by Brandt Legg
“Why does he hate me?”
“Dunaway carries the abuse from our lifetime as a slave. It is partially my fault; if I had let that life die, he would have been able to see the completeness in his soul. Instead, he doesn’t know what he can’t let go of.”
“Can’t you help him?”
“I was not to be a mystic yet, so I’m limited in what I can do with my own incarnations.”
“Who limits you? I thought you’ve been a mystic for a long time.”
“I did not become a mystic until I escaped from slavery into the mountains. Then I began to explore time and dimension. It can be bent and changed . . . large changes are extremely difficult, small ones are but small things. Like a figure eight, journeying the infinite course, I relived many lives as a mystic, returning to the beginning of human history and repeating lifetimes. They are easier as a mystic, and, well . . . we must do something while we wait for the others to figure it all out.”
“And Dunaway insists on using force against Omnia because . . . he is lashing out at the plantation owners and slave traders.”
“Something like that. Remember, you found me only because you were looking for him. Dunaway is not your problem, he never has been. Often, in life, we fail because we do not realize that our biggest problem is the solution. Dunaway is your solution.”
“Thank you.” I understood.
He walked me to the glass wall. “One last thing before you go. There are many great truths, and most of them you know. However, remembering this will help you at times of great hardship: we are all each other in one form or another.”
Then the Dark Mystic opened a glass door where there had been none, put his hands together and bowed slightly. I bowed in return, looked down at the swirling ocean far below, and stepped out into the open air without hesitation.
I found myself walking on a beach. The stars were close. I looked up to see if I could find the Dark Mystic’s house. Nothing but stars. “Where am I?” I asked myself, knowing the answer would come – just south of Puerto Vallarta on the Mexican Coast. Before I could ask the location of the nearest portal, a harder question, a light in the distance caught my eye. It approached fast, maybe a motorcycle. Without a heat warning, I decided to wait.
Flannery took off his helmet. “Need a lift?”
“How’d you find me?”
“The Dark Mystic. He helped me quite a bit in the institution, helps a lot of folks locked up. Anyway, I do errands for him every now and then. He suggested I pick you up. Plus, I’ve got a new song I want you to hear.” He motioned his head back to the black guitar case strapped to his back.
“And where are we going?”
“See if we can’t catch up with Dunaway.”
“I thought he’d be back in Prague after killing my girlfriend,” I said.
“The Faust House in Prague got raided; it’s now controlled by Omnia.”
“Damn.”
“I’m sorry to hear about Linh,” he said, sadly.
A knot formed in my stomach. “What happened to Linh?”
“I don’t know, you just said Dunaway killed her.”
“No, you’re confused,” I said. “He killed Amber, not Linh.”
“Oh, sorry about Amber, then. But, you’re the one who seems confused.”
“Never mind.” I took the guitar off his back, slung it over mine and climbed on. “How far is he?”
“Just up the road. There’s a series of overlapping portals between here and Baja. Quite incredible, like a cosmic maze. Anyway, he’s got a base on this side.”
The Dark Mystic had obviously arranged where I would reenter 92426. I wondered if it was an endorsement. The knowledge and powers I’d gained during my eleven years with him were going to finally allow me to best Dunaway.
Flannery navigated a narrow trail through Playa Majahuitas, protected lands leading up to the coast. Over the motorcycle’s whine, he explained that the Cañon Submarino, an underwater canyon, contained many of the portal entrances. He also sang his newest song, something about earth’s music reaching the Pleiades star system through our radio waves.
“You’re losing me, Flannery.”
He kept singing.
Suddenly we entered a group of buildings.
“How does he hide this in the middle of a government wildlife sanctuary?”
Flannery sang louder, but I had already answered my own question. Dunaway employed a form of semi-permanent TVC to shield the base – no one could see it.
Flannery stopped when we spotted Dunaway standing on the balcony of a two-story, sheet metal building.
“Nate, I’m kind of busy trying to save the world. Can we do this another time?” he yelled down.
I Skyclimbed up to him. “Now is better for me,” I said.
“Fine,” he sighed. “If this is about your girlfriend, I’m sorry; I thought you’d die saving her, not the other way around.”
“This isn’t about her.”
“Oh, good. Then about the Jadeo, possession is nine-tenths of the law.”
“You don’t really know what it is, do you?”
“I know it’s important enough for you to get your girlfriend killed.”
I stayed calm and continued to concentrate on weakening his powers while blocking him from doing the same.
“I’m not giving it to you.”
“I think you will.”
“Oh yeah, tough guy, why’s that?”
“Because I know where it is.” I vanished into a Timefold. His panicked expression told me three things: he believed I knew, he thought I was heading there now, and he would try to reach it before I did.
I followed him to a portal entrance above a rock outcropping. The advantage I’d gained from my time with the Dark Mystic was lost as the portal maze twisted before me like a thousand passages inside a hall of mirrors lit by multi-colored strobe lights. Dunaway had been here many times before. If I lost him, I might never find my way out.
