The Irreversible Reckoning

  ***

  As I slept beside Adam that night, I dreamed of when I had first seen Penny again. It was approximately three days after I had been released into general population, and when the door had opened, and I had seen her for the first time, the tears began to fall before I could stop them.

  “MAMA!” She screamed, and she threw herself into my arms before I had even come through the doorway. My knees collapsed out from under me, not because she was heavy or because the impact of her small body into mine had caused me to stagger, but because I had feared for so long that she was lost to me forever, and feeling her there in my arms, feeling her soft hair under my hand, feeling her tears on my shoulder, hearing her cries, feeling her heart pounding against my chest, assured me that she was not lost, her continued existence was no longer able to be questioned, her wellbeing was, for the most part, preserved.

  “Hey, baby. Oh, my God. Oh, my God.” I whispered, as tears fell from my eyes, too, “I love you so much. Are you okay? I love you.”

  “I was in the woods, and the scary tree monsters got Violet, Nick, Alice and Quinn!”

  “I know, sweetheart.”

  “And then I came back looking for you and Daddy…”

  Oh, boy…

  “…and you all weren’t there! And that mean lady with the hole in her face snatched me up like this…” She grabbed my arm really hard and pulled with all her might, “And when I bit her, she hit me! She hit me really hard, Mama.”

  My anger knew no bounds when I heard that. I made a vow to bite off the other half of Mary Bachum’s pretty face.

  “She hit me really hard, but it’s healed now, and then she grabbed my hair like…”

  “It’s alright, sweetie, you don’t have to show me.”

  “And she pulled me along, and they put me here! I didn’t know where you and Daddy were!”

  “I’m here, baby. I’m right here.” I assured her. I hated that she had been so afraid for so long. I hated that she had to think that every person she loved was gone, that she was all alone in that vast, dangerous, terrible world.

  “We’re together again, baby.” I said, “Okay?”

  “There are other kids here. Kids younger than me! And some big kids who are really mean. But there is a nice girl named Illa here who takes care of me. She lived in camp with us! Her mommy was a doctor.”

  “I knew her and her mommy. She’ll look after you, sweetheart. You need to stay with her. Don’t leave her side. Let her watch over you when I’m not around.”

  “I will. The guards are mean. They…” Her big blue eyes filled with tears, “They shot a boy!”

  She was practically whispering when she told me the rest, and the tears streamed continually down her big, round cheeks.

  “He was trying to jump over the railing into the ocean, and they shot him with a big gun. Illa covered my eyes, but I heard the bang. And I saw Daddy! I tried to call out to him, and I know he heard me, but he didn’t even look. He ignored me, Mama. Why? Why didn’t he come get me?”

  Her voice was so small, and while she should have been hysterical, because she was a child, and children confront hardship and trauma with hysterical tantrums, as they should, she was whispering, and she was not sobbing, as she should have been, but she was merely crying softly. It broke my heart to know that she had seen so much chaos, so much tragedy, and so many upheavals in her short seven years that she did not even react to them in a way that a child should. Perhaps, in what is the cruelest trick of fate, she was no longer a child. Perhaps she hadn’t been since we had landed on Pangaea. James and I had tried to preserve her ignorance to all the world’s cruelties, and we had failed. But perhaps that is not our fault. I will take responsibility, even if it is unfair to me, because I do so often place the blame on my own shoulders, for whatever reason. It was not my fault or James’s fault or even Adam’s fault that the world was so terrible, and that as a result of its general awfulness, Penny had seen, in her dreams of the end of Earth, her first home utterly destroyed in fire, water, and waste, her second home in fiery ruins, and her third overrun by crazed religious zealots who treated her like an animal by herding her onto a prison ship with the other children who could not be saved.

  Watching her react like a little grown-up made me sad because it reminded me of how I had been after Luc had died. I had been responsible for soothing myself in my grief and for trying to cope with all Michael had done. Of course, things had gotten significantly easier once Penny was born, because I had loved her so much. But she had come along years later, when I was seventeen and about to be evicted from my “home,” and I use that word lightly, because it had not been a home for me in many years.

  Of course, seeing Penny’s new maturity made the needy mama in me particularly depressed, because I could not stand the idea of her getting older. If we escaped the ship and somehow found our way back to the Allied Territories, she would want to go away to school or even just to explore the world. Maybe she would want to join the Armed Forces, or maybe she would want to join an Aid organization. Either way, she would want to leave the nest, and I could not imagine my life without her. I did not want to imagine my life without her. Selfishly, I wanted her to stay young so she would never leave me, and how terrible is that?

