by R. E. Vance
The other me was standing in the dorm room of The Garden. The more I thought about him, the more whole he became. He both existed and I was creating him at the same time. I do not have any other words to describe it other than to say that as long as I could feel him, he was to be. Lose that feeling and, well, he would fade away as if he never was.
The me under the tree knew of his existence, but the OtherMe had no idea where I was or what I was doing.
The OtherMe only knew himself.
As confusing as this sounds, OtherMe was me, and at the same time, wasn’t me at all. He lacked certain parts: my fear, doubt, anger, selfishness—all the parts of me that held me back or stopped me from doing the right thing. The parts of me that somehow made me lesser. It was like someone had taken all that I was and sifted out any blemishes, any stains that prevented me from being all I could be.
“What the …?” I started.
“Jean-Luc,” my mother sang out my name as a warning not to swear. Then she straightened her dress and smiled. “Don’t you understand? That other person … that’s you. You free of doubt, second-guessing or anxiety. He is the You who will do what your heart knows to be right. The OtherYou who will carry your burden so that you don’t have to anymore. You can rest here with me without guilt or fear.”
“For how long?”
“For as long as you like.”
“But …”
“You’ve had so much pain, Jean-Luc … so much suffering. You’re free now. Free and happy.” Her voice was a lullaby, and I started to feel so tired. So very tired.
“Maybe just a little while,” I yawned, “but then I have to go help my friends and—”
I was about to fall asleep when I felt something burst out of my chest with a whoomp that took my breath away.
↔
Tink came charging out of my chest, her fist in front of her—and she punched my mother square in the nose.
“Tink!” I yelled. “What the hell?!” I grabbed at the three-inch-tall golden fairy, but she was too fast.
She whirled out of my reach and mimed, What the hell are you doing? OK—she more mouthed it with a few explicit gestures, but I got her meaning.
“What?” I said, looking down at my mom, who held her nose and stared up at the fairy with a combination of delight and horror. “You hit my mom!”
Tink pointed at the woman standing next to me and made a gesture that said this woman wasn’t my mother.
“Yes, she is!” I insisted. “Sorry, Mom, that fairy over there is—”
“Houlm?” my mom said, her eyes widening. “I thought she was only a story, but … but …”
“Houlm?” I said. “What …? I don’t know what you’re talking about. That’s Tink. She’s my friend.”
But before I could say anything, my mother turned around and climbed up the tree, her legs and arms bending unnaturally, making her look more bug-like than human.
“What the fuck?” I said, and the reality of where I was and what was happening came crashing in.
That woman wasn’t my mom. She was a construct. A dream and nothing more. Colel Cab had manipulated my emotions … again.
My mother—or rather, the nightmare of my mother—crawled over a middle branch and leapt at Tink, her arms outstretched. It was a stupid move—Tink could have easily flown out of the way, but the little fairy didn’t. Instead Tink let her catch her and the two of them came tumbling down to the earth together.
“Yes!” cried out my mom. “Yes, yes, yes! I have the Houlm. Do you know what this means? I no longer need that obnoxious angel. The Houlm is made of dream … she can bind souls with constructs.” My NotMom’s eyes widened as a realization dawned on her. “She can make souls!”
I looked at Tink, whose body was held by NotMom. “Can you do all that?” I asked.
Tink nodded, then gestured that I cover my ears. I had spent enough time with Tink to know when to obey, and I covered my ears so hard I’m surprised I didn’t burst my own eardrum.
Then Tink spoke. Or at least, I think she spoke—her lips moved, and NotMom winced in pain at whatever she said.
In an instant I saw the skies melt and the tree burn, its ashes carried away by a wind I could not feel. The burning tree transformed into a large crystal of rainbow colors roughly the size of Conner’s camper, its shards muted by the dreary, neon-lit room we stood in. A split-second later and the entire field transformed into cold, hard concrete and the distant horizon curved into a circular room, its outer edge made almost entirely of prison cells from a Panopticon-style prison.
And in those cells … were children. Dozens of them, huddled against back walls as they cowered away from the monsters their fear and imagination created. Seven or eight anomalies stood around us, as well as two Occultists, the ijiraq and tiyanak. Evil-and-Cute was nowhere in sight, but I was sure she’d be along as soon as the alarms went off.
Reality had returned, except for one thing: I could still feel the OtherMe. Oh, boy … a world with one me was bad enough, but two of me? We were going to rain Hell on this place.
When Colel Cab cast her Crystal dream on me, I had seen an empty field with a single apple tree in the distance. Now that the illusion was shattered, I saw this place for what it really was: a circular prison with the Crystal in the center. I was in the old prison under The Garden.
I turned to the door through which I’d entered. Through it I saw Miral, Mr. Cain and Mr. Yew standing where they had been, their expressions unchanged. Colel Cab, on the other hand, wore an expression of pain as three of her six eyes bled.
“You are a singularity that should not be!” Colel Cab pointed at Tink. “You little fairy piece of dust! When I am done with you, no dream ever dreamt will ease your pain.”
Behind her sat my hunting sword. I made a step through the door for it, but Miral blocked my way. So that was a no-go.
