Rejoining his cloaked companion, Aaron readied to take Airia away. Her eyes met Flynn’s between the steel bars, pleading, but Flynn was at his mortal limits. Desperation turned to decisiveness, and Flynn felt suddenly that there was something left she could do … and it was something she very much did not wish to. It must have taken all the strength she’d been holding in to throw the cloaked man, who tumbled to the side of the room, before bucking off Arronel. Running to the soldiers that had closed in on the seven, she disarmed one effortlessly, and then used his blade to run the others through.
Pained to see his beloved followers suffer so, Taryl cried in anguish. “Why do you perpetuate such cruelties?”
Moving to Flynn’s side of the cage, Airia stuck her arm through. “Take my hand, now,” she ordered, “All of you!”
Struggling to rise again, Taryl Renivar sent a rain of spears down upon Airia, who deflected every one handily. A mass of flesh had coalesced in the tightness of the cage, each finding some part of Airia Rousow to hold fast to.
“Taryl,” she spoke slowly and deliberately. “I want you to see this. My immortality aside, this is the last light of grace I possess from when I was a god. More of a god then than you could ever be now.” Turning back to the others, she whispered quickly, “The keeper of Eternity’s Essence, the Mystik of Growth: Einré Maraius. Find her.”
Among his friends and himself, all grasping for some piece of Airia’s arm, Flynn saw a seventh hand take hold, one he almost overlooked. The blue markings on it trembled with dull light. There was no time to ask who this Einré Maraius was or where she might be found. Everything turned to light so suddenly, that the only thing Flynn heard for certain was an impotent scream. The Living God had been denied.
Epilogue: Cycles of Pain
Sea foam ebbed and flowed over Flynn as he lay on the soft sands of an unknown shore. The first thing he saw was the red sky, and in that sky was a body so massive that he soon realized they had been spirited away to a tiny moon, in orbit of a world that loomed large above them. While the others were recovering from their abrupt relocation, Flynn paid little mind to his surroundings, even as a pair of feet came shuffling toward him. The world above had captured his mind.
This is what we’re facing … and we’re tiny before it.
Mack peered down at him, blocking the sunlight. “You okay there, Flynn-o?”
“We were wrong to leave Earth,” Flynn realized aloud. At Mack’s quizzical look, Flynn sat up. “Not circumstantially, just … ethically. We tried to escape a broken system and find a world that worked in our favor.”
“Tough noogies there, yeah?” Mack replied with cheer. “I’m not in a hurry to go running back and try to pick up a bunch of broken pieces. I mean, maybe one day … but we’re here now. Even after all this, we keep goin’, right?”
Flynn nodded. “We don’t stop. We keep going.”
Then he shuffled off, gripping his side. He was short of breath, his ribs bruised from being flung. Zaja was sitting on a rock, half-stripped and squeezing ocean water from her clothes. She blushed and looked away when she saw him coming, but she couldn’t chance freezing either. There was already a cool wind in the air.
“You came with,” he said. “I wasn’t sure for a while if you would.”
“I almost didn’t. Not because I dislike any of you. I do. Like you, I mean.” Zaja bowed her head, ashamed. “I nearly accepted a terrible trade. I could have had a little prosperity … but the price was too high.”
“What we’re offering is something worse,” Flynn told her. “You’ve seen firsthand the stakes and the danger involved. Out of all of us, you’re already facing a much shorter lifespan. You may not even live to see a natural death in our company.”
“It’s okay,” Zaja smiled warmly back at him. “As long as it’s a job worth doing.”
She reached out and hugged Flynn, relieved to have survived their harrowing encounter. Her body was cold, her skin clammy, and so Flynn hugged her back, helping her warm a little.
*
A short distance inland, Poe had gathered driftwood and made a fire. He stoked it with the blade of the Searing Truth, whose end had turned slightly red from resting in the flame.
“Eternity’s Essence,” the Guardian mentioned. “That is what I need to fulfill my intended purpose? To become a god as this Airia wishes?”
“I believe so,” Flynn replied. “Though I have no clue who Einré Maraius is, or where to start looking for her.”
“We’ll determine that in time,” Poe softly concluded. “In these last weeks, I’ve discovered that a higher being enslaved my family line for generations on a lie. Her mistress denied me my revenge and betrayed us to our enemy. That enemy had me stripped and bathed in caustic light for days without end.”
He spoke with quiet contempt but said nothing of what he might do next, let alone when he gained the power he’d been tapped to inherit. But Flynn had little doubt about the revenge he was at least considering, and feared what damage could be wrought by a murderer god.
Excusing himself, Flynn found Chariska nearby, picking among bits of wreckage for scraps of metal, depositing them in a worn satchel she had found.
“He was not the man I expected him to be,” she said, not looking up at first from her task. Realizing she needed to be clearer, she added, “Saint Renivar.”
“I suspect sainthood is something he made his peace with long ago,” Flynn said. “Still, he has lifetimes upon lifetimes on us.”
“That doesn’t make him infallible. Nor is he inhuman. The anguish he conveyed at the worshipers he lost …” Chari’s face was pained, sympathetic. “Still, a man of such renowned faith … who would he have to pray to in times of crisis?”
