“It is as I said it would be,” Chari told Flynn. “The damage is like that to Mack’s eye; too ingrained, too much a part of her.” She looked to Zaja. “However she suffers now, it is natural for her. Whatever I might abate in the moment does not impede what will to come.”
“I … don’t—” Zaja started.
“I didn’t want to get your hopes up.” Flynn said. Even if the “how” was lost, the “why” was clear: She had long since inured herself to treatments colored with words like “radical” and “promising.” Whatever Chari could do, it was done as but a courtesy check, little more.
“We’re leaving Oma,” Flynn told her. “If you still want it, you can come with us.”
Zaja sat up, sacrificing the small comfort that the blankets gave. “I don’t want to get caught up in your problems,” she told him plainly. “But I’ll help out as long as I’m with you. I’ll earn my keep.”
Flynn, nearer to her effects, picked up the pile of clothes and placed them on the foot of the bed. “You’re only coming with until you find some place where you can settle in,” he smiled at her, nodding in acknowledgment, “I knew before you even woke up.”
That sort of cockiness bugged her—the way he stated it as fact, like he had any idea what she was thinking or how she felt. What Flynn said next, as he turned somber and avoided eye contact, stayed with her most. “I understand what it’s like to find your body betraying you.”
Worse than the audacity of this statement was the possibility that he might not be lying. “How can you?”
He didn’t answer, and he and Chari stepped out of the room so she could dress. Zaja scrambled quickly into her clothes: hopping on one leg to untangle bunched up pants, twisting a backwards sweater around. She hurried out of the room in a state of half dress—they were still there, but she’d been afraid to find them gone.
As they exited warm halls, she buried her discomfort and followed them into a back alley strewn with dust and rubble. Instinct told her they would be braving something worse before the hour was done. The others—Jean and Mack—returned items to Flynn and Chari that had been left in their care.
“And really, Charsy,” Mack was saying as he handed back her rifle, “I still don’t get why you think it’d be a problem to walk into a local hospital carrying a loaded rifle.”
“I err on the side of caution,” she told him, amused.
Distracted by their exchanges, Zaja was surprised when a pool of cords was pressed suddenly into her hands. Looking down, she recognized the whip of thorns she’d left in the hotel room—that she’d worked so hard to learn and had hoped not to need again.
“Even if you’re not with us for very long,” Flynn told her, “knowing our luck, there are dangers ahead.”
“You kept this for me?” Surprise preceded curiosity, and she turned to ask, “What if I hadn’t come with you?”
“Woulda left the damn thing in the alley.” Jean’s reply was short and cold. “You took my damn mace!”
Cowed, Zaja swiftly apologized. Qainen had never been so threatening or vindictive as Jean.
“So we’re all goods to goes, right?” Mack asked.
“At last!” Jean abandoned her grudge. “Let’s hike to the gateway, get out of here, and find that Poe son-of-a-bitch already!”
Poe? Better not to ask, she decided. It was already getting cold, and would only worsen as they lingered. Flynn beckoned and the others followed, Zaja making sure to keep close to the lead lest she fall behind and be forgotten. Every so often, she slowed to let her heart rate calm, lest her body vent too much heat before they even reached the outside. They were near the top when Zaja realized how severe the temperature drop would be on the other side of the plate. She had never gone so high up before, so close to the net. There was no one living around Kana’s apex. A few buildings remained, stations when the mine was first being stripped, likely now a repository for maintenance tools. When she felt the first draft slip through the edges, she put aside her pride and leaned close to Flynn, saying, “If I fall, you have my permission to carry me.”
She hoped she hadn’t sounded haughty—she just needed him to know she would not resent him thrice. A stairwell of slick, set stone climbed up less than a story, past the protective plate. Almost immediately as the cold hit her, she fell back and was caught by Mack behind her, who helped prop her up.