Colel Cab pointed at Tink. “Get her,” she said.
“Ah, ah, ah, ah …” I said, wagging a finger. “You want her, you’ll have to get through me.” I gestured for Tink to rejoin me in my chest, which she did with a whoomp.
“That,” Colel Cab said, pointing at me, “will not be a problem. Miral—rip her out of him and bring her to me.”
I took a step back. “Sure, you could do that. But first, I’d like to draw something to your attention. You see, all those attacks from your Occultists … I was so convinced that they were after me. First they came to the hotel, then the desert, Metatron’s apartment, the park on the mainland. But that was just my arrogance talking. It was never about me. It was about him.”
I pointed at Penemue who strained his head to see me through the open door. He gave me a the-Devil-knows wink.
“You see, unlike Metatron and the other committee members who helped with Creation, Penemue actually had the secret to permanence. The ability to create something that wouldn’t eventually fizzle away when you stopped believing in it. You could never be a god unless you could actually create things that moved and thought, loved and hated. Lived. As you are, you’re just some hack with toy automatons that you need to terrorize children to make.
“I was arrogant. I was stupid. Well, I’m sick of being stupid.” I pulled out the last contingency I had on me—a toy walkie-talkie with a range no more than a couple miles. I clicked the plastic speak button. “Operation WeedKiller is a go.”
There was a rumble from above.
“You are alone. I felt it,” Colel Cab said.
“No …” I said. “You felt my doubt. You see … Penemue told me about your empathic abilities. You can sense what we’re feeling, but you don’t know what we’re thinking. And since I’m always just a hair’s breadth away from crumbling into the fetal position with doubt, I figured that as long as I focused on that, you wouldn’t be able to sense anything. So I just thought about all the times my friends let me down. All the failed missions. I thought about how I couldn’t save them … Bella and Medusa … and, well, you felt the rest.”
“But your doubt was complete. Total. How?”
“Part of being human,” I sneered, “is that we have an uncanny ability to lie to ourselves very convincingly.”
What I didn’t tell Colel Cab was that the trouble with being human is that we always think it’s about us. That somehow we are the center of the Universe, the hero of our own story, the driving force behind what we do.
I thought that because I had General Shouf, Mr. Cain and Michael all banging down my door for me to serve them, that I was the catalyst for all this. That they wanted to either stop me or hire me to stop what was coming. How stupidly arrogant of me. This wasn’t about me. It never was … and it probably never will be. I was a bit player in the drama unfolding between creatures older than most stars—and petty humans only fight for dominance of the little green and blue planet called Earth.
But did that mean they were after Penemue? Not necessarily. Not until you took into account how the angel Metatron was murdered in his apartment. Penemue described him as Creation’s Project Manager. Penemue had also said that—not including my strung-up friend—there were eighteen other Others who worked on making humans. That was the other thing I asked Astarte to investigate: where the other Others were. Astarte’s network of sex-hungry acolytes revealed that six of the nineteen were dead. Metatron, of course, but also Hajib Al-Eayn, the hobgoblin in charge of hair; Abathar Muzania, the angel responsible for measuring souls; Uzziel, the angel who imbued humans with creativity; Phanuel, the angel who taught humans how to hope; and Go’an, an ifrit who designed the human digestive system. All of them were directly responsible for creating humans.
All of them dead.
All of them would have known that Penemue was the guy who figured out how to bind a soul to a human body.
Not that I told Colel Cab any of that. Right now I was enjoying watching her little plan crumble. And before you could say “Another god wannabe loser bites the dust,” explosions erupted on the island.
“Hellelu—” I started.
“Jean-Luc,” admonished Penemue.
“Oh, yeah … sorry. I forgot. What I meant to say was, Empty Hell!”
End of Part 4
Epilogue to Part 4—
Juliet Matthias rubs her belly, not knowing that today will be the day her son is born. Nor does she know that before her precious little man will turn three days old, she will be dead, ripped from his life forever.
An opaque future is the kindest gift that the gods gave humanity.
She sings to her yet-to-be-born child and dreams of his future. She wants her little Jean-Luc to be ordinary. Unremarkable. Mediocre.
For a person with unusual talents, exceptional intelligence or great beauty is rarely a happy one. But one who is neither great nor small, exceptional nor dull, leads a simple, joyous life. And Juliet only has one wish for her son: that he is happy.
Oh, how her wishes will go unheeded … for although Jean-Luc will grow to not be particularly intelligent or strong or beautiful, his life will be far from simple.
And all because he will possess one quality in far greater abundance than almost all of his fellow human counterparts: empathy.
Part 5
Prologue to Part 5—
Penemue stands on the edge of Creation.
He is waiting for the rest of the committee to come. He has spent many hours in Heaven’s library. By the standard in which God’s newest Creation will measure time, he has been working for three and a half centuries straight, and—finally!—he has figured out the question that the committee asked of him: How do you bind a soul and body together?
Previous attempts have failed unquestionably. The soul, an ethereal being, does not want to be tied down by something as cumbersome and restricting as a physical body. After all, when you are a being free to go anywhere, be in any time and experience whatever you wish … why confine yourself with mortal flesh?
