The Irreversible Reckoning

  ***

  “Alright, Capitol Hall is this way!” Alice called back as she ran ahead of us. She was not even breathing heavily, and she was barely sweating. We were running through the snow behind her, already getting winded, but she was upright, sprinting, her gun swinging back and forth in her arms. Alice had a seemingly never-ending supply of energy. At night, when we were actually at home (which was rare), she stayed up, reading or just pacing, and when we were camped out on missions, she sat up, staring up at the stars if we could see them, or cleaning her guns, or again, just pacing.

  She just hadn’t been able to power down since we got word that everyone we loved there in our second world was dead. The only time I saw her smiling like she had used to was when we were out on missions, hunting down the Old Spirits. That’s why she took on so much work, because when she was out hunting, she was happy. Maybe.

  Sometimes, I swore I could hear Brynna. I could hear something smart or wise that she would say, and when I puzzled over whether Alice was only truly happy when she was out on mission, I always heard Brynna’s voice in my mind trying to help me answer that question:

  “Perhaps she is not happy so much as merely content to indulge the desire of her heart to fulfill her plans for revenge.” She said once, and God knows that’s not something I could come up with myself.

  From wherever she was, she was still talking to me, but she never talked to me when I asked. For a long time after we had lost them, I called out into the void I knew existed (because I had been in it, after the trebestia had nearly taken my arm, my eyes, and had totally stopped my heart) for them, knowing that if anyone would answer, it would be Brynna. I had heard her telling James once about how Maura was always talking to her, and how sometimes, she thought she heard her mother. She took the fact that she sometimes heard her mother as a sign that her mother was dead, which, of course, we knew wasn’t true.

  But more on her later.

  There in Hollowshall, I could smell something disgusting, and my eyes turned over to white as my mind registered the smell.

  “Sulfur bomb!” I yelled, and simultaneously, the five of us dove for cover. Quickly, Yang threw a sulfur bomb in return, and in the flash of nearly blinding light, I watched an indiscernible body blow into pieces even more indiscernible. A whole reduced to indiscernible parts… I saw it all the time.

  “Let’s go!” Alice yelled, and she stormed forward, ripping into the throat of the first man who came charging through the door of the Capitol building, and after he began to convulse from the rapid loss of his blood, she kicked him backwards into the onslaught of men charging through the door. Because the man was pretty large, when she kicked him backwards with all her might, at least ten of the men charging through the door collapsed to the ground, and from behind me, Yang and Yates picked them off with effortless headshots.

  Alice pulled a grenade from her pocket and said, coolly, as always, “Grenade,” before pulling the pin with her teeth. The rest of the men tried to come charging through the door, but she had thrown the grenade inside the building, pulled the doors shut, stuck her longest knife in between the handles to keep the doors closed, and then calmly walked away just before the grenade detonated. The doors would have blasted off the hinges had her knife not been holding them shut, but she had not stuck her knife there to keep the doors from blowing off; she had done it to keep the Old Spirit soldiers from running out of the way of the bomb. Before she had even stopped walking away, she spun on her heels, walked back, took her knife from the door handles, pocketed it, threw on her gas mask, and walked inside.

  “All clear. Yates, find a car that will get us to Fogbeach. We’ll catch the ferry back to Luna Moors, make the drop, and then we’re done.

  “Yes, ma’am.” Yates said, and he and Yang left.

  “You know what I’ve been thinking?” She asked me, as we began to climb one side of the two sided, curved staircase.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I’ve been thinking a lot about Shadow Village lately. I mean, I always think about it. I can never get it out of my head. But here of late, I’ve been thinking… Do you remember when we wanted to be Deep Cover Agents, and Brynn and Savannah and James were all like, ‘No way, that’s ridiculous?’”

  “Yeah, and now look at us.”

  “Yeah, we’re not Deep Cover Agents. We’re just lowly grunts, you know? Exactly what we signed up for but didn’t want. What we took because they said it would be safer.”

  “Well, if we’re looking at it relative to Deep Cover Agents, I guess we are safer.” I looked back at the thirty or so bodies, thought about the hundred or so out in the street, and about that ridiculous jump off of that tower. It was hard to believe that we were safer than Deep Cover Agents, but we were.

  “Yeah.” She agreed, “And we’re having way more fun.”

  I looked at her, and I struggled not to say that sometimes I didn’t find the job fun. I just agreed, and pushed away the sudden resurgence of the guilt I sometimes felt at night, when I began to wonder as I drifted off if every person I had killed or had a hand in killing had truly deserved to die, when I began to realize that we killed indiscriminately, though we tried to make sure it was only their soldiers, but some of their soldiers were twelve and thirteen years old, and I had seen those kids dead, dead at my hands…

  I had broached the subject to her once when we were at home in Luna Moors. It was after a particularly brutal run, when we had infiltrated the mountain camp where the Bachums had first made their home. We went through it like a hurricane, taking down houses and churches and their troops by rattling the mountains so hard that avalanches wiped everything out and saved us from having to do the dirty work. Before we got there, they had evacuated their civilians, and it was only their troops with their guns left, but we wiped them all out, and when we were picking through the deep snow, pulling up bodies so we could loot their valuables and steal their weapons, I saw more young faces wearing Old Spirit uniforms than I had hoped to ever see in my life. I saw young faces turned blue in the snow, eyes wide but totally blank, and sometimes these young men were burned or cut through beyond recognition…

  “They are old enough to know that what they are doing to people is wrong, Quinn.” Alice had told me coldly when I had confided in her how disturbed I was by what I had seen.