“This way!” Flynn yelled with a grand wave of his arm. Coats tightened and hoods were drawn and if there were any murmurs of dissent, they were soft and drowned in the winds. As they walked the circumference of the net, very nearly to the other side, it appeared. A rift of blue light opened and broke the already fractured cup that was Zaja’s understanding of the universe. Whatever she knew fell away, back to Kana below. She had no place there, after all. That light and the promise the portal offered held Zaja up when she would have fallen. She could feel the winds, worse than she’d ever known, but she carried on, not even realizing that Flynn helped her along the way, his arm slung supportively across her back until she stood before the exit from this endless winter. Breathing deep, Zaja smelled the trace of a world that was not her own. Dulled by the winds and no longer able to tell the cold outside from that within, Zaja was transfixed for a moment.
“Hey, we’re freezing our collective asses off back here!” Jean accused. “So hurry the fuck up and hop through!”
Hop? Could it be that simple? Zaja could see below: They were beyond the edge of the plate, and if what hovered before her wasn’t real, or if it couldn’t carry her the way it carried them, she would fall between rock and snow. If she survived the impact, she would still freeze to death. Else, her body might slip past that space and return to Kana, tumbling down until she was mangled beyond recognition. Regardless of the outcome, she was leaving Oma tonight. She wished now she could have made peace with her parents, her grandparents, her sisters. This was the point of no return.
Making certain of her aim, Zaja closed her eyes and leapt. If she crashed and died, she didn’t want to see the rocks coming at her. Something passed through her and around her and she tumbled painfully to a ground of thick roots. She could still feel Oma’s cold winds reaching through the portal behind her, as though trying to pull her back. Knowing herself too far away to be taken, she didn’t bother opening her eyes. She just rolled onto her back. She loosened her scarf, discarded her cap. Snaking out of her jacket, she smiled blissfully as the sunlight bathed her. It touched her bare skin, and she felt a warmth that she had waited all her life to know.
Chapter Thirteen: Inescapable Shadows
Flynn waited until the others had gone through, not knowing if the exit point would keep him close enough to the breach between worlds to maintain it. He waited until the winds died before leaping after the others. There was no one to help him along in the damning cold, and an ill-timed leap would be his doom and strand his friends in the process. When he came through to the other side, Jean caught him, then pushed him back the moment he was stable, brushing the snow he’d brought with from her coat.
“Thought I’d keep ya from fallin’ on yer face.”
Flynn felt what she meant. The ground they stood on was comprised of roots, packed more densely than a cobblestone road. It was not a patch of terrain either, but the very land itself, stretching as far as they could see. Here and there, leaves of grass—pale and translucent—sprouted between the roots. In the distance, there were so many that they formed a field. Unsteady though the ground was, it remained readily traversable—though if careless, one could easily become snagged and trip. They had come out in a shallow basin, hugged by the arms of a great tree whose bark was so faded that one could see the trunk it housed. The branches, sprouting crystalline leaves, were no different than those of any other old growth peppering the landscape.
“You think this is the place?” Chari asked. “The World Between Heaven and Hell to which Airia Rousow directed us?”
“I’m having trouble imagining how it’s not,” Flynn conced
ed. Beneath a pastel sky of pinks and oranges, he climbed to the basin’s lip to see a land too faded to be alive yet too living to be dead. Ethereal lights bounced playfully for miles around. Flynn glanced back at Chari. “I don’t entirely know yet why it’s called the World Between Heaven and Hell, but this has to be it.”
“Well, that’s pleasing.” She smiled.
“It’s relieving,” he corrected her. “I don’t want to return to that icescape.”
Chari concurred, and Flynn hiked back down to Zaja, who was lying blissfully with half her clothes shed, basking in the sunlight that poured fully through a break in the foliage above. Mack crouched nearby, poking her intermittently to no effect and informing Flynn, “She’s kinda just been doin’ this for several minutes now.”
Dismissing his companion, Flynn knelt and placed a hand on Zaja’s forearm, skin to skin for the first time since meeting her. She was cool to the touch, and he intuitively felt the need her body had to keep whatever warmth it could find. She stirred at his touch, but only became aware when he spoke her name. She smiled with euphoric content as she awoke.