  “I miss Daddy.” She said softly, and the tears brimming in her big blue eyes spilled over, and her little arms wrapped around my middle so she could bury her face in my chest. Her little cries were so soft, so delicate, like she was trying to stifle them, and I remembered almost half a year earlier when we had been in Shadow Village, and she and I had had a disagreement over her behavior, and I had sent her to her room, and she had wailed for half an hour, until she was literally gasping and hiccupping. She had not stopped until James had gone in and coddled her, which had infuriated me at the time, but he had gotten her to apologize and promise to stop being such a hooligan. He always got to play the good guy, and I was always the bad guy, but my stars, I already missed it. I missed how Penny used to cry in a manner that was normal for utterly spoiled little girls now that she was crying like a little grown-up. I missed how James used to swoop in to play her hero after I played the villain, even though it had driven me crazy at the time. I missed having him there, for me and for her, now that he was gone for good.

  Very carefully, so as not to allow the pent-up grief in my heart to free itself, I said, “I miss Daddy, too, baby.”

  In a voice so quiet, I had to strain my ears to hear her, she replied, “I wish we could see him.”

  Do not cry, Brynna, My mind urged me, but my mind’s voice was trembling under the threat of tears, too, and one tear escaped my eye to stream down my cheek.

  “I know.”

  Her voice was even smaller when she spoke again, and her tears intensified. As always, my smart little girl knew too much. She knew the answer to her own question before she had even asked it.

  “Do you think he’ll come see me soon?”

  It was my fault. If I had just kept distance between them… I had been selfish, wanting Penny to view James as her dad, though I had thought that my motivation behind allowing her to call him “Dad,” to see him that way, was so he could fill the void left by (and honestly, never occupied by) our real father. Or perhaps I just wanted us to appear as a family, to replace the one I had lost after Luc had died. Or perhaps I am being too harsh on myself once again, but I doubt it. As I looked into her eyes, watching as her tears fell, seeing his face in her mind, feeling in her heart her absolute, unyielding sadness, I blamed myself, because reacting with anger, either with myself or with someone else, is infinitely easier than feeling pain. Or perhaps reacting with anger is simply the way I have always felt pain.

  How could I break it to her that James was irreversibly lost? How could I break it to her that he didn’t want me anymore, and as a result, he did not want her? I could not say those words to her; I could not allow her to feel as though it was her fault in any way. I had to tread carefully, but I did not even kno
w where to begin. Honestly, if she had not seen him, I might have tried to say that he was dead. But then what if they ever crossed paths? She would inevitably get her heart broken, and either it could be done by me or by him, and because he felt nothing for us anymore, he would break her heart cruelly, while I would do my best to break it gently.

  When Violet had cut into me with the scalpel after I had been shot, she had been thinking of doing so gently. Then she had chided herself, saying that it didn’t matter if she cut gently or slowly, it would still hurt. The same can be said for breaking hearts: either I could do so gently, or James could do so cruelly, and it didn’t matter; the heart would still be broken, and it would still hurt worse than any other pain.

  “Why did they do that to him, Mama?” She whispered tremulously. “To you?”

  I was holding her, and I was thinking of James. I was picturing us both being tortured, of the blue light that met my touch wherever it rested on him, of how his body had seized beneath me, how after days upon days upon days, he had begun to shed tears when they shocked him, until finally, he had broken, his body and his mind shattered, and he was saying that he didn’t love me anymore, he didn’t want me anymore… And because I was seeing all of this as clearly in my memory as I had seen it in the moment with my eyes, and because I was feeling the pain of it in my broken heart, she was seeing it and feeling it, too.

  “They took him away.” She cried, and her voice had risen a little bit as her sobs increased in volume.

  I hated how well she understood the permanence of it without me having to tell her, how her grief was so immediate, so intense. I wanted to take it all away. I wanted to reverse time, and maybe I could have, though I knew by instinct that the results of trying to turn back time could be even more disastrous, almost apocalyptically catastrophic. It was even more of a risk than trying to reverse death, as I had with James.

  “Why would they hurt him like that, Mommy?”

  She was demanding a response when I thought that I could get away with leaving all her questions unanswered. She was growing up so quickly, and soon, I would not be able to brush off those uncomfortable topics. In fact, in that moment, I was already unable to brush them off. So, with whatever was left of my will to think, I found words that I hoped would make it easier.

  “Look at me.” I said, and she did. I grasped both of her hands and looked into her big, blue eyes that were identical to mine. “I am going to be totally honest with you, because I think you are old enough for complete honesty now.”

  She nodded, looking a little nervous to hear the truth. I reminded myself to tread very, very carefully.

  “They hurt him because they don’t like us. They don’t like what we are.”

  “That we’re strong, and good fighters, and we can use our powers?”

  “Yes. They don’t like all of that, so they think it’s alright to hurt us.”

  “But it’s not!”

  “You’re right.” I said, and I kissed her hands. “You are so right, baby. They hurt us because we are different, and that is wrong. Isn’t it?”

  “Yes.” She said emphatically.

  “They didn’t like that Daddy and I loved each other so much. They wanted me to love Adam.”

  “And you do love Adam.”

  “I do. Yes, I do.”

