by R. A. Rock
But humans who were born and raised on other planets — like Audrey’s people had been for generations — continued to evolve and adapt to their environment, so there were slight genetic differences that could change everything when it came to something like fighting off an ancient flu strain.
“I’ll be back, Yumi,” Cynthia said and I nodded absently, focused on my thoughts.
I needed to heal Audrey, but I was so out of energy, I didn’t think I had enough. I wracked my brain. How to manage it? I wasn’t going to let Audrey die but I also wasn’t about to kill myself with an ill conceived rescue mission.
Been there. Done that.
I needed Chad’s advice.
I looked at him. He was sleeping deeply. I wasn’t even sure I could wake him. I had been told in my training that it was impossible to contact someone who was at that level of deep sleep.
Of course, being told something was impossible had never stopped me before.
No Modern Medicine
Yumi
Cynthia came back into the guest house a few minutes later as I lay down in the narrow twin bed where Chad was sleeping. She raised an eyebrow but didn’t say anything.
I couldn’t explain that I needed to touch him to help me use the soul bond to get into his mind, so I let her think that I just wanted snuggles. I needed to find my way in through the soul bond because our telepathic powers weren’t back yet.
I watched in silence as Cynthia brought in something that smelled… delicious, actually. She took a blanket off of Audrey to reveal a sheet wrapped tightly around her torso. Cynthia unwrapped it and took off a cloth packet, replacing it with the hot cloth packet that she carried. She placed it against Audrey’s chest. Then she wrapped the sheet tightly around her again.
“What’s that?”
“It’s a garlic and onion poultice,” she said as she wrapped Audrey up like a mummy. The blonde woman didn’t wake up but beads of sweat formed on her forehead and upper lip.
“Both are known for their antibacterial properties. I’m trying to kill the germs through the skin. The heat opens the pores and allows the goodness from the garlic and onion to get into the body.”
I blinked. That’s what we had against this illness that was taking Audrey’s life? Garlic and onions? That scared me a lot and I lay down back to back with Chad, reaching out to take Audrey’s hand for when we needed to heal her. Then I closed my eyes.
***
I yanked on the connection between us and felt an answering tug from Chad’s mind. The soul bond felt odd but I assumed it was because we were sick. I didn’t try to link up with him. I just wanted to use the soul bond as a way into his mind, since our abilities hadn’t returned yet and I couldn’t get in the usual way.
His feelings of discomfort wafted over the connection and I imagined the feelings as a rope floating out from his mind. Then I grabbed ahold of that rope and began dragging myself hand over hand into his mind.
It seemed to take forever. I had never had so much trouble getting into Chad’s head before. But finally I appeared in his public mind. He was no where to be seen. But I hadn’t expected him to be out here. Out of habit, I looked at the fireplace in his mind and started it with a thought.
The flames danced and I felt a little better.
I crossed the room, shuffling across the floor I was so exhausted, and went into his private mind. Private minds are like bedrooms and I had been in here before. He was lying in the bed, curled up in the same position as his physical body.
“Chad!” I said, speaking in a loud tone of voice because we needed to help Audrey right now.
He was startled out of his sleep and sat up quickly.
“What?”
“Audrey’s really sick. We have to heal her.”
He frowned.
“We don’t have enough energy ourselves for that, Yumi,” he said. “You must know that, or you’d be healing her yourself right now.”
I swayed a little and Chad frowned.
“Come sit down.” I walked over and dropped without energy onto the bed. “Why are you so weak?”
“We’ve been out for five days.”
“Five days?” He was as amazed as I had been.
“You’re still out. I had to come in through the soul bond.”
He looked as though he wanted to ask about that but changed his mind.
“I thought we could make a Circle,” I said, losing hope but not willing to give up yet.
“It’s still the same amount of power. Okay, with more juice because of the joining of the minds. But with our current energy levels, that’s still not going to be much.”
I took a heavy breath. Feeling weak even in his mind was not a good sign. He was right, of course. But I didn’t want to believe that there was nothing we could do.
“Wait,” he said, as a thought suddenly occurred to him. “Do you have your powers back?”
I shook my head.
“Then how did you get in here?”
“I had to climb in using the soul bond. Looks like it came back before our powers this time.””
“Go see the wall,” he said, referring to the wall of minds in the living room of his public mind. Chad is the most powerful telepathic Receiver ever discovered. He has this wall that stretches to infinity. It protects him from all the minds in the universe because he can hear every one of them if he wants to. If he didn’t have the wall, he would go insane. Every brick in the wall is a different mind.
I got up and slowly went and peeked behind the curtain that sometimes covered it.
There was no wall. Only a strange fog.
I let the curtain fall back and walked quickly into his bedroom.
“Okay, that’s damn freaky,” I said, shutting the door behind me.
“Tell me about it,” he said, his eyes wide and troubled.
“Chad,” I said, sitting on the bed again. “Cynthia thinks Audrey is dying. Please, maybe we can use the soul bond. Even if we can give her a little bit of healing, it might put her over the line.”