73
I memorized every turn he took, but everything continued to move, with the portals colliding, overlapping and changing constantly. Once I had the Jadeo, how would I get out? He must have a way to know the transformations; he never hesitated in his choice of direction. We were underwater now; I could see it all around like a giant aquarium pulsing with neon. Suddenly he pulled the Jadeo out of a wall, then headed in a different direction.
Because Dunaway remained oblivious to my presence, I used the relatively simple power of Solteer to make him see changes in the portals that were not there. Using Solteer on another mystic caused me blinding pain, but it gave me enough time to employ a technique I learned from the Dark Mystic. Through mental projection, I showed Dunaway the future view of what would happen if he traded the Jadeo to Omnia. Definitely a risky move because it would also show him the Jadeo’s true power.
As soon as the vision completed, he looked around. “Nate?”
I appeared. “Do you understand why I must have it back?”
“I do. But do you understand why I can’t give it to you?” he replied.
“No.”
“If I give it to you, then you will win.”
“If you don’t, then Omnia wins. Which is worse?” I asked.
“For you it’s Omnia; for me, it’s not so clear.”
“How can you say that after what I just showed you?”
“I don’t know.” It was the first time I’d heard anything but confidence, arrogance or bravado in his voice. He looked at me questioningly. “Because I hate you.”
I showed him the lifetime when I sold him into slavery and beat him.
“Why haven’t I seen this past life before?”
“Because you’re still alive,” I said firmly.
“Impossible.”
I raised an eyebrow and cocked my head.
“You’re telling me that alive today, a four-hundred-year-old black man, an escaped slave no less, is running around and I share a soul with him?”
“Yes,”
I replied.
“I would know.”
“Yet you don’t.”
He paced a figure eight. “If what you’re saying is true, where is he?”
“He is the Dark Mystic and he resides in a dimension of his own making,” I explained.
“You’re making this up. Get out of my way!” He shoved me.
I stepped aside. The portal had returned to the form familiar to him. “Nate, if I keep the Jadeo, I can win.”
“Not in the stars, Dunaway. Look for yourself. You don’t know how to open it. And even if you did, you’d be killed before you could and Omnia would wind up with it.”
“Nothing is so sure.”
“Dunaway, I’m sorry about our past. You know enough about karma to know that I have paid for that crime.”
“Show me!”
“In karma, the debt is seldom paid to the one to whom it is owed, but it will always be paid somehow.”
“Show me the payment, Nate.”
So I did. I showed him my parents being dragged away by the same slave trader, and later my life in slavery. I showed him Dachau, and fifty other deaths, Lightyear killing my father, him killing my mother. I showed him suffering until he put his arms around me and we both dropped to our knees in tears. Forgiveness is far easier than one might imagine. “I’m sorry,” I cried.
“Apologies are meaningless. I cannot begin to make up for the pain I’ve caused . . .”
“But that is the only place where we can begin,” I said.
“How many lifetimes am I going to have to pay for this one?”
“Many.”
“I don’t think I can bear that kind of cruel suffering.”
“You can, you have. We all have.”
“All the Omnia agents I’ve killed or had killed . . . they’re as good as me . . . as you.”
“Yeah, that’s the problem with violence; no matter how much we think we’re using it against others, it’s really always against ourselves.” I looked him in the eye. “You see what violence has wrought. It damages the soul. You have taken the wrong road with IF. We must defeat Omnia with non-violence or any victory will not be lasting.”
Flannery ran toward us. “Omnia found IF’s compound. They’ve blown it to smithereens!”
“Damn them!” Dunaway shouted. “I have attacks ready to retaliate at seven key military bases, including the Pentagon!”
“We’ve probably got about twenty seconds before they find the entrance to the portals,” Flannery said, breathlessly.
They both looked at me. “Twenty seconds is an eternity,” I said. “Dunaway, you must decide . . . return the Jadeo and join the Movement.”
He hesitated. “Damn you, Nate, I’ve lost people up there. Good friends . . .”
“I know.”
He thrust the Jadeo into my hand. Feeling the small gold box jolted me; much had changed since I last held it, mostly me.
“Thank you, Dunaway.”
“Nate!” Flannery yelled. “We gotta go.”
I caught an Airgon particle from Flannery and detected the commandos’ next target.
“Dunaway, how do we get to the butterfly forest?” I shouted.
74
We arrived too late. Amber-two and Wandus were dead. Their bloody bodies, along with twenty-eight other Movement members, lay among millions of butterflies, torn, ravaged and lifeless.
“Sorry, Nate,” Dunaway said.
I closed my eyes, and finding no support to lean upon, sank to the ground. “He was a being of pure love . . . and I brought her from the safety of an advanced dimension into this . . . this . . . barbaric society.”
Flannery put a hand on my shoulder. I looked up at Dunaway. He had strikes at the ready, we could inflict thousands of deaths in retaliation and weaken Omnia’s ability to repeat this kind of massacre. And I wanted to do that, my rage rising within me, smothering out my spiritual impulses.
I could almost hear what Dunaway was thinking. “Kind of tough to turn the other cheek.”
