“Think about it, Danielle.” Another name teased Miranda’s lips. Not that she would dare to call Danielle by her old, dead name. “Why do you think our paths always cross? Why do we torture ourselves, even when it’s evident that we cannot yet be?”
“I’m not sure if you mean romantically or otherwise.”
“In any capacity.”
Danielle turned her head back toward St. Lucia. The jovial visage of a stone statue held more mirth than Danielle was capable of in her heart. “It wouldn’t be appropriate. Best to not even acknowledge it as long as we’re working together.”
“Yes. That’s the issue, isn’t it?” Miranda couldn’t contain a laugh of disbelief. “The fact we work together. You know… I once heard an excuse like that. A long, long time ago.”
They shared one last look that almost ended Danielle while lifting Miranda’s spirits. In that precarious second, another golden butterfly dashed past Miranda’s head and landed on St. Lucia’s. It was gone as soon as Danielle glanced back at the statue.
“By the way,” Miranda said with a hint of trepidation. “Heidi died.”
Something clutched the heart still beating in Danielle’s chest. “Who?” Her throat was dry.
“She was the woman with me a while ago. The one who recognized you. Used to be your ex-girlfriend’s tutor, I guess.” No, Miranda knew. She knew exactly who Heidi was to Danielle, even if that young woman had meant more to her old lover than to someone who only tangentially knew her. Still, Danielle had a right to know that one of ten million casualties was someone they both knew.
Danielle remembered that, at least.
“How?” she asked.
“Official cause of death was heart failure. Of course, nobody could explain how an otherwise healthy twenty-five-year-old dropped dead in her art studio, but these past few days have been rather chaotic. Hers wasn’t the only funeral I attended.” The only one that hit her hard, however. Miranda hadn’t needed to go to the other funerals of people she barely knew, but she owed it to them. She had played a part in those poor souls winking out of existence, never to feel the touch of the Void again. Their fates were only slightly better than hers. At least they couldn’t experience nothingness.
Still… Heidi had been her friend. Her casual girlfriend. A woman with endless potential in this life and her next one. Maybe her fate didn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. But like anyone else, she deserved to go Home.
What if one of thousands of souls dying against her skin in that endless wave of destruction had been Heidi’s, come to her in fear and hope?
Miranda held her hand out between her and Danielle. “Humor me,” she said.
Danielle scoffed. “Are you kidding? Someone might see us.”
“I hope they do.”
“Do you want me to get discharged?”
“It’s my ass on the line too, you know.”
“I’ve got more to lose than you.”
Miranda’s mouth twitched. “I don’t think you do.” Her fingers once more beckoned to Danielle. “Are you afraid?”
“Of what? Being discharged? I need the money, okay?”
“No. Afraid of what you might feel.”
Danielle almost choked on her spit. With that kind of dare, however, she almost had no choice but to slap her fingers against Miranda’s and inhale a deep breath.
The effect was instantaneous.
“I will always love you,” a familiar voice said in the distance. “Even if I’m the last soul in the universe, I will fill it with my love until every star, every planet is a dedication to what we will always have.”
Danielle snatched her hand away. Yet her determination to end the connection between them was futile, for somewhere within those thoughts swimming in their collective consciousness, her lips had ended up on Miranda’s.
Her eyes widened. The kiss ended as soon as the voice faded from her mind.
Miranda sat back with a content countenance. “If you need anything at all,” she said, picking up her purse and raising to her feet, “I will come running.”
“Why?” Danielle shielded her warm lips with her fingertips.
“It’s the least I could do for the woman who wouldn’t let me die alone.”
“You remember…”
“I remember everything.” Miranda hesitated before crossing the courtyard. “I always remember, because I have the most to lose. And everything to gain.”
A host of Shadows stood on the street when Miranda passed. They glanced at Danielle, disinterested in her soul of endless potential. Why would they want to feast on hers when they could follow Miranda’s? Why shouldn’t Danielle want to follow her, too?
