***
Brynna and Elijah were talking quietly. I watched him put his face in his hand, knowing that he was fighting the same assault of tears that Maura and I had succumbed to earlier. She and I stood side by side, hand in hand, watching Brynna speaking to him with her hand rested on his knee. That was how she was comforting him. There was not even a hint of softness in her eyes, and I knew that from her lips, she was spewing nothing but lies and excuses.
“They would have left us behind.” “They never cared about us.” “I did it to save our lives.”
It was all bullshit, in plain terms.
“I need you two to understand something.” James said suddenly. As though under mind control, Maura and I turned our heads simultaneously in his direction. “It won’t change a thing, I know. But I cannot, if I am remaining honest, let her take all of the responsibility for her decision.”
“There’s nothing you can say,” I felt tears, angry ones this time, welling in my eyes, “Even if you all said that they couldn’t come, she should have stayed with them. Either that, or she should have done everything in her power to convince you and your friends to let them come. She’s their daughter.”
“Look, I know that you love your parents, Violet. But they were responsible for this. Your mother, throughout her time in office, stepped on every toe she could. Your father covered up the things she did. They were responsible for what was coming if, in fact, it was nuclear.”
“But you don’t know for sure that it was!” I snapped at him, furious that he would insinuate, though he did so with a veil over it, that my parents were solely responsible for the destruction of the earth.
“If it was a solar storm or something, then they weren’t responsible. That doesn’t mean that she had to abandon them! That doesn’t mean that she had to trick us into coming with her! We’re just as guilty now, don’t you understand?!” The tears began to fall again, “We’re just as guilty because we didn’t force the truth out of her!”
“We never would have gotten it out of her. You know that, Violet.” Maura told me quietly as she shook her head. “Our hands are clean in this.”
“They’re not!” My body was trembling now with a rage I knew was spiraling out of control. “We should have made her tell us the truth. Now, we left them behind, and they died alone. Mom was in the house by herself! Dad was in his office! They died alone when it hit!”
“How do you know that?” Maura asked as she grasped both of my hands tightly in her own. “Sweetheart, I’m sure they were together. Brynna said that they knew this would happen, so I’m sure that he was there with her. Don’t torture yourself, Violet. Don’t picture how it happened. Please, if not for your sake, then for mine.”
“But I know it! I know!”
Maura looked at James for help, but he was rendered silent by my determination to believe. But he also knew, from his own ability to just know, that I was probably right. When Maura continued to stare at him, begging for him to reassure me that my belief on the subject was just a grim fantasy, he shrugged slightly.
“I can’t say that she didn’t see it. When did you see that, Violet?”
“While I was asleep!” I cried before putting my face in my hands to hide from their concerned gazes for just a minute. “I woke up crying for them. But you wouldn’t know that, would you, James? You and Brynna were off exploring like this is some vacation! Like the world didn’t just blow apart! Like everyone you ever knew didn’t just burn away! What is wrong with you two?! How can you not care about this?!”
“Whoa, whoa…” James held up his hands in defense. “I know what just happened, Violet. I know better than anyone. I saw this long before anyone else knew a thing. What I’m trying to tell you is that Brynna’s decision was not completely hers. The original group of people who had that dream, people from all over the world, mind you, voted. We decided that your parents and all the people involved with them couldn’t come with us, because they were in the group that was going to leave us behind. Now, I will say that Brynna agreed. She wanted to leave them, too, but only for that reason. I can promise you, that it was only that.”
“You voted…” I repeated in a fierce, incredulous whisper. Before I could stop myself, I had lunged forward and slapped him hard across the face. Thank God there weren’t many people around to witness that embarrassingly overcharged outburst.
“Violet Mae!” Maura and Brynna exclaimed in shock and outrage, respectively.
“You voted on whether to let them live or die!” I screamed as I lunged forward to hit him again. “My parents!?”
Maura had pulled me away from him, but I was still charging forward, infuriated beyond any degree of anger I had ever felt. Who did he and his psychic friends think they were? How could they have determined the salvation or death of people they had never met? Who was he to decide whether my parents were worthy of being saved?
I must specify that I knew both of my parents were not good. I knew that they possessed some quiet evil in their hearts that they were scarcely aware of. But that didn’t mean that they deserved to die. In fact, on Pangaea, they might have been redeemed. Who was James Maxwell to decide that they didn’t even deserve that chance?
“That is enough!” Brynna was standing in front of me, shaking with a strong anger of her own. “We are not barbarians, at least not yet! I would appreciate it if you would refrain from acting like one!”
Though that was a typical Brynna line, the way her eyes flashed over from their usual icy blue to a fiery red was certainly not typical in any sense.
“Brynna…” Maura whispered, and her grip on me went lax. “What happened to you?”
After her arms released me, I fell onto my knees and stared up at Brynna in horror. Brynna looked at James for help in deciphering exactly what we were talking about, and he indicated his eyes. She nodded slightly and blinked to allow her own to dissolve back into their normal blue.
“Look in the mirror. And control yourself before you kill us all!” Brynna spat at me as she pulled a cigarette from the pack with a shaking hand.
I stood up and hurried to the mirror that was hanging over a desk in the corner of the room. I firmly believe that my heart stopped beating as I took in the sight of my own reddened eyes. How long had they been like that? What did it mean? I ran back to Maura and threw my arms around her neck, my whole body shaking with a new terror. It was the utter horror of finding myself unrecognizable. I was seeing clearly that something existed in me that was not entirely human.
“We don’t know why that’s happening to people.” James explained quietly. “Besides being able to see things and to just know things, people have been mutating.”