Flannery was visibly shaken by the sight. “Wandus didn’t even eat food!” he said.
I knelt down beside Amber’s body; in a cruel karmic twist, I’d lost her twice in one lifetime. “I will see you again and before again.” I kissed her forehead and then Wandus’. As brutal as it was to see them that way, I knew if they had been there with me, retaliation was the last thing they would want. And it was the first thing Omnia would want. We used Gogen to dig graves and bury the bodies.
I found Spencer on the astral. The surviving hierarchy of the Movement, including Yangchen and Linh, were in hiding. Constantly moving among dimensions, he told me where to meet them but said to hurry as they were considering retreating to another time until they could regroup.
“I’ve got the Jadeo,” I said.
“I know. I felt it happen.”
“We can still win this.”
“Wait until you hear the full reports of the crackdown.”
“Omnia’s only doing this because Devin Moore is scared his control is slipping.”
“Whatever his motives, the crackdown is working.”
“What do we know of Outin?”
“Last report said it was still safe but we’ve not been able to reach Dustin.”
“Me neither,” I said. “We’ll go through there on the way to you.”
“Be careful.”
Dustin and Dustin-three met us as we entered Outin. They explained that they were not communicating on the astral because, although Omnia didn’t have the ability to intercept astral-talks yet, they had found a way to use the energy of them to trace people. It was how the crackdown had been so effective. They had figured it out through the Windows but couldn’t figure out how to get word out to us without jeopardizing Outin.
“Is Outin really worth all the lives we lost?” I asked Dustin.
“Nate, believe me, it’s been a tough call, but if Omnia had Outin, it would already be over. I knew I’d made the right decision when I felt you get the Jadeo back.” He looked at Dunaway. “Cool of you, man.”
“Maybe we should use Outin as a base for the Movement,” I said.
“Nate, the Movement has nothing left to make a base with. It’s down to you and Devin Moore,” Dustin said.
“I need to go to Clarity Lake.”
Dunaway and Flannery got the grand tour of the four lakes from the Dustins while I went to the fifth lake seeking answers. And what I found there was so monumental, it was astonishing that we’d missed it.
When I told the others, Dustin-three verified it in a Window. If we’d known it sooner, would it have changed anything, I wondered. Spencer, Yangchen and Linh needed to know immediately but we couldn’t risk Outin by breaking our astral silence.
“Dunaway, I need to talk to the Dark Mystic.”
“You think you can do it through me? Won’t that risk Omnia picking up our energy?”
“Not if we do it through an Outview. If you and I both go back to that time, we might be able to talk to him.”
“It doesn’t sound like fun to me.”
“It may not be,” I said.
“Try to resist the urge to kill me.”
“That won’t be easy with you giving me fifty lashes,” I replied.
“I’m hoping to avoid that this time.”
Instead of reaching the slave life with Dunaway, I wound up in a future time. The Dark Mystic smiled, looking the same. I, however, was a woman in her mid-forties with a young son, but I also had full memory. “I was trying to reach you with Dunaway.”
“Yes, I know. He would have killed you,” the Dark Mystic said. “Dunaway is too new to the world of non-violence and you thought going back into the lifetime that created his penchant for violence and revenge with the one who did it to him was a good idea?” He shook his head. “Apparently eleven years wasn’t long enough.”
“I wasn’t thinking. Is he okay?” I asked.
“He isn’t making it back to that life. He’s in a different future
right now, seeing a lifetime surrounded by loved ones, teaching all that he has learned. It’s a good place.”
“Nice to know there is a future like that.”
“There is a future like just about anything you can imagine.”
“You know why I’m here?”
“The mix-up?”
“Yes, how does that happen?”
“There are no accidents. Had you known in the beginning who he was, Dunaway would have killed him and then . . . well, you don’t have the years it would take me to explain to you what would have happened.”
“So now, what am I supposed to do?”
“Omnia is on the verge of victory. They are using overwhelming, unprecedented force. Therefore, we know their victory will not be lasting. Yet you must stop them because, as you know, time is a funny thing and a victory that doesn’t last may still last ten thousand years.”
“You aren’t going to tell me how, are you?”
“I could only tell you what I would do, and that would not do any good, since you are not me. I can see into the future and tell you what you did, but that would not do any good, since in order to do that thing you must do it first.” He nodded and I knew it was time to leave.
75
“Didn’t make it back to the slave times.” Dunaway said.
“Me neither, but I know what to do.” I rounded up the Dustins and Flannery and told them we needed to get the news to the others so that a plan could be agreed upon. Not surprisingly, both Dustins decided to stay.
“Love you, man.” Dustin said, hugging me.
“Every time we say goodbye, I wonder if I’ll see you again.”
He stood back, left his hands on my shoulders, stared at me for a minute. “Me too.” He looked down for a moment and then back into my eyes. “This time feels worse.”
I nodded.
He made a funny face and laughed, pushing me away. “I’ll see you again and before again,” he said.
Linh ran to me as soon as we came through the portal. “It feels like a hundred years,” she said, throwing her arms around me.
“You’re not still mad?”