  “You love them both!”

  “Yes, honey, I do.”

  “But what’s wrong with that?!”

  “Nothing. There is nothing wrong with that, sweetheart. The same way there is nothing wrong Tony and Tom, or Patty and Whitney…”

  “They think there is something wrong with them, too? I just… I don’t understand, Mom.”

  God, my little girl… She was so innocent. I had kept her shielded from the prejudices of the old world, which had still run rampant, even after so many years. When we had come to Pangaea, I had thought that we had escaped those prejudices forever. Because of my foolish idealism, I had allowed myself to believe that we could all live in harmony. We could accept each other’s differences, and as long as we were living happy and free lives, and we were not harming anyone, we could coexist in peace, but I had been wrong. So here we were, locked away because of our differences, and Penny could not, for all her knowledge and strange wisdom, understand why. It should have made me happy, that she was so confused by it. But instead of feeling touched by her ignorance to the world’s cruelty, I wondered if I should have prepared her for it. Maybe then, in that moment, she might not have had the weight of the world’s cruelty bearing down on her at once. Maybe she would not have had to face it head-on with so little preparation, with so little knowledge of how to deal with it. Once again, in my own way, I had tried to keep her young, because I was so afraid of her getting old.

  “Yes.” I said, “And they’re wrong about that. You’ve heard Mama and Daddy talk about the Old Spirits, haven’t you?”

  She nodded.

  “And Francis always talked about them. A lot of kids in school talked about them. They’re bad. All of them!”

  “No.” I said, shaking my head, “Not all of them are bad. But a lot of them are. The Old Spirits don’t like anyone who isn’t just like them. They follow a silly God who doesn’t like anything or anyone who is different, but it’s alright, baby, because the One God or the Gods that our people follow aren’t like that. We’re not like that, because we choose not to be like that.”

  “But you remember in church back home on Earth how Pastor Tom said that we’re not allowed to say mean things about anyone? We’re not allowed to tell other people they can’t be happy, he said.”

  I was shocked that she remembered the times we had gone to church. I so rarely went, but when my mother started stipulating that Penny needed to attend church on weekends or else she would start keeping her from me, I spent hours on the internet trying to find a church in the metropolitan area that would not totally repulse me, and I had found one. This pastor was made well aware that I did not believe in any of his gobbledygook, but that I was there for Penny, and he had been so incredibly alright with that, though I could not understand why. He had been kind, and his sermons had been kind. I wished that Pastor Tom had come to Pangaea. We could have used him and his God.

  “I know, baby. And Pastor Tom was right. But none of this matters right now. All that matters is that we are kind to everyone, and not only that we are kind, but that we accept everyone, as long as they aren’t what?”

  “Hurting themselves or anyone else.”

  “That’s right. That is the choice we have made, Penny. The Old Spirits had that choice. In fact, they have that choice every day still. They can stop. But they don’t want to. They choose to judge us, and hurt us if they judge us unfavorably. We choose to accept the people we have grown to love here for who they are, and to let them live their lives according to what makes them happy. What have I always told you about choices, Penny?”

  “We all make them; there is always a choice, and even the smallest of choices can have the biggest impact.”

  “Exactly, and even though we are here, locked away, because we chose to be good, we have to know that we made the right choice.”

  “And maybe someday we’ll leave here.” She said with a slight shrug of her shoulder, “Maybe one day Adam’s God—the good God—will let us leave, because we made the right choice.”

  “Maybe.” I agreed, “I hope so. But even if that doesn’t happen, we just need to remember that we chose to love instead of hate. We chose to accept people instead of judge. And that’s all anyone should ever choose. Right?”

  She nodded emphatically once and said, “Right.”

  “And most importantly, I need you to remember this.” I grasped both of her hands in both of mine, “Daddy loved you to the Earth, to the moon, and back again. You were everything to him, the same way that you are everything to me. He is gone now; he is lost to us irreversibly. But right before I lost him, we were right here.” I gently touched her forehead with the tips of my finger
s, “You and me and Violet. He was keeping us right there so he could hold on, but they were hurting him so badly that he lost his grip, and now he is gone, baby. The Daddy we knew is gone forever, but he loved you so much, Penny. To the Earth, to the moon, and back again. Okay?”

  She nodded, and then she leaned into me so I could hold her as she cried. I fought the tears for as long as I could, but since she was not looking up at me, I allowed a few to fall. When I closed my eyes, I half expected to feel him come up behind us, to say that he was alright, that he loved us both still. But there was no one in the room but us.

  “I love him still.” She told me after the worst of her sobs had subsided, “Should I try to stop loving him so much, Mama?”

  I smiled slightly and reached out to put my hands on both her damp cheeks.

  “Yes.” I said softly, though it broke my heart to say such a thing. “It is going to hurt forever if you don’t try to stop loving him, baby.”

  “But what if I can’t?”

  “You will.”

