realized it would do no good. She had to do something to fill the space while Steve drove I-64 at his usual breakneck pace.
She’d finally settled on another round of cleaning the already immaculate suite when she heard the soft chime indicating that she had e-mail.
Grateful for the activity, she propped the lip of the computer against her belly and flipped it open.
And froze.
The e-mail was the only unread one in her in-box, the bolded letters striping across the screen, boldly proclaiming the sender and subject.
The SENDER column read: PORTSMOUTH RAPID STD/HIV/DNA TESTING. The subject was: ACCT. P00001224617 RESULTS.
She glanced at the can where it sat on the counter. They’d duct-taped it closed after taking their sample, put it in a plastic grocery bag. She’d forgotten all about it. Be honest. You blocked it out. You know what that e-mail says, and what it means.
It meant closure. It meant saying good-bye.
She was conscious of the pressure of her teeth digging painfully into her lip, forced herself to relax.
You couldn’t have better timing, Steve. It wouldn’t do her any good to face Steve just after reading confirmation of her husband’s death. Why? You know he’s dead. What difference does an e-mail make? Having closure will help you move forward with a clear head.
She thought of her dreams, the trail of rose petals, the unshakable certainty that he was alive.
Time to wake up. She swallowed and double-clicked the e-mail.
She read it three times, became slowly conscious that her mouth was hanging open, that a thin stream of drool was beginning to slide down her lip to drip onto her T-shirt.
She read it again. “The fuck?” Patrick looked up, his eyes widening.
