INDEX:
Link here to a general overview of the novel
Prologue, Chpt 1, Chpt 2, Chpt 3, Chpt 4, Chpt 5, Chpt 6, Chpt 7, Chpt 8, Chpt 9, Chpt 10, Chpt 11, Chpt 12, Chpt 13, Chpt 14, Chpt 15, Chpt 16
Chapter Seventeen
Daav
I carefully move Sebastian’s limbs from their drape over my chest to avoid waking him, and creep out of bed, pulling on leggings and a tee shirt and slipping into a soft pair of my dance slippers. Comfort is better for what I plan to do, and the light of the moon from the bedroom window is enough to dress.
We’d fallen into bed only hours ago, the chaos of the explosion letting us return to the suite without notice. Understandably, everyone was distracted when all the lights went out, unsure if it signaled an attack on the Conclave.
I’d known the truth. And my part in it. No attack, or at least not from the outside.
Despite my Angel’s insistence that a Verse trip now comes without the same exhaustion for him, he needs rest. He hadn’t gotten much the night before the celebration either.
The doorknob turns as quietly as I hope and the door is half open when the sound of a throat clearing from behind halts my movement.
“Sneaking out?”
My back remains to him.
“Trying to. Clearly my stealth skills need some work.”
“I take it you’re still not ready to talk?” he asks.
I hadn’t wanted to explain what had happened after our Verse had touched and my desperation to keep him from the blowback had me reacting. Hadn’t wanted to talk about what I’d caused instead, or my conjecture about it.
“Go back to sleep. You need it. I’m only going to the lab to practice.”
“Don’t you think what you did messed up all the energy grid structures connected to it?”
“I kept the surge to the city’s standard electrical systems. Nothing extra special hooked into this building was affected. I’ll be able to practice.”
His whistle is long and low.
“Impressive. That’s some precision to contain it so locally.”
“I didn’t say it was contained.” I turn around, resigned to some level of conversation.
“How widespread then?”
“The city.”
“Fuck, Daav! Lights out for all of Bistral?”
“I preferred it to the other option.” The guilt is a sour churn in my gut, but he’s safe, and that’s all that matters. Still, I’m correct that the threat is real when our Verse touch, and that’s unacceptable.
Sebastian’s sitting up in the bed, resting on pillows he’s propped against the headboard for his comfort during his interrogation of me. His eyes are squinted, examining me even in the low light of the room, fine tuning his bullshit detector. He doesn’t need to. He sees through me without much effort. It’s both frustrating and strangely comforting. And he looks sexy in my bed, sleep rumpled, smooth chest on display in the moonlight with barbells glinting at his nipples, his biceps and forearms well developed, sleek muscles cording them from the work he does with his sculpting tools and hefting materials for his designs even if his frame is thinner than I like.
“I’m worried about you. And I know you’re in your head about how our Verse brushed each other. I saw yours, you know, it’s goddamn gorgeous. So worth it. Don’t be jumping to doom and gloom conclusions about the experience. It could be a good thing. Your lab visit’s to test your power levels after last night?”
I nod.
“I saw your Verse, too.” My throat constricts with the memory, the ugliness of it.
His brow wrinkles with a frown. “Well get over that shit. It’s been that way always, and I’m as fine as I was before you saw it.”
He’s as cavalier as usual about the pain he lives with, and he barrels through my reticence over it.
“You think what we did last night bumped up your power,” he announces.
“Yes.”
He nods. “Good. I think you’re right, so it’s a positive they touched. And I won’t even say I told you so.”
“You just did.”
He grins. “Guess so. An asshole move, huh?”
“Don’t get overly excited. We don’t know what’s going on yet.”
He looks at me without a blink, tilts his head. “Uh, huh. You just keep lying to yourself. I promise to sit here and stew in pessimism. Maybe shed a few tears over the futility of it all. But you take that gorgeous ass of yours down to the lab.” He winks.
“Get more rest, Angel, and don’t hurt yourself on that smart mouth of yours. I’ll return when I’m done.”
“Unless Johan catches you. He has to have figured it out by now.”
“I’ll be stealthy. More stealthy,” I correct.
He grins like a maniac.
I leave for the lab.
I do have to move carefully through the building, workmen in unexpected corners still installing backup generators and stringing unshattered lights through hallways at this limbo of pre-wake early bells. The tension in their movements reminds me of my fatigue. The quiet determination of their work echoes my need to charge forward toward a finish line full of uncertain outcomes, using the fuel of desperation to arrive at either heaven or hell. The purgatory is now, during this race. Only, I’m not certain what I need to do to reach either reward or punishment.
The lab is unguarded, its vulnerability the least of the building staff’s concern when basic functioning is on the line. I pull out a flashlight I’ve packed for this purpose as I enter and shine it over the diagrams of the new energy systems, dormant and untouched by my recent outburst of power. Then over the visual maps of the city landscapes. I never needed these images, they’ve been long seared in my brain with Victor’s relentless insistence I memorize every inch of the capital and country he named my responsibility to save. Bistral’s an old city, proud, but showing the wear I feel all too well.