  “And what about you?” She asked, “Will you ever stop loving him so much?”

  After everything, I had never considered that question in depth. The Warden had asked me if I would ever forget him, and if I would ever stop loving him, and I had said that I never would. I had said it at the time, honestly, because it had felt rebellious, and because I thought that it might be true. But now, as I looked at Penny, and I realized that I was not the only one who had made her this brilliant little girl, and as I cast my mind backwards into the recent past and saw every moment with James that had always filled me with that warmth (the warmth that had been stolen from me by Tyre and his thugs), I realized that I had not been lying. I would always love James. Even in one million years, I would love him just as much. Maybe that is the nature of first loves. Maybe it is simply the result of him and me being joined so briefly yet so brilliantly. I had loved him, I had needed him, I had desired him, I had been so attached to him, and now he was gone, and I was nothing to him. The love he had for me had been stolen away and replaced by hatred and resentment that motivated him to physically harm me. But I loved him still. He was lost to me, but I loved him, and I would always love him. The grief I felt over losing him would fade as the years passed, I hoped, but my love for him never would. In fact, if my love for him would never dull, then neither would the pain of losing him. That might be the nature of first loves, too, and that might just be him and me. It doesn’t matter.

  “No, baby.” I said, “I love him, and I love Adam, and I know that I will love Daddy forever, and I am almost sure that I will love Adam just as much, for just as long.”

  “Then he’ll come back, Mama.” She told me, “Love can do anything! He always used to say that when he’d tell me stories! Love can make you strong, it can heal wounds, it can move mountains, and make oceans split apart.” I laughed softly, because I could hear him telling her those things in my memory, “It can bring him back, Mama. You love him so much, and I love him so much. We’ll bring him back. I know we will!”

  For the first time, I found myself asking the question that always drove me crazy when people asked me.

  “Now do you really know, or are you just speculating, honey?”

  “I really know!” She said, and apparently, she found it just as irritating as I did. “I know that we’ll be able to bring him back. Just trust me, Mama.”

  I looked at her, so fearful of her gift though I possessed it, so in awe of her brilliance though I had helped to foster it. I did not want her to have my gift, but she did. Perhaps she could see things that I could not. Sometimes, I willed myself not to look forward for fear of what I would find. Sometimes, my mind was too exhausted to function as anything other than a far above average human brain. But Penny was just beginning to exercise her power, and sometimes, I wondered if she could see that which even I could not.

  “Say that you trust me.” She said, “Pinky swear.”

  “Oh, Lord…” I said, and for the first time in what felt like an eternity, I was smiling. She extended her pinky with the strictest look upon her face, and I knew that I must not wrap my pinky around hers unless I was being totally honest with her; Penny’s pinky promises were not to be made lightly. When my pinky finally wrapped around hers, and we squeezed, she smiled her bright grin at me.

  “I’m right.” She said, “I promise.”

  “I believe you.” I said, “But you have to keep your gift a secret, right?”

  “Right.” She said with another emphatic nod.

  “Good girl.” I kissed her forehead.

  “When they take you away, when will they bring you back?”

  “I don’t know, baby. I will do everything I can to make sure that it’s soon. I promise you.”

  “Alright. Maybe you can become friends with the Warden?”

  “How do you know about the Warden?”

  “We all know about him. He’s the boss because Tyre’s not here.”

  “Oh, is he?” I said somewhat more snarkily than I intended, “I never would have known that.”

  “Stop.” She said, “Maybe if you two are friends, he’ll let you live with me!”

  “Maybe. Tell you what, I will give it a try. I will try to make the Warden want to be my friend.”

  She grinned and hugged me again, and I steeled myself to the accidental invasion of her mind. There was one way to befriend a man like the Warden, and I certainly did not want her to know how.

  But even if she did not know how, I did know. The Warden was a danger to me. He was a monster, if the stories about him were true, and if I did not act to tame that beast, it would devour me. The only way to beat that place was to hold all the loose ends in my fist. I was the former King’s wife, and people would try to harm me or Penny if they could because of my status, certainly, but also just because they could. The only way to control the chaos was to tame it, and I would. As usual, Penny had been wise enough to come to a logical conclusion to which I never could have come: I had to “befriend” the Warden if I wanted him under my control. From that, I gained my own conclusion: I had to make the people of the Lapsarian my puppets if I wished to live forever. The only way to do that was through fear.

  When the door closed, blocking me from Penny, I asked the guard to take me to the Warden, and he did, as though he had been expecting me to ask. When the door opened, the Warden was behind his desk, scribbling away on a piece of parchment with a quill.

  “So you realized that my gift to you was not a gift after all. It was a payment made in advance.” He said without looking up. With a flick of his hand, the guard left, closing the door behind him. “And now you have come to do the work for which I paid you.”

  “Why must you make me sound like a prostitute?”