“Wait!”
Miranda stopped. The Shadows turned toward Danielle, their vacuous faces daring her to transgress holy ground. Around them, the neighborhood lost focus. Buildings melted. People disappeared. Birds ceased their twilight tweeting, and the sun itself evaporated into the impending darkness.
Or maybe that was Danielle’s tunnel vision making her see the object of her affection and nothing else. When she indulged the other half of her instincts – the ones not consumed by the undying need to survive – she discovered the part of her that was always sucked into Miranda’s inescapable gravity.
She used to think it was mere attraction. A forbidden love made hotter by the rules of their careers. But what if it was something else? What if it even transcended the meager existence of one planet in that isolated corner of the cosmos?
What if Danielle was denying herself something that would only enhance her unfortunate existence… not hinder it?
“Yes?” Miranda’s tone was neither curious nor exasperated. It simply… was. As if its existence was meant to serve the bending universe around it.
Tunnel vision. Yes, that’s what it was. The world was not tearing itself apart as these two souls finally acknowledged the wedge constantly driven between them over the span of a thousand years.
Do it, Danielle’s conscience whispered to her heart. Did that conscience happen to bear the name Sulim? Because that was the quieted echo of Danielle’s soul screaming to finally come out and claim its right to live once more. Jump into the rabbit hole and see where it takes you.
“You’ll really come running?” Danielle’s tongue fumbled in her mouth. What were words, and how did she use them when everything she needed to say radiated from her soul?
“Yes.” Miranda’s tired smile betrayed the disappointment inside of her. “Whatever you need. Whenever.”
“What if I need help right now?”
Miranda shifted her stance entirely in Danielle’s direction. The sidewalk beneath their feet fell away with every cautious step she took, once more bridging the gap between them. “What kind of help?”
“Don’t know.” Danielle swallowed. Do it, do it, do it. “Why don’t you come running and find out?”
Miranda’s purse fell to the depths of the earth. Her feet barreled her whole body forward; Danielle awaited her with a racing heart.
And the twisted, dreaded sense of hope.
The legion of Shadows stepped back as Miranda broke the fragile barrier surrounding Danielle’s body. She was a bullet penetrating flesh. A rocket spiraling through the atmosphere.
An old friend happy to be of service.
Danielle leaped into her arms before they collided. The force of their kiss was enough to dismantle the precarious world slowly piecing itself back together. It certainly was enough to erase the past thirty years of Danielle’s life.
This time, I’ll remember. She didn’t know what she was remembering. She had no way of knowing. Not until her brain released the chains trapping her soul in the eternal hell in which it suffered, a willing member of the Process that never had the right to jump into something it didn’t have a hope of understanding.
All it understood was the simple, human emotions flooding its intangible form.
Love, you fucking idiot.
Miranda’s hand squeezed
the back of Danielle’s neck, fingers emerging in hair and holding her so close that it was impossible to escape the thrill of their first real kiss in a thousand years.
There was the spiritual relief Danielle experienced when she kissed Devon… then there was this. It wasn’t born of circumstance or threatened to pull her away from her nature. It was somehow purer than indulging in the merry-go-round that was life with another soul in the Process. Was this what the universe felt like when it was born from the Void, in that great, expansive bang that echoed across the galaxy?
Of course it wasn’t. That would imply these two souls were more important, more powerful than the Void itself. In truth, they were hardly comparable. Danielle and Miranda were specks in the annals of history. Footnotes that future scholars would acknowledge as Great, tremendous, very important, but know nothing else about. They were players in a grand scheme, yet the only motive they shared was recreating this moment until the end of time.
People are selfish like that. Selfish enough to think their love is the only thing that matters, the lives of millions be damned.
It was that ugly truth that almost knocked Danielle out of her lustful reverie. When the bright light of a hundred Shadows collapsing into piles of dust subsided, she built the brick wall around her heart again, before she had the chance to recall the disgusting reason she had built it in the beginning.