The reclining chairs sit in their own dark corner, waiting to cushion the mage doing battle with tangle and Verse. Yes, I’m tired, but a manic energy is roiling beneath my skin, and I’m both eager and anxious to embrace it. Maybe that mania’s what Sebastian has said he was feeling. No chair for me these early bells, my assumption of reduced drain from use of tangles a part of the test of my growth I hope I haven’t imagined.
The shattered lights and shorted electrical systems across Bistral argue I haven’t.
Time to check.
So, I stand mid-room, and begin to focus on the contrast of dark and light in the dim objects around this space, the muted colors of the maps, the cool air I breathe into my nostrils and the warmer exhale. I hum, tapping my thigh in a slow beat to accompany my music, and enter the trance of my Verse with a soft golden sheen of my vision. Recent events show it’s willing to pull me in according to its own plan, when in the past I needed to cajole it open. But today it does neither. Instead, it greets me with a calm, friendly welcome once it realizes I’m at the door, and opens wide.
And there it is. Beauty, the definition of it beyond my mind’s capacity for words, although I always try. Tangles of glowing color, song, light swimming between the particles of atomic and chemical reality. Today, I don’t want to fight the complete wholeness the Verse brings me, the peace. Something has changed inside me, and more than the change in magic. The tangles rejoice and I feel their difference, their willingness to follow.
While the systems of solar cells, batteries, turbines, power lines, pipes and steam venting are easier challenges, I choose the magnetic bottle beneath the Conclave. Fusion. This is the test, always has been. My hope focuses me down as my mage vision finds the sluggish molecules of hydrogen resting there.
I sing the crystal tangles forward, and while they wind around the bottle, vibrate close with more attention than they had shown before, in the end they turn away. Not refusal, but their curiosity roused then sated. My disappointment flares, the heavy weight that the task is impossible, a failure of my purpose in life.
No, I can’t fail. What do you want from me? I need to figure this out. What’s the pattern behind the tangles’ new interest? The force driving them alive and reaching between Sebastian and me?
The crystals circle, soothing, cajoling me themselves in a turn around of our usual roles. And then retreat.
They strain away, and like otherworldly gorgeous bloodhounds, they leap. I follow and now it’s a race soaring over the building, over the city blocks as they weave between the power systems.
I’m barely in control, following a lead to this dance and for a moment I’m afraid. Then I join the song and, as we race, urge their attention to the destruction of the power grid from last night. While it’s impossible to wield their power for rebuilding, my vision notices the places less frayed by my surge, with pathways not completely broken. To those I urge the crystals to dance over the potential and atoms constructing them, no encouragement needed as they spark them alive, exploding, reacting, breaking down bonds and pushing and pulling electrons into frenzy. Easier, faster, more potent than ever. The deadened lights of Bistral flick on, as my tangles make possible what should be impossible.
My power has grown and it’s intoxicating watching the results.
We break past the previous limits to my reach, moving beyond the blocks surrounding the Conclave headquarters and deeper into Bistral. Expanding farther, as we’re almost to the waterfront. I laugh, allowing the joy of the light and song and vibrations of all beauty to merge with the cascade of connection from the power, my disappointment forgotten.
I imagine Sebastian flying with me through the ribbons of networks and streets, again like the hawks at his ears, free and unrestrained by his darkness. He deserves it more than I do.
At the horizon, the yellow, orange and red of sunrise offers the city the promise of a new beginning. Unveiling another day when people will wake, will gather the fragments of their courage to embrace their driving need to survive and keep going. Even if there’s no promise of a happy ending, humanity has a way of reaching for hope, if only in small dribbles. While the sun is too far away for my mage vision to see the intricacies of its atomic power, the steady, burning energy of it is clearly set in my mind. So much potential. I want to reach for it and pull it into my hands to lend itself to this fight.
I keep flying, crystals swirling around me with the taste of their gorgeous eagerness.
We’re hovering now, finally at the waterfront with its piers, docks and the buildings created to serve the fishing industry and fragile import business.
Is that Sebastian’s warehouse? Yes. Across the street from it, pulled against the fading sea salt, wind battered planks of the dock, is a fisherman’s trawler, three men loading equipment back and forth into the boat from their aging pickup parked near the pier edge. The boat bobs repetitively on the water of the protected bay where our fishing industry has made its home, its bumpers knocking against the wood of the dock. The waking sun means activity along the pier down the shoreline and I watch people prepare for a long day fighting the sea to make their living.
The solid picture of the real world is made surreal as the atoms, molecules, flow of the structures are superimposed over the objects, like a map laid over the actual topography of the ordinary world. Years of practice allow me to make sense of both layers together.
My vision and the tangles’ path has me watching down from the hawk’s view to my Angel’s makeshift studio. Isolde should be inside. My pulse leaps with the reminder of my sister, and then of Sebastian and his sculpture of me dancing. Longing sparks alive, and instead of closing it down, I allow it to have its way. Is Sebastian still in my bed at the Conclave, has he fallen back asleep with his legs twisted in the sheets, the fabric half off the mattress, making a mess even when he’s unconscious?