  “I do not mean to.” Now, he looked up at me, “I am thoroughly impressed that you came here on your own.” He rose onto his feet, and began to saunter towards me slowly, “I do not wish to require this of you, Brynna, so I will not.”

  “But is there any other way that I can keep you appeased? Honestly? Will the pleasure of my company be enough?”

  “No.”

  “But you will not let me see Penny if I do not appease you in some way.”

  “No.”

  “But you are unable to say that it is this that you require of me, because you do not want…”

  “For you to feel forced.”

  “But I am forced. You will not let me see Penny if I do not do this.”

  “That is correct. But I so desperately want this to be your choice, Brynna.” He reached out his hand to me and expected me to take it, but I would not. With every ounce of my willpower, I was keeping him out of my heart. I was keeping my thoughts from broadcasting into his mind. My insides were churning when I thought about what I was about to do. I was consenting to it, but it was not my choice. That did not seem to make any sense at all, but it was how I felt.

  “Your powers stun me.” He whispered in my ear, and I had n
ot realized that he had pulled me closer to him. “Your intelligence and your poise and your courage stun me. If you were a man, I would kill you, because you would be a direct threat to my standing as the Lord of War.” He whispered in my ear, “But since you are a woman, I want you. I do not want to love you, but I want to take you to my bed. More than anything, I want to take you to my bed. In exchange for this, I will allow you to see your daughter. I will allow you to do what you must to survive out there amongst them. All I ask in return is you.”

  “I am very protective of myself. I am very, very particular about with whom I allow myself to be physically and emotionally intimate, Warden.” I said.

  “Well, I require no emotional intimacy with you.” Gently, he wrapped his hand in my hair, and gently, he pulled my head back. “Tyre has told me how any emotion used to make you so angry. It used to turn your stomach. He heard all about how cold you were from his little spy. James Maxwell softened you.” He kissed my throat very lightly, “The First King softened you further, and look where you are now. Look at the hurt that they have caused you. Would it not have been easier to deny yourself that emotional intimacy, and just fuck when you wanted to fuck?”

  He said that word, and I shuddered, though I did not know why. He had snapped at me when I had said it, but now, he was saying it to me. It was like a secret, one that felt in the moment almost as dirty and dangerous as the act that would surely follow our conversation.

  “I admired that in you when I heard of it. When I heard that you had grown up with such a cold resolve to remain unfeeling. You left that path, and that disappointed me, but by the One God, it has not lessened my admiration of you enough to make me not want this, to not want you. Let me take you to bed, Brynna.” He whispered, as his lips slowly kissed my neck right up the center. “You will see your daughter, and I will feel that I am getting my due for my kindness. For this kindness I never thought I could ever show.”

  The harshly logical, totally unemotional, almost primitively cold part of my brain told me that it would not be assault if I said yes. It would be my choice, and it would be a means to an end. But God or Gods, the emotional side of me, the human side of me, the part that knew it was still forced, that it was still not my choice, was utterly sick with the idea of it.

  “I do not want to do this, Warden.” I said, “I am asking that you don’t make me do this.”

  His lips moved over to the side of my neck now, and I tried to pull away, but he held me to him hard with little effort. My heart began to thump faster, my eyesight cleared completely, my breathing became a little more rapid, as I tried to pull myself out of his grasp. The animal was roaring to life inside of me, preparing to fight, preparing for the moment when he forced me down, when I would have to kick and punch and scratch and scream, and get myself away before he could do the worst to me.

  “Please make this your choice, Brynna.” He urged in my ear, “It is merely a business transaction. Think of it that way. You allow me to call on you when I need you, I allow you to see your daughter. Don’t you love her? Don’t you want her to see her mother? Don’t you want me to ensure that no harm befalls her when you are not with her?”

  I wanted to run away. I wanted to disappear into thin air. I wanted someone, anyone, to swoop into the room and make it all stop. I wanted him to drop dead of a heart attack, even though that cold, logical part of my mind told me that heart attacks were a dime a dozen on Pangaea, so the chances of any natural harm coming to him were just about zero. I could try to break away and run, but then who knew what would happen to Penny? I could consent, and know that it was not real consent. I could say no, and maybe he would force me down anyway. I could panic easily, but I could cry and beg about as easily as I could joyfully give him consent, so about as easily as I could spontaneously disappear from his room and reappear beside Janna in our bed. There were so few options, so few exits… There were no roads in my Sight that did not lead right there, with me letting me take him into his room, to his bed.

  “And if you deny me,” He whispered, and his tone was fiercer, colder, showing me that I was angering him with my indecision, “It will not just be your darling Penelope who suffers the consequences. I could easily repay Adam for this scar he bestowed upon me in our fight all those years ago. I could give him a scar of his own—right across his throat, while he is asleep. And your darling James, he might not feel a thing for you, but you feel for him, so watching me take off his head would hurt you so terribly, wouldn’t it? And without them, who do you have in the world? I suppose then you would be the machine you were before you came here, and that would be a blessing for you, but I know that is not what you want. So, what will it be, Brynna?”