“No one but himself,” Flynn agreed.
“How lonely that must be.”
Resuming his wandering, Flynn found Zella washing her face in a small pool of water. She had shed some of her coverings for comfort, exposing the line of inscriptions running down her arms, her legs. So long as Flynn didn’t look directly at them or dwell upon them for long, they didn’t cause any pain.
“It works out for us that you came with,” Flynn told her plainly. “We have time now that we wouldn’t have had before.”
“I know,” she replied, “and I considered that, from the moment I left my cage until I touched Rousow’s hand. I will not be coerced … but I need perspective. My decision will impact the future of everything. I can’t make that sort of choice from inside a cage.”
Flynn nodded, understanding. Zella was not the same girl he had met before, when Arronel was passing as Aaron Limbs. She was not the one who had clawed at Flynn in desperation and begged not to be taken back. She had become somehow serene in the face of all this.
“I am sorry about how we parted back on Earth,” he told her.
“I’m not sure if you are,” Zella said. “Looking at you now, I know what happened, even if I can’t fathom why: you got caught. Before the weight of your sins and the lives of those you harmed, you were sorriest first that you got caught.”
There was no argument with the weight to refute her words. Flynn knew his capacity for empathy had greatly improved, but it still had a long way to go.
“I’ve had to make peace with a great deal in order to provide my father a pure sacrifice,” she said. “So understand that when I forgive you, it’s because I have little malice left in my heart. It’s why I accepted seeing you when we first met again. But I have no love for you.”
“I hope, in time, I can earn back your trust,” he told her, and it was true. It was true for Flynn, the redeemer. It was true too for Flynn the confidence man. It was the only absolute he could provide.
Zella nodded, accepting. “We will see.”
*
Jean was found at another shore, having gone to spend some time alone. She had shed her jacket, and was sitting on a large log that faced the ebbing tides. Flynn sat next to her. Chari had mended her wounds, but Jean still held her
arm carefully, and a faint scar remained from the spear that had been run through it. Her engorged forearms, capable of such power, now rested helplessly in her lap.
“Chari figures I should avoid makin’ anything shake for a while,” she said, holding up her right arm. “Without knowin’ how I’m gonna heal, I could just pop the whole thing like a fuckin’ zit.”
“Well, you’ve still got a spare,” Flynn replied with a smile, glancing at her left arm. Jean flexed her left fist in response, grinning with surplus confidence. It was time to own up. Flynn breathed deep, feeling the pressure still on his ribs. There’d been no point in troubling Chari with something small.
“You remember back in Civilis, the day we met?” he asked. “What did you think of me, the first time you saw me?”
“Ah, jeez,” Jean was trying to think. “Somethin’ like … ‘boy, this guy sure looks like a pussy.’”
Flynn blinked. He wasn’t sure if that was supposed to be a pun, and it wasn’t really where he was trying to steer the conversation. “But when you opened the door—I wasn’t what you were expecting to see. Was I?”
“I’ve seen my share of halfs that look like freaks,” she said. “Little ways, here and there.” Shaking her head, she looked Flynn right in the eyes. “But no, nothin’ like you.”
This was it. The moment of truth. “That’s because I’m not.”
Jean was silent.
“Over a week prior, I was closing a job. I’d located a target named Kett and was bringing him to the facility in the mountains near Crescent. I—” Flynn felt almost embarrassed to remember. “I told him I found a lover of his, someone he’d lost track of in a raid. For a small fee, I said I’d help the two of them meet.”
Still no response. Flynn went on.
“After handing him over to a specialist named Anthem, something in the facility caught my attention. I went to check it out and … the blue light, the blood … the rest was a blur. I lost myself in the moment.”
Jean stood up, but she didn’t face him. He knew what was coming.
“Before, I was plain to look upon, another face in the street. I woke up alone in Civilis. I woke up as this.”
Her backhand came abruptly, and Flynn was sent sprawling into the sand. He instinctively tried raise his hands to stop her, and she swatted them away, climbing on top and drawing her fist back.
“Fucker!”
She punched him. His cheek stung.
“I fuckin’ trusted you!”
Again. His teeth jostled in his mouth.
“You were supposed to be one of us!”
Red spatters as Flynn’s nose crushed.
The angry cries, the vindictive strikes went on. The first thread of trust between them—the belief that their experiences and suffering was shared—was irreparably broken. But had enough formed between them that, despite this, Flynn and Jean would endure? When the violence ceased, she remained atop him, breathing hard, exhausted from her outburst. His blood had spattered on her face, reddened her fists.
“I’ll get Chari.” Jean gruffly shuffled off into the foliage.
In healing Flynn, Chari too would suffer. And it was the way of things, as he had learned long ago. Pain and hatred is cyclical, and passes far beyond the aggressor and the victim.
Closing his eyes, Flynn ignored the pain and found peace in a moment’s rest. There was still a long way to go, but even here, beaten, Flynn could sense the ways between worlds. There was still so much to do.
Flynn laughed hoarsely to himself. “At least I have my friends.”
Outcasts of the Worlds Page 44