To love Miranda and the soul inhabiting her body was pain. Pleasure, but the damning pits of pain clawing up their legs, dragging them into the depths of regret and tearful goodbyes, always overcame how good it might feel to simply be two souls in love.
Danielle shoved Miranda away from her, meeting the disappointment of another soul searching for the meaning of its existence.
“Sorry!” Danielle held her fingers to her lips, aching to wipe away the bliss lingering upon them. “Sorry, sorry…”
She didn’t realize she spoke in a language long dead. But Miranda did.
“It’s okay,” she said in their current tongue. “I understand.” Her nails brushed away the tears pouring down her cheeks. How fitting of her to cry in the face of what she so desperately wanted. “I’m scared, too. It’s hard to face what we did.”
Danielle took a large step back, lest she jump back into the terrifying light of Miranda’s siren song. “What did we do?”
Miranda turned away before she shared the sob threatening to jump up her throat. “If I told you, it would break you.”
Danielle understood. Whatever they had done a thousand years ago had been terrible enough to cause her to seal herself off from regression. Sulim was trapped in an impenetrable tower. Danielle was the dragon coiling itself around stone and mortar.
Did that make Miranda the stalwart knight standing on the edge, waiting for her chance to attack?
“If you told me…” Danielle whispered, “would that send me into a forced regression?”
“Yes. It would kill you and trap you in the Process forever. That’s why I can’t tell you. You have to remember on your own.”
No wonder Danielle was so terrified of regressing. “Does the truth haunt you?”
“Every day.”
“Yet you still want to be with me?”
Miranda laughed into her cupped hands. “Why do you think I’m here?”
Danielle shook her head, another step bringing her farther away from Miranda.
“We only have one shot left,” Miranda continued. “This is it, my love.” She turned, taking Danielle’s hand. The Third Piece illuminated her ring finger, and in that moment, Danielle did not judge what it might look like to the woman she stole it from. “If we fail to make things right with the universe, it will destroy us. We will be victims of the end of the world.”
Danielle’s mouth dropped open.
“So you see why I’m so invested. But unless you’re willing to open yourself to that pain, I can’t… forget it.” Miranda snatched her purse off the sidewalk. The world was back to normal. Buildings stood. The sun turned into a prism of colors as it continued its descent behind the horizon. Trees swayed in the breeze. People looked askance on their way by. “You know where to find me.”
She ran. Miranda was faster than a bird flying away as she tore down the sidewalk and away from Danielle.
Yet she had said she would always come running if Danielle cried for help. Did that mean she now answered that call, even if she resigned herself to taking the long way around the world, back to where Danielle now stood?
Was that how long it would take for Danielle to gather the courage to repent for her sins?
Because Sulim had followed Cairn to the ends of the universe already. Sometimes it was worth being the one chased. To be the one reminded and reassured that they were still loved.
Endless pursuits sometimes lead to the greatest discoveries, after all.
--- SOME TIME LATER ---
On a world where the sky was prone to purpling in the middle of summer, where trees grew fruit expanding to enormous sizes before plummeting to the ground in an explosion of pulp and seeds, where grass grew no longer than three inches, where cities were built around planetariums instead of churches, and where the seas continuously rolled across shores in a mist of illusion and spray, Marlow sat at a chazah board beneath a tree ripening with fat fruit.
There was a party in the park at the same time, some young man’s birthday centering him and his friends playing the chess-like game in excited pairs across the field. Under the violet sky, they slammed their hands on timers and belittled each other every time a piece was taken captive. Chazah was the national sport, and they were the championship team.
Charlie scratched his ear as Marlow tapped a piece against the board before him and contemplated the other side, unmanned and unmoved. Twice already one of the party goers had asked if they could join and challenge Marlow to a quick game, and twice he had to tell them he awaited someone. He kept his brimmed hat low across his face so none of the other young men could recognize him, an infamous julah.