  My mind was sounding the alarm, confirming for me now that my consent meant nothing. He knew that my consent meant nothing. It was, in his mind, a courtesy, to give me the choice, to have my own lips saying that it was alright for him to bed me. It made it better for me than it would if he just dragged me into his room and threw me down.

  So instead, I let him walk me by the hand into his room, feeling for all the world like I had when I was a little girl, and it was Michael leading me into the room.

  For a man who called himself the Lord of War, though, I expected savage, animal thrusting, grunts, bites, and clawing, and I got all of that except for the grunts, but all of it was to a lesser degree than I was expecting. Plus, unlike Adam, and even unlike James, who had not had thousands of years to hone his lovemaking prowess, the Warden was fast. When it was over, he held his lips to my forehead for a very long second, his breathing heavy, his heart pounding, his voice whispering, “Thank you.” My mind blanked out, and when it returned, I saw that he was turned away from me while I got dressed. Once he had pulled his pants back on and buckled his belt, he opened the door to his room and instructed his guards to take me away.

  He had not been lying when he had said that it was only sex that he wanted. Before I left, though, he reached out, grasped my wrist rather hard, and instructed me to look at him.

  “No one knows about this.” He said firmly, “Or the hell that I will rain down upon you will be the same as what would have followed you saying, ‘no.’ Understood?”

  I had nodded, but then, I forced myself to say, “Yes, I understand,” in as emotionless a voice as I could muster.

  The years went on. I saw Penny every night. I told her stories before bed, brushed and braided her hair, made promises I began to see could not possibly be kept, promises of freedom, of James coming back to us, of the world turning right again. I saw Adam once a month, when the doctors who had poked and prodded me said that my mess of a reproductive system might allow a child to implant. I said nothing to him or to Janna about what the Warden required of me, though as the days turned to weeks, and the weeks turned to years, it began to gnaw like one million writhing, gnashing termites through my insides. I saw the Warden twice a month, always when the doctors who poked and prodded me said I had the least chance of conceiving, and each time, the walk to his room felt like a walk to the Gallows, and each walk from his room was the time during which I chose my next victim.

  Because for every time he required my company, I chose a sympathizer to his cause amongst the prison population, and I killed that person as brutally as I could. He did not know I was targeting them specifically because they sang the praises of the Old Spirits, or because they admired the Lord of War; he simply thought they started fights with me, and I finished those fights, which made his respect for me grow a little more every day.

  And so, I reanimated the cruel beast that had been young within me when I had smothered it into a coma that day I had found James in the woods and had begun to soften. I made that beast stronger, crueler, and angrier than before, and I knew that she was also so much more intelligent and infinitely more powerful than she had been in her youth.

  And just like that, Brynna Olivier was dead, and Brynna Elohimson was born.

  Quinn

  “You ready,
baby?”

  Her blonde hair was pulled up in a high ponytail on top of her head, and if I turned off my memory for just a second, I could convince myself that she was still seventeen, not just physically but literally, too. It took getting used to, seeing a teenager with a huge machine gun in her hands and knives all around her belt. Granted, I’m sure I looked just as young, and it took just as much getting used to seeing me loaded up with deadly weapons.

  She smiled at me, raised her eyebrows, cocked the gun, and said:

  “Always ready.”

  She raised her eyebrows again and looked around at our unit.

  “Alright, y’all!” She said, before beaming at me again, “Let’s move out.”

  I watched her go, and as always, the sudden spike in my love and desire for her left me shaking my head back and forth to clear my mind. As always, I found myself saying out loud, “God, I fucking love that woman…”

  “Sanders, on my right. Pyles, on my left. Yates, Yang, Remizov, behind me, six steps back, triangle form. And Wesley,” She looked back at me, “Right behind me.”

  “Yes, Commander Wesley!” I shouted back, and she laughed.

  “Alright.” She pulled a small object shaped like a baton out of a pocket on her belt and pointed it at the circular metal door in front of us.

  “For whom do we do this? Say their names.” She commanded, because this was how our unit got pumped up for battle. We had all lost someone, and before we put our lives in danger, we reminded ourselves that we fought for those we had lost. For some of our crew, everyone they had ever loved was gone. For some of us, like Allie and me, we still had people alive for whom we wanted to make the world a safe place. How many of our loved ones were living or dead didn’t matter; we fought to avenge the ones we had lost, and we fought to keep the ones living safe from the Old Spirit reign we had all been unfortunate enough to see spread to the farthest reaches of the world.

  Everyone said the names of those they loved, of those for whom they were fighting. Alice and I said the same names, because we had lost the same people, and they were the ones we were fighting for. They were the ones we would never stop fighting for. Looking into each other’s eyes, we said their names, with quick pauses in between each, to pay each holder of each name the proper respect.