“Yumi, that’s crazy talk. We’ll kill ourselves and maybe Audrey will die anyway. And it will have been for nothing.”
“Chad, please, I can’t give up on her. We have to try. I’m all she has.”
Audrey doesn’t have any friends or family. We’re it. And I’m the only person in the galaxy that saw good in her, when she couldn’t even see any in herself. I helped her change her perspective. I gave her a chance to prove that she had changed so she didn’t have to go to jail with the rest of the people she worked with.
She’s my friend and somehow in a strange sort of inverse reaction to how many times I’ve wanted to kill her in the past, I really wanted and needed to save her now.
I opened my mouth to argue more but Chad held up his hand.
“Okay. I know.”
“You know?”
“Of course. Audrey’s severed all her ties, burned all her bridges, and hasn’t had time to form new connections. We’re her family, friends, and coworkers all rolled into one. I know. Okay? I know.”
I knew that he wanted to help Audrey but he didn’t want to endanger us.
“Chad, I’m sorry to put you in this position,” I said, feeling truly bad about it. “Because I know that doing this could easily kill us and Audrey. But it could also save her. And you’re the only one I can ask to do it.”
The soul bond is a long story, but suffice to say that we created it by accident, it links our minds permanently, and we can use it to increase our powers exponentially. But it’s also almost killed us more than once, so there’s always that. It was our only chance to help Audrey. But as always the risk was terrifying.
“It’s okay. That’s what I do, right? I’m a good guy.”
I smiled, remembering all the conversations we had had about Audrey before we were sure that she really was on our side and not just messing with us. There had been a lot of talk about how we were the good guys and she was the bad guy and where the line was
drawn between the two.
If I was being honest, though, there wasn’t a line, there was a whole big gray area between the good guys and the bad guys. The right choice wasn’t always straight forward.
“You’re not just a good guy, you’re a great guy,” I said, and he nodded, getting my little joke but not laughing. I didn’t laugh either.
“Okay, lie down here.” He patted the bed beside him.
I tilted my head and gave him an inquiring glance.
“You’re likely to fall down while we do this if you don’t.”
That was true. But still.
And yet, I was so tired that all I wanted was to was collapse. So I did as he said. I lay with my back to him and he scooted over until we were spooning. Chad is the master cuddler and I knew he wouldn’t miss a chance to snuggle.
“We barely touch the soul bond,” he said into the back of my head. “When I activated it just now, it felt weird to me. Not like usual. So, I want us to go slowly and make sure nothing strange is going to happen. And we won’t do the whole healing process. We’ll just link up the minimum that we can manage and let a tiny trickle of life energy pass through into Audrey. Just enough to put her over the edge and to jump start her own healing processes. Are you physically touching her?”
I nodded.
“Okay, here we go,” he said, gently tugging on the soul bond. I touched it, too, pulling softly.
But something was wrong.
At the slightest touch, the soul bond activated fully all at once — something that had never happened before.
I screamed at the intensity of the pain/pleasure as the mind meld happened nearly instantly. I could feel Chad’s agony/bliss, too, mingled with mine.
This wasn’t supposed to happen.
And just like that, I felt myself merging with the overwhelming life force that was pouring through us.
That wasn’t a good thing, though.
It meant we were dying and going back to the Source.
This was not exactly going as planned.
Soul Bond
Chad
As I was overwhelmed by the intensity of forming an instant mind meld with Yumi, one conscious thought ripped through the madness…
Mental construct.
A mental construct is what we use to make mental tasks easier when we’re trying to do things in our minds that are very abstract. We just imagine a scenario that will help us visualize what we’re trying to do.
Somehow our linked minds managed to create a mental construct in the middle of the maelstrom of energy and I suddenly found myself standing in the middle of what looked like a tornado. Yumi was beside me.
“Why did we appear in the middle of the tornado?” she yelled.
“I don’t know,” I said, imagining us outside of the storm. We immediately appeared far enough away that the tornado couldn’t hurt us.
Yumi and I were inside my mind inside a mental construct. I know. Makes my head hurt, too. Outside in the real world, our bodies were lying on one of the beds in the guest house at Matt and Nessa’s. We had come in here to save Audrey but now we were the ones who needed saving.
The construct was strangely bare. Just an endless field. And the tornado. And us.
Like my mind didn’t have enough energy to bother adding in any other details. I had never seen a mental construct so bare.
“Is it going in slow motion?” she said, tilting her head to examine the storm.
“When I imagined us outside of the tornado, maybe I slowed time, too,” I said, feeling sort of confused. “I think we have a few minutes to figure things out.”
“Chad,” she said, her voice shaking, her dark eyes terrified. “The soul bond’s out of control. We’re dying.”
“I know,” I said, taking her hand. “And though there’s no one I’d rather die with than you, Tanaka. Frankly, I’d rather not die at all.”
“Agreed,” she said. “How do we get control of this insanity?”