He was, after all, on Nimrokah, the neighbor of the julah home planet Yahzen. It would not take much for one of these science students to recognize Marlow, the julah who once was salutatorian of his Academy class and spent the last thousand years of his career in pursuit of the valedictorian who made it his business to destroy planets. With Nerilis Dunsman’s recent recantation, Marlow had grown even more famous, much to his current chagrin.
The dog growled. Marlow shushed him and looked up to find his visitor had arrived.
Nerilis wore a heavy hooded sweatshirt, a remnant from his time on Earth, with the drawstring pulled up to his chin and a pair of sunglasses slammed against his face. He looked like an awkward Earthling tourist – which, Marlow thought, was probably what the other old man attempted. Still, Marlow could not deny recognizing Nerilis’s thin lips and sunken cheeks that had remained on his face since adolescence, when they first met thousands of years before.
“Ramaron,” Nerilis greeted curtly, as he sat at the chazah table and surveyed the pieces.
“Nerilis.”
They began a quiet game, lest any of the boys around them grew suspicious. Charlie finally stopped growling and plopped down at Marlow’s chair. The only sound for the next few minutes was of wooden pieces tapping on stone.
“What will you do now?” Marlow asked. “Assuming your reign of terror is really over.”
“I’m retiring from that, yes,” Nerilis said through clenched teeth. “But that doesn’t stop the threat in the Void. I need to find a way to keep it functioning. Mass sacrifice doesn’t work. It’s not sustainable. And it’s not…”
“Something that makes you feel good?”
Nerilis ignored that. “I’ve been thinking about the parallel universe conundrum. I wonder if it’s possible to find an alternate world where the Void is not endangered. If we could fuse them together…”
“We?” Marlow asked with a chortle. “Besides, I believe what you’re referring to is called crossing.” It
was buried deep in the studies of the Old Ways. The sort of thing Ramaron Marlow and Nerilis Dunsman once looked up at the end of their terms and begged their instructors to let them practice at the Academy. Always forbidden, of course. Crossing parallel dimensions was heavier stuff than creating pocket dimensions, which any high-level julah could do with enough study. To cross meant to take the whole universe down with them, not hide away from it.
“I alone don’t have enough power to cross universes,” Nerilis said. “That would require a vast amount of hubris to think. I would need your help.”
“Tell you what, Nerilis. You find a universe worth crossing with, and we’ll talk.”
They returned to their game.
“The bounty for you has increased to over five trillion Federation dollars,” Marlow said as he took one of his opponent’s pieces. “That’s officially the largest ever in the history of the Federation, even when adjusted for inflation.”
Nerilis studied the board before answering. “Anyone who caught me wouldn’t know what to do with that much money. I doubt even I could use that much money.”
“Yet you managed to spend millions on Earth.”
“Earth money isn’t worth much. And how do you know that?”
Marlow chuckled. “My assistant hacked into your employees’ off-shore accounts. You paid them both quite handsomely.”
“For a woman of Tograten’s standard to work for you and keep quiet, you must pay her.”
“And the other woman?”
Nerilis’s smile faded. “It’s important to me that she be taken care of.”
“I see. You know, I find it quite curious that she is biologically half julah. Would you know anything about that?”
Nerilis tapped his fingers together, both in contemplation of the game and what Marlow had asked. Finally, he admitted, “She is my daughter.”
Marlow licked his parched bottom lip. “I figured as much at the time. But why would you breed with an Earthling, and how in the world did your daughter manage to be the reincarnation of Joiya’s form?”
With the game now on hold, Nerilis sank into his seat. “It’s complicated. I’m sure you’d love to hear the stories, but I really don’t have a desire to share them. But you’ve seen her for yourself. Actually, she’s the reason why I asked you here today.”
Rebirth (Cross Book 1) Page 57