Every soul tied to the body has eventually broken free, killing the body as it does so. And this is unacceptable. After all, God insists this new being, this human, must be of both flesh and spirit.
And Penemue has finally figured out how. Sure, it took almost two hundred million of what God has deemed “minutes”—but Penemue has done it.
He sees Metatron approaching in the distance—a massive creature of immeasurable power, as well as the lead angel on the project.
Before the angel can land on the perch, Penemue says, “I know how to do it.”
Each of Metatron’s faces raises one skeptical eyebrow. “How?”
“Creatures of flesh—creatures like you and I—are bound to each other, forced to interact through our words. But spirits … they are free. Too free.”
“Too free?”
“Yes. That is why we must make them aware that their physical body gives them something that simply being a spirit cannot. The flesh anchors them—limiting them to see and know only other beings of flesh. So we must bind them with the only tether they will be grateful to have.”
“And that is?” Metatron asks, his voice growing with impatience.
“Love,” Penemue says. “It is the only shackle any creature is happy to bear.”
Chapter 1
The Best Laid Plans…
DAY 6—
Two Days Earlier—
After our little camper van pow-wow, we drove home, mostly in silence. There wasn’t anything else to say. We all knew what we needed to do; discussing it more would only lead to more uncertainty. More fear. And the world was already full of that.
It took us six hours to get back. Six. Conner and I took turns driving as Penemue and Sinbad played cards or slept. Eventually we made our way to the bridge, and showing the guards our Paradise Lot badges and the giant angel in the back, they were more than happy to let us through.
Once we were back on the island, I asked Conner to drop me off at the one and only place I could think of where I’d get some answers: Paradise Lot Police Station.
↔
The common area of the precinct was devoid of its usual hustle and bustle. Instead, in a strange tableau I was sure I’d never witness again, all the officers sat or stood like statues, watching a TV that had been wheeled to the room’s center. The volume was on max and we all watched in horror as the humans continued their march to war. On the news, images of Mr. Yew standing behind various podiums, a flag always strategically placed behind him, spewing words like “terrorists,” “fanatics,” “ban,” “registry,” “torture” and “incarcerate.”
Colel Cab also came on repeatedly, her insectile face somehow conveying innocence as she pleaded for calm. News anchors narrated as cameras went into the homes of the accused Others. They were fairly typical Other homes—poor, untidy and without much decoration, the homes of the underprivileged and systemically oppressed—but that’s not what the media focused on.
Just like humans, Others have their different cultures and practices. When reporters pulled out rotting lamb chops from the fridge as an example of the Other Aau’s savagery, they failed to mention that the meal was a jackal-guard delicacy, that the Other wasn’t simply letting the meat rot, but was in the course of a complicated process of fermenting the flesh with various herbs and spices and patiently waiting for the meal to ripen. When they opened up Mable’s birdhouse and pulled out statues made from bird bones, they claimed it was shamanism or some kind of witchcraft, completely glossing over the fact that pixies do not kill the birds to collect their bones, but collect the fallen aviary bones from the wild, then construct them as a homage to the dead bird—a common art form practiced by the fae, in many ways the equivalent to human taxidermy or pottery.
The reporters’ traditional vocabulary (words like “alleged” and “possible involvement”) had been upgraded to “guilty” and “irrefutably guilty,” and the meaning was clear—innocent or not, these Others were going to hang.
The room was sullen and silent, heads downcast in disbelief as they watched their already bleak world turning bleaker. Wat
ching the Others in their silent vigil made me think of patients receiving the diagnosis of cancer—at first, the shock of it silences them. But few take terrible news quietly … soon their silence would turn to pleading, bargaining—and then anger.
And that would be when the flashpoint happened.
Michael stood in the middle of the room, his massive shoulders hunched as he watched. I walked over to him and lifted a hand up to his shoulder, which was just within my own limited reach. “Michael,” I said. “We need to talk.”
The archangel turned around and looked down at me, his eyes conveying an emotion I’d never seen in him before: despair. “Oh, Human Jean-Luc,” he boomed. “Please tell me you have good news.”
I shook my head. “No. I’m afraid not. Is there anywhere private we can speak?”
↔
Michael took me to the far edge of the back parking lot. Evidently he didn’t want to betray anything to the precinct, and they might be watching for facial expressions through the window or listening at the door.
Being outside with the archangel made me nervous. The last time I gave him bad news, he shot me up in the air and threatened to drop me because of my involvement in the situation. Of course, he had been greatly upset at the time—after all, his friend and an Other he greatly respected had been killed in my hotel—but that knowledge didn’t calm my beating heart as I looked down at the ground beneath my feet and imagined myself falling with a Bugs Bunny splat.
“What did you uncover?” he asked. Well, more like bellowed.
“Not much. In fact, almost nothing. Except to say that I am pretty sure the jackal-guard, pixie, caretaker and monster-under-your-bed are innocent. Also, whomever is behind this is using Memnock Securities to single out and kidnap children connected to Others in some way. Some of the kids were friends with them, or neighbors, or being looked after by them.”