We were quiet for a moment, thinking, then she burst out again.
“I’m freaking out, here, Red. How long do we have?”
At the same time, the tornado spun faster and began to make a sinister wailing sound.
“Calm down, Yumi,” I said, facing her and putting both my hands on her arms, knowing that my touch would help her stay in control.
“The soul bond is going to kill us,” she said, her eyes big. “If it was something I could fight, I could handle it. But this…” She shrugged helplessly.
And I knew she was right. I had seen her fight off a half dozen hostile attackers without batting an eye. But this. This was making her come undone.
“Yumi,” I said, frowning. “Give me your hands. We’re not going to die.”
I took her cold hands in mine and paid attention to my breath.
“First we need to calm down. Do a focusing exercise.”
Learning to concentrate was one of the first things we learned to do at The Agency because you can’t do any sort of mental activity without having a fully focused mind. She closed her eyes and I did the same. When I looked again, the storm beside us had calmed some.
“We don’t have the energy to control that thing,” she said, looking at the tornado that was whirling ominously twenty feet away. “We’ve been ill for almost a week, Chad.”
“There’s got to be a way, Yumi. We have to try, otherwise, we’re simply going to wink out of existence in a couple minutes.”
The thought filled me with apprehension. I had come pretty close to death before but never this close.
“Okay,” she said, not sounding convinced. “A force field.”
“What?”
“Let’s imagine a force field — how about we can actually see it. Let’s say it’s blue. And we’ll contain the tornado that way.”
“I’m not sure that’ll work.”
“If we were at full power, we could do it.”
“But we’re not.” I pointed out.
“Exactly. Either way we die. But this way at least we die trying.” She said, her voice rising as she spoke. She was more agitated than I had ever seen her — with good reason.
“Yumi.”
“Let’s just do it,” she squeezed my hands. “You imagine it. I’ll feed you energy.”
I closed my eyes and imagined a blue force field, bigger and stronger than the twister. When I opened my eyes, there was a translucent blue something surrounding the tornado like a blanket and it was making an electric sort of humming noise. It hovered about ten feet away from the storm.
“Why’d you create it so far away?” she said, bewildered.
“I didn’t. The soul bond’s out of control, remember?” I said, shaking my head.
Then I shouted as I spotted the danger.
“Watch out!”
The force field suddenly untwisted and the shock wave hit us, making a sound like a sonic boom. It knocked me to the ground with bone-shaking impact. I groaned, feeling like I had just been hit by a Class Five starship.
You have to be careful in mental constructs. Even though it’s all in the mind. Whatever your mind believes it makes real, so if you get killed in a mental construct, your mind dies in real life.
Yumi gave me a dirty look as we got up and brushed ourselves off, the dust irritated my nose and I sneezed twice. Then she took my right hand in her left, reminding me of the marking that we had on our hands. If we could see them right now, the Celtic love knot would be lined up and whole again, showing the C on her hand and the Y on mine. If only our relationship could be in the same state — whole again.
“Together,” she said pulling me out of my mind’s rambling thoughts. The translucent blue force field reappeared.
“Remember,” I said, bringing my mind to bear on the problem at hand. “This is all just a mental construct designed to get control of the soul bond before it kills us.”
“Of course,” she said. “Let’s just do it.”
We lifted our free hands to use them to help
guide the energy and began slowly lowering the force field over the tornado, but as soon as it started pushing on the tornado, I could feel we were going to lose control. My mental grip was slipping.
Shit. This wasn’t going to work.
“It’s not going to work,” Yumi said, squeezing my hand, way too tightly.
“It has to,” I said, holding on hard but at that moment, the tornado got bigger and blew the force field away.
Then the twister started moving towards us.
“That’s it, Chad,” Yumi said, staring at the mental construct of the tornado in horror. “We’re dead.”
Certain Death
Yumi
“What the hell are you two doing?” Shiv said, appearing beside us without warning. I must have jumped two feet in the air.
“This is totally out of control,” Gracie said, as she popped up in the mental construct, too, startling me a second time.
God, I was so on edge.
“No shit,” I said, grabbing Grace’s hand so the four of us stood in a row facing the tornado. I didn’t know how they had got here since our telepathic powers weren’t back yet, but I was definitely glad to see them.
“You think we’ll have enough power?” Shiv said.
“I sure as hell hope so,” Chad said, closing his eyes. “Otherwise we’re all dead.”
We joined our minds and Shiv and Grace’s calming mental presence, made me feel better right away. We could do anything if we worked together. For so long, I had been going solo thinking that was how to be strong but it was when I finally let others help me that my true strength began to show up.
Chad brought the force field back and directed our combined energy, pushing on the tornado. It made a whining noise but got smaller and smaller until it disappeared. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief as we got the power of the soul bond under control.
The moment Chad felt us in control again, he directed the energy through me into Audrey. Gracie and Shiv provided support for the mental network that we were using. Slowly, we could feel Audrey’s empty shell of a body filling up with healing energy, till it could take no more.