“We’ll be leaving in a few minutes,” he told her. “You don’t have to come with us, but I thought I’d let you—”
“No, no,” she interrupted, scrambling to her feet. “I mean, maybe I’ll stay here later—on this world, later—but I’ll go with you for now. Options and all that.”
Rather than any uncertainty, Zaja expressed nothing but excitement at the prospect of the unknown to come. Infirm though she was, she could be a valuable asset in the right circumstances, and Flynn’s unconscious mind was already turning at the ways to nudge her closer to the group, keep her in their company. Flynn had not been above exploiting the sick or dying in the past. He had conned more than a few with one foot already in the grave. Looking at Zaja, Flynn remembered Russels, who had had enough medicine to stay alive for decades, until a certain chemist had learned of his stash. Flynn had been hired to find and clean out the entire supply. Strange, the memories that sometimes surface.
*
A pile of skins and coats lay abandoned. In the gentler winds of the World Between, the five travelers found that much of what they had borne from Oma in the name of survival was little more than ballast and burden now. While Chari had changed to the more moderate wraps she had made in Bolni and Mack had shed his coat, Zaja retained most of her garments, still more sensitive to every breeze than the others, and mindful that night would come. While Flynn rolled up his sleeves, Jean did nothing more than unzip her jacket.
Their loads lightened, the group set off. The World Between’s rooted lands rolled as naturally as soil and stone, and in spite of the absence of manmade routes and roads, the five found a natural pathway, an affirmation of a direction they did not at first know they were following.
Casually probing, Flynn sensed a few ways connecting to places outside the World Between. Some, impossibly, seemed to be in the distant sky above, promising a cruel landing for the hapless fool who stumbled through that gateway. When Flynn shared this observation, Chari shook her head.
“Some other thing is at play here,” she told him. “Just feel the way the land has formed beneath our feet. Have you ever felt so guided?”
“I only feel the pull of the passages,” Flynn told her. “Nothing is leading me on—”
“It’s not supernatural,” she said dismissively, “and neither is it so egocentric as being about us. It’s as though these roots bow to chaperone a herd that has lost its way.”
There had been no signpost, no trash, no broken branch. Were they not in this very world in search of a man, Flynn would have readily surmised that the World Between Heaven and Hell (despite whatever its name suggested) had never known the human element. It seemed barren, like Sechal. Yet as Chari said it, he noticed the way his feet fell, the sensation of moving comfortably downhill even when hiking up. If roads are cut and made so that mankind never loses its way, it seemed as though the people of this world were never at such risk in the first place. More unlike Sechal still, there was a greater sense of life to the World Between. Like the flora that peppered the land, the creatures too seemed almost ghostly, their natural colors muted, and their flesh, at times, transparent. Yet they bounded and stalked and killed like anything else.
“Alrighty!” Mack declared. “I spy with my lonely eye, something beginning with an arr.”
“A reik shema?” Chari asked, looking at the serpentine behemoth in the distance.
“I think he meant the rityiy,” Zaja said, kicking a mound of roots in the ground that was beginning to recede.
Disappointed, Flynn heard Mack murmur to Jean, “I was lookin’ at that raven over there.” He watched the bird, perched and cawing from a branch, until they passed out of sight.
“It’s weird seeing so many animals walking alone out in the open,” Zaja admitted as they moved on. “So many creatures on Oma move around in packs that it seems dangerous to do anything less.”
“Could just be that things aren’t so dangerous here,” Flynn suggested, eating his words as a predator of unknown origin took down what appeared to be a deer, promptly feeding on its flesh. Keeping an eye open, he never saw another deer, much less the thing that had eaten it. After hours of walking, he could only conclude that this place was strange.
*
Although Flynn did not yet have a sense for how long days were on the World Between or when precisely they ended, they were decidedly less brutal than those endured on Oma. It seemed they might know a normal night of sleep for once. Darkness neared as they located a watering hole and settled by it to camp for the night. Flynn was drawn to the pool, with its rich turquoise waters, and knelt before it, cupping his hands and drawing the water to his mouth. He drank deeply, and the water fell into him as blood in his veins. Looking to his companions, he could see that he wasn’t the only one who found the sensation strange.