“Into what?” Maura asked as she ran her own trembling hand down the back of my hair and gripped me so tightly that I could barely breathe.
“We don’t know,” James continued calmly, “We have no idea.”
“I don’t want this. I never wanted any of this. Why didn’t you just leave me?” I cried before glaring at Brynna again.
“It is too late now. So I suppose it is time you start making peace with the fact that you’re here. But for the record, I would have dragged you kicking and screaming.”
“Why?! You don’t care about me! You don’t care about Maura or Elijah or Penny! You only care about yourself!” I pointed my finger at her on the last part.
Behind her, a vase of flowers shattered, causing us all to jump and Maura to exclaim in horror. I looked at her, terrified, to see that she was grasping her heart, her eyes wide as she breathed heavily.
I looked at James and Brynna, my anger dissipating only to be replaced by that same fear I had felt a moment earlier. I didn’t know what was happening to me, but there was no way that those instances of anger causing some physical effect were meaningless. There was something happening. I felt it growing inside of me like a lethal cancer, eating through every part of me that I had possessed since birth. It was changing me over to some unfamiliar creature for reaso
ns I couldn’t fathom. The same thing, as I understood from witnessing Brynna’s brief transformation, was happening to her and James.
“Don’t be afraid of it.” Brynna told me firmly. “It is happening for a reason. Isn’t that what faithful people like you are supposed to believe, Violet?”
Her voice was dripping with condescension, and the rage welled inside of me again. At least that time, nothing broke.
“You can’t tell me that you two think this is good.” Maura snapped in a fierce whisper, “You can’t tell me that you think this is all just part of some plan! It’s wrong. It’s… unnatural!”
“How are we supposed to know what is natural?” Brynna asked after sitting down on the couch and lighting another cigarette. “Who are we to believe that what we knew was normal?”
“Because there was nothing else! Before this, there was nothing else but what we knew.” I told her. I sat down now, too, to keep from fainting. “What, do you have some theory on why all of this is happening?”
She exhaled smoke as she chuckled to herself softly.
“You are asking me if I have a theory. Do you want to ask me next if Homer wrote The Odyssey? If humans are mammals? If my eyes are blue?”
“Please, darling, share it with us.” Maura snapped.
I could see that her tolerance for the continued lunacy was wearing thin. It didn’t help that Brynna essentially gouged out our eyes and left us crawling around in the dark until she decided to heal our sight with her long withheld answers.
“It is adaptation. We are mutating in order to survive in a completely unfamiliar setting. We’re getting stronger, we’re getting smarter, and we’re getting a few extras thrown in. We are the last remnants of the human race. We are meant to start it over.”
“But,” I looked from her to James, “are we still human?”
“As far as we know. Our hearts are beating, we’re breathing. We must still be human. We believe that we’ll remain human. We’ll just have some other skills to help us out. You don’t have to be a believer in anything to believe that.” James told me, and I stared at him, watching my hand-print grow steadily clearer on his red cheek.
“I shouldn’t have hit you.” I muttered after diverting my gaze away from him.
“It’s understandable.” He brushed off my apology calmly. “I won’t say that I didn’t vote against allowing them to come, but I will say that your anger at it is understandable.”
“I need to ask, for my own peace of mind, why you left them, Brynna.” Maura blurted out suddenly. When we looked at her, we all saw a steely resolve in her eyes. She was going to get the truth immediately. There would be no more skipping around it with half-assed excuses or blatant lies.
Brynna was not weak when it came to Maura. She didn’t hold back or excuse her behavior. She never failed to be honest to the point of bluntness. The answer she gave Maura would be no exception.
“I knew they were not allowed to come. You all were. I made a choice.”
“Was it malicious? Did you leave them to die because of how much you hated them?” Maura pressed her.
Brynna stared at her for a long moment. Then, she shrugged but said nothing. Her response, or lack thereof, was psychological torture at its cruelest.
“Just tell me you didn’t! Just lie to me, if that’s what it takes!” Maura’s pleading shouts broke my heart. “I can’t afford to see you differently now! None of us can afford that. Just tell me it wasn’t out of hate, Brynna!”
I wanted to scream at Brynna to answer her as I watched Maura’s desperate need for that denial grow. But she just stared at her icily, raised one of her eyebrows, and pursed her lips in an expression of contempt and slight confusion.
“What makes you think I owe you anything at this point, Maura?” Brynna stubbed her cigarette out in the crystal ashtray on the table and walked away, leaving Maura to dissolve into tears that shook her entire body. I was responsible for comforting her now.
James hurried after Brynna, calling her name, sounding as though he was now at a level of fury on par with Maura’s level of grief. The intensity of both of their mental states mirrored my own rage, my own growing hatred. How could anyone be so heartless? I didn’t know what had made her that way, but I knew that while I loved her as my sister, I hated who she was at her core. Inside of her dwelt a spiteful, demonic creature that preyed on human weakness. It sniffed out every fear, every sadness, and every regret a person had ever suffered through and turned it against them. Through doing that, she controlled chaos because she created it.
I loved her because she was my sister. But after learning of what she had done to our parents, every last cruel act she had committed in our lives was amplified to a loud droning that would remain omnipresent in my ears, possibly forever.
I wish now that I had forced her to make me understand why she allowed such evil to exist in her. But I was so young and so incredibly blinded by my own pride and my own frustration at not being able to understand. I loved her because I had seen goodness in her as she raised Penny and me through the years.
That love, despite its purity, was weak in strength. It was eaten by the very same beast that lived inside of me, too.