As if the Verse tangles read my thoughts of him, they slow their vibrating quest. Questioning. They hover over the warehouse expectantly, at a standstill and waiting. I don’t know how I can tell, but their quality changes. There’s a glimmer of unhappiness to the beauty now, of protest. I sense their question, their confusion, their dimming colors. Almost a sulk?
The sense of a word? Seii? What is it?
Seeiiii I hear. I don’t understand.
What’s changed?
Again, the vibration alters, becomes faster, the crystals shifting back and forth with nowhere for their energy to go. I sing back to them, my own attempt to soothe them to calm even though I have no more plans to infuse them into the energy systems below. The lights are already back on beneath us.
But their colors begin to blur, smudge in the franticness. No, this isn’t right. What are they doing?
They need a location, a destination for their power, and I whisper to them to move out to the ocean, infuse into seawater molecules and separate the salt from the water, desalination a useful process if I harness it for the city. But this isn’t about the useful, just a way to stop whatever’s happening with the magic and target it elsewhere.
My control slips and the tangles continue vibrating, slipping out of my grasp, refusing to listen. They won’t move away from our location over the warehouse. They need a place to go as they seem insistent on a connection. Their force demands a home.
The beauty is there, intense, overwhelming, but too fast, a dance with no choreography but more the flopping, rhythmless agony of mass hysteria, like some pentecostal sect’s religious ecstasy.
And I’m moving nearer the crystals, pushing, whispering to them with urgency. With a sense of dread as they fracture into a more erratic state. They drop lower, toward the warehouse.
No, not there!
I’m not sure what’s happening, but fear is leaping through my body, up from my gut to my throat, pounding the blood at my neck into a speeding pulse.
Isolde!
Move, move, move! Not there! Fear and the threat of something to be lost that’s only just found.
I push and scream and sing at the top of my incorporeal lungs.
And the gorgeous tangles screech back. Protest.
They drop lower, too quick for me to do more.
Pain and my Verse body sweats and fights the path of the magic. Nothing makes sense as the crystals blur and fight and melt. Splintering lightning shoots through my simulacrum of torso, limbs and head. Tearing me apart.
No!
Please move, sweet crystals, please. Just a little, just there. I wrench harder, knowing they won’t respond to demand, but twist this, I’m desperate.
It hurts, and my attention is all focused on the tangles, the smears of color shaking in their downward path. Push, cajole, my unreal body a throbbing mess. I dig fingers into it, but it batters back at me, more bruising punches across my body. Please. I’m begging, reduced to ragged breath and anguish. Every piece of me is about getting them to move away from the building.
And within their song there’s a screeching sound of protest, a long drawn out string of letters almost a word, smearing like their colors.
Aaaaaannnnnngggggeeeellllllllll. Aaaaaannnnnngggggeeeellllllllll. Aaaaaannnnnngggggeeeellllllllll.
Then, finally, they do move, just a little. Still dropping, but now they’ve inched toward the street next to the warehouse. A little more and now they’re at the pier, moving toward the sea where I want them. Blur and motion like a funnel storm. Still I hear their screeching sound.
Aaaaaannnnnngggggeeeellllllllll.
Shit! They’re hovering over the boat, the fishermen blithely loading gear, laughing at one another in their conversation.
No, no, no!
That’s not where I meant them to move, but it’s too late.
They drop the last bit, sinking into the bowels of the trawler. Into the depths of its gas tank.
To find a home in the molecules of the ethanol.
Time slows.
Then–
Explosion.
Flame and the dock erupts in noise and heat and smoke, engulfing the men and boat.
Noooooo!!!
Blindness.
In the lab, my real body jerks out of the Verse. Tumbled confusion, and I’m sliding across the floor, scraping burn, into the recliners which slam my body to a halt.
Thwack!!! Bone jarring bruise with the hit.
My skin is like fire, stinging and throbbing with pain. The lights of the lab are all on from the result of my journey through the city in my Verse. I blink, squint back the too intense glare of light to try to focus, suck in deep breaths as I gasp from the contact. Air in, air out.
Ticking silence outside of the rasping of my struggling lungs, my foggy mind.
The memories flood in, the dock in flames, bodies burning in the remnants of the exploded trawler.
I’ve killed them!
Isolde is safe? The warehouse, too? Yes, but… Guilt, and damn what I’ve done.
The guilt is acid. I am the waste my father named me.
And for the first time I hate my Verse, a tar filled cauldron of hate. Would banish all its beauty from my life, no question.
Whatever this new power is, this growth of the magic is dangerous. And now I’m more certain than ever my birthday means a swell of my strength, just as everyone hopes.
If it’s this out of control, out of my control, what’s to happen at my quarter century? And what if I’m not the savior after all?
But the doom of everything?
Intriguing. The hidden variables are always the most compex.