They had nearly settled in for the night when Mack called them over. “Hey, guyses! You’ve gotta take a look at this!”
With varying degrees of contempt and curiosity, they trudged through the glassy reeds to where a light shined like a pillar through a gap in the earth. The roots wrapped around the edges and climbed down, as though sealing the edges of an old wound. The object at the pit’s depth was the real source of Mack’s fervor: a white micro-sun, receding in the distance as the World Between Heaven and Hell pulled away. More than just setting, the heavenly body had retreated far below, merely happening to be visible through a hole in the world. Spellbound, all watched until the last edges of that sun were eclipsed by the very ground they stood upon. What remained was too dim to provide any real luminescence in the deepening night.
When they returned to the watering hole, caught in a strange silence, it was Zaja who spoke first. “… So are all your alien worlds just a bunch of large, floating landmasses?”
“No,” Chari confirmed. “No, this … this is new.”
“I’m suggesting baby steps from now on,” Mack proposed. “Don’t wanna get snagged and trip. And fall. Through the planet.”
Flynn had been watching the land well enough, and it seemed unlikely there were many breaks in the World Between Heaven and Hell like the one they’d found. That wasn’t his real concern at this point.
“Yo, Flynn?” Jean asked. “Did Rousow give ya any fancy tips on how to find this Poe guy?”
“Poe?” Zaja asked. “Didn’t I hear you say that name before?”
“The man we’ve been sent to find,” Flynn replied. “A candidate for godhood.” He turned to Jean. “And no … I don’t know how to find him. But I’m hoping that wherever we find other people, that’s where he’ll be.”
“Just gonna ask around, huh?” Jean sniggered as she lay back. “No harm, I guess. Sometimes just askin’ random bozos is how you get shit done.”
Flynn somehow expected Zaja to be stuck awake while the rest of them slumbered, but he saw her settling in as the temperature cooled, though the nigh
t’s breezes caressed gently compared to those of Oma.
A few hours into the night, Flynn was startled awake by the sound of something splashing through the watering hole, as though it were swimming ashore. Clambering to his feet, he hoped to spy it in starlight. Whatever it was, it emerged on the far side of the water and galloped off, its hooves resounding on the alien terrain.
*
The sun rose in the wrong direction. It had escaped their notice the day prior, as they hadn’t bothered tracking it in the sky. But where it had merely crossed their path the day before, it very clearly rose against the way they headed now. Shielding her eyes from the light as they marched, Chari gave Flynn a look that suggested wanting her mother’s spectacles back, though she said nothing.
“So you really came here knowing nothing about this Poe guy?” Zaja asked. “As in, you crossed worlds knowing nothing about him?”
“Kinda dumb of us in retrospect,” Mack admitted.
“Airia had little more to give but a name and a place,” Flynn told Zaja. “Besides … I’ve found people before with less to go on.”
“Still, you don’t know what he looks like?”
“Nope,” Jean said.
“How old he is?”
“Nuh-uh,” Mack cut in.
“Skin color?”
“When’d this become a race issue?” Jean asked.
“When I found out there are people who aren’t blue!”
“Whatever he is, he’s likely the same stock as anyone else here,” Flynn stated, putting the matter to rest. No one said anything else regarding this “Poe” they sought; in terms of information, they were collectively unarmed.
Morning waned as they reached a crest in the hills and looked out over the land to come. Though forests ran high for miles all around, the valley below housed a lake of the same composition as the watering hole they’d camped next to, albeit much, much larger. The rooted ground grew beyond the shores and extended across the lake, forming a network of crisscrossing pathways that were tethered to hundreds of massive shells, floating upright in the water. Chari squinted at them, then looked to the others and asked, “Are those houses?”
Outcasts of the Worlds Page 29