  “Tom Rice-DiAngelo. Tony DiAngelo-Rice. Rachel Klein. Joe Klein.”

  We had learned that all four had been killed, though there were some who said that Tony had been imprisoned on the Lapsarian. Even after almost twenty-five years, we both still had tears in our eyes when we said their names.

  “Violet Friedrich. Brynna Maxwell. Penny Maxwell. James Maxwell.”

  We gave them the names they would have taken. We had imagined once what we hoped had happened before they were killed, and we had imagined that Violet and Nick, and James and Brynna, had gotten married, and that they were happy for just a little while. A tear fell from each of Alice’s eyes as she spoke the names we had given them, as she imagined it, so clearly that we could almost pretend it had actually happened, that they had died with those names. A tear fell from each of my eyes, and as I always did, I wiped her tears away, and she wiped mine.

  “Endless Anarchy. Red Revolution.” We said simultaneously, and then we turned to face the door, and she raised the baton again. After pressing the button at the back, three thin laser beams quickly joined to form one red mass which, right before our eyes, melted the metal in a rapidly growing circle of heat. The metal melted into a nearly blinding mess of yellow liquid, until finally, the area was open, and immediately, we were besieged by enemy fire.

  We were at the very top of the tallest building in the Pangaean city of Hollowshall. It was a northern city, very close to the side of the mountain range where the Bachums had made their camp in our first year. The mountains were off in the distance, black pointed triangles of shadow, and all around us on the outside viewing deck of that watchtower, snow and sleet were whirling and whipping against us. Though the Old Spirits were not allowed to harness their powers, they could not help it when they were threatened. In response, Alice and I sieged the natural territory; we began to use the snow and sleet against them so they could not use it against us. Though we had not made the harsh weather, we would certainly use what Mother Nature had given us to our advantage.

  In Hollowshall, there were four towers, including the one we were currently invading. All were used to keep watch both over the snowy wasteland outside the borders and over the populace within them. We had come in from the south, so it was the South Tower on which we stood. It shot straight up from the ground, reminding me of the drop rides back home that took riders to the top and then sent them plummeting back down, except this tower was probably quadruple the height of any of those rides. At the top, the observation deck on which we were fighting wrapped in a circle around the tower, so the guards could walk around its large circumference and see for miles in every direction.

  “Clear them out, get ready to jump!” Alice ordered, and we ran forward. Sanders was wielding his thick sickle, which he promptly began to slash through the Old Spirit troops who rushed him. Yates and Pyle were spraying bullets at the insurgents coming around the bend, while Alice and I were spraying bullets at the insurgents coming in around the other side. Yang, a Herculian, was simply throwing the men who stormed towards him over the low railing, and their screams could be heard only for a second before they were lost in the mile-long drop.

  Eight were able to escape us firing at them, and just as they reached her, Alice pulled a knife from her belt and stabbed one cleanly in the throat and then turned around, ducked what would have been a neck-breaking hit from one of the huge Herculians on their side, dropped down onto her knees, and stabbed him in the gut at least sixty times in half as many seconds.

  The remaining six insurgents I took out by throwing my small weighted knives at them one right after the other, hitting each squarely in the forehead.

  “Nice, babe.” She told me when she stood up, and I took a small bow.

  “I told you I’ve been practicing. Plus, I’m just good like that.”

  “I know you’re good like that. You’re still bad about heights, though. Do you want me to put you on my back?” She asked, and she moved in front of me and crouched down slightly, “Here, jump on.”

  When I knew none of the others were watching, because they were doing last minute checks on their parachutes, I hit her ass, and with an “ooh!” of surprise, she jumped up, turned around, and kissed me.

  “See you down there, hot shot.”

  I watched her stand on the railing and fall forward without a second thought to the five thousand-plus foot drop.

  “Hot shot?” I called after her, but really, I was stalling. We were up so high that there were clouds at eye-level, and as I gripped the metal railing of the watch tower, I felt my grip slipping because of how badly my palms were sweating. We were so high, what if the drop in pressure that we would inevitably experience as we fell caused the same negative effects as ascending too quickly in water? What if my parachute didn’t deploy? We could land gracefully on our feet from heights that would leave a human splattered all over the ground if he tried to jump from so high up, but there was no way we would not be splattered all over the ground if we hit after a fall from on top of that tower. I could think of one million ways that the jump could go wrong. I could stand up there for the rest of my life, thinking about it. But the doors into the city on the bottom floor were accessible only with a commander’s handprint, and we didn’t have time to find the commander and cut off his hand to unlock the door. So we had no choice but to jump. But I really, really, really didn’t want to jump…

  “Come on, Wesley!” Pyles told me, “It’s only a little higher than the jump we did in Tetra Province.”

  “We jumped off a ship in a Tetra Province, Pyles! Into water!” I shouted, and he laughed, saluted me, and back-flipped over the railing without even stepping up onto it first.

  I w
as the only one left, and I had to make the jump, but the cold metal slipping under my sweaty grip reminded me of the nightmares I had about heights, nightmares where I was trying to hold on while my body was dangling over a drop just like this one, but my grip kept slipping, until finally, I plummeted. I always awoke with a start, which caused Alice to awake with a start, and then I had to explain that it was the dream again…

  In times like those, times when you’re staring down what could possibly be the moment of your death, when you are scared that this drop will be your last drop, that this fight will be your last fight, they tell you to think of the names. That’s why you say them right before things get hot. You say the names so you remember that this fight, this fall, this whole war isn’t for you, it’s for them. It’s to protect the living and avenge the dead. As I stood on the railing, I pictured Brynna, James, Penny, Violet, Tom, Tony, Rachel, and Joe, hanged in the village square this time, but when I pictured the moments before their deaths, that is when the rage began to burn. I pictured them dragging Penny, how she would have been crying, how the rest of them would have been crying or cursing. Maybe they were hung. Maybe they were shot. Maybe the Old Spirits only killed them. The Old Spirit troops had been trained to never tell us. The Old Spirit superiors knew that not knowing drove us insane. So we would never know exactly how it happened.

  The only thing stronger than my fear, in every situation where I had felt fear, was my hatred of the Old Spirits. As I threw myself over the railing, as I felt the drop pushing my stomach up to my brain, as I felt my mouth open to scream, and my eyes watering, I pictured them all, happy and whole, back in Shadow Forest, all those years ago. Some afternoons, we had all just lounged around. One instance that stuck in my mind came right after Brynna had come home, and we were all so relieved, and so tired from worrying about her for three days. Violet and Alice knitting. Nick reading an old book by the fire. James, Brynna, and Penny, cuddled together on the couch, Brynna looking up at James, kissing him softly every few seconds. My family. Our family. Broken forever. Alice, Eli, and I were the only ones left.

  So I guess I should say that the only thing stronger than my fear wasn’t my hatred of the Old Spirits. It was my love for my family that I had lost.

  My parachute deployed, and within seconds, my feet were touching down on the paved street of Hollowshall, and I was detaching my parachute from my shoulders and running, pointing my automatic at the men running out from around buildings, from out of alleyways, from the doorways of the shops, some raining down on us from the much less intimidating buildings. I shot the ones in front of me like they were rabid, raging, running bulls, and I shot the ones in the air like they were a pesky flock of birds. Easily, I shot them, and I prayed this time that I hadn’t shot them in the head. They didn’t deserve an easy death. They didn’t deserve to die painlessly. I hoped that the bullets, which always broke apart, fractured inside their skin and shredded their insides to pieces. I prayed that they would lie there on the pavement for hours upon hours, soaked in the blood of their friends and fellow soldiers, and that it would take one of our cleanup crews finally ending their misery with a quick bullet to the head (a bullet they didn’t deserve) before they died.

  My ammo ran out, and because the number of insurgents had dwindled to the mere lower fifties, I pulled the crossbow from off of my shoulder. They were firing on me with guns of their own, but I was homed in, my mind operating in a totally mechanical, methodical way, slowing everything down, taking everything in: The three bullets shaped almost like a three-point heart, coming towards me from three different guns—hear the gun fire, see the bullets, move to the left, fire—one, two, three, four—three spurts of blood, three men with arrows in their necks, more bullets, this time I had to blur to one side (our way of saying “move so quickly to one side that we look like a blur,” just to clarify) fire again and again and again, blood spurting towards the sky, towards the darkened street behind them, bodies dropping, snow pouring, lightning crashing, hitting the marks—Alice always hit her mark when she controlled the lightning—and hail soaring towards three other men so quickly that they looked like Swiss cheese by the time they crumpled to the ground. She broke the knees of the last man one at a time, with two swift kicks from her leather-booted foot, and then, she pulled a baton from her belt, and bashed in his head with ease.

  Quickly, my eyes scanned the carnage, and found that we had just eliminated one hundred and twenty men. These soldiers were foot soldiers, probably signed up the day before to defend one of what we call the “B Cities,” so big target cities but not the biggest target cities. We had not been expecting much of a fight, but what we had gotten was just pitiful.

  “Quinn!” Alice’s voice called, and I whipped around to find all six of them huddled around a body that was on the ground. Pyles was lying there, riddled with bullets in his back. They had come up behind him, and he had been too focused on what was happening in front of him. It had happened quickly.

  “It’s alright.” Alice told him, because she was cradling his body now, knowing that it was only a matter of time before his legs stopped kicking and twisting slowly, before his breathing stopped, and she was right; it wasn’t long. Alice whispered to him the whole time, and I held one of his shoulders while Yang held his hand. When he was gone, we carried him as a team to the sidewalk and laid him down away from the other bodies.

  Our people and their people would not intermix, not even in death.