  “No, they’re not, Allie!” I had snapped, “Didn’t you buy everything your parents told you when you were thirteen!? Their parents probably tell them that it’s their duty to serve, that it’s their only way to get to Heaven, or whatever, so they do it! We have to…”

  “What?” She had looked up from the book she had been reading in the candlelight, and her features had been resolute, her eyes set in stone, “Start trying to pick them out before we bring a mountain down on them? Save them? Bring them back here, and try to rehabilitate them? When you look back at the jobs we’ve done in the past two years, how much time do you think it has taken us to get in and get out? The answer to that is ‘no time at all.’ We don’t have time to decide who lives and who dies. If they’re standing on the frontlines, wearing Old Spirit colors, waving around guns, then they’re old enough to die for their cause.”

  “Allie.” I had said, because I had truly been shocked to hear her say something so heartless.

  “Quinn, we don’t have time to decide who lives and who dies. We try to keep the civilian casualties to a minimum, because in their case, we don’t know who is loyal to the cause and who isn’t. But if they’re willing to strap themselves with bombs and blow up our kids in our cities without worrying themselves over age, then we won’t worry ourselves over the age of their soldiers.”

  I remember sitting down in the chair across from her, so angry all of a sudden that I had been trembling.

  “So we should just do what they do. Just fight fire with fire, right?”

  She had not answered right away. She had showed no sign of irritation. After a minute, she smiled, and it was a slight, quiet smile,
like someone was whispering in her ear, telling her something she had needed to hear for a long time. I wondered if Brynna had made an appearance in Alice’s mind from beyond the grave, or maybe Alice’s mother had, or someone else. But when she had looked at me, and the torchlight had been reflected in her steely gaze, and she had still been smiling that soft, strange, contented smile, I had known that whatever it was she was going to say was from her, no one else.

  “We were fighting fire with fire when we signed up for this, Quinn.” She had said, “We’re killing them because they killed our family. It’s too late to play this game any other way.”

  “But it’s not a game, Allie.” I had implored her, “It’s war. It’s innocent people dying while we all fight for what we think is right and what should be. It’s senseless. You knew that once. What happened?”

  “What happened?!” She had snapped, and she had slammed her book shut and stood up, “Look around, Quinn!”

  It had startled me, how quickly she had grown so angry and so indignant. It had startled me as much as her sudden heartlessness. Grief had made her hard, and I couldn’t blame her for that. In fact, I had thought that I was strange, because my conscience hadn’t been similarly lost after everyone we loved had been taken from us in some violent, awful way. The rage burned in me, certainly, but I couldn’t view the Old Spirits as one entity or one evil that had to be eradicated without prejudice. I couldn’t help seeing them as individuals, being born to two other individuals, who maybe loved them. I couldn’t help seeing them as people who had been babies, then children, then teenagers (and some of them, as I’ve said, stopped there) and then adults, experiencing joys and sorrows, achievements and failures.

  More than anything, I could not shake one question, and it was this question that haunted me every day then, haunts me every day now, and will haunt me every day until my immortal life is taken or the worlds end: Who would they have been before all of this? Before the ascension of the Old Spirits, before the Almighty Split, before the Arrival, before the End of Earth… Who were they before that? I pictured those thirteen-year-old boys as young kids on Earth, playing cops and robbers with their friends, or lugging sports equipment to their games on Saturdays, or getting lost in a book somewhere, going to school every day, celebrating Christmas, dressing up for Halloween… Stupid, insignificant shit that didn’t matter then and certainly doesn’t matter now. But God, I picture it. To this day, I remember every face of every man I ever killed, and I remember especially well the ones who were too young, despite what Alice believed and said, to know what they were doing. And even the ones who were older, I still pictured them on Earth, and in those imaginings of mine, they were never extremist crazy people judging and wishing death upon anyone who didn’t agree with them. They were still so afraid—the world was a scary place on Earth, too—but they weren’t fighting for their lives every day the way they had been since the Arrival on Purissimus. They had been wild in their youth once, happy, carefree, looking at the future and all it held for them, graduating high school, then college, getting jobs, having families… There was a time before the war, before they were fighting to survive. I couldn’t shake the incessant need of my mind to picture who they could have been, who they probably were. They were never just Old Spirit soldiers to me. They were just people, and as it turns out, thinking that way was dangerous, because it hindered my ability to kill them when they needed to be killed, or to watch them get executed. I was supposed to be a man of war, not necessarily relishing in my ability to kill anyone I deemed worthy of death, but certainly able to do so knowing that when I had to kill, I was doing it for my people, for the Red Anarchy. But I had never believed in the Red Anarchy, either. I only loved my new family I had found there, and they were gone. That should have been enough for me, like it was for Alice. But my stupid mind wouldn’t stop asking “Who were they?”

  I had seen firsthand that their cruelty was on a level few in our world or theirs had ever seen before. Lara Olivier had died four times before they were able to stabilize her. If Alice hadn’t given her medical attention in the woods, she would have died long before we could buy her decent care in one of the Unallied villages. It was the Old Spirits who had beaten her for so long and so severely that she was barely recognizable, until she was missing several back teeth and was blind in one eye. It was the Old Spirits who had lashed her so many times that the skin on her back was almost completely gone and had been replaced by deep, penetrating slash-marks. It was the Old Spirits who hadn’t let up on her until she was bleeding so badly internally that it was only a matter of hours before she would die, who hadn’t just put her out of her misery, who were going to let her die in total agony, because she was the one they had decided would bear the punishment for the Earth’s destruction. The doctors would tell no one but John about what they called “the other damage” but through the glass, we had watched John go white when they told him. Alice hadn’t spoken to me as we watched, not for a long time. She had only looked at Lara, who was laid out on the operating table with wires hooked all over her body to monitor her heart, with needles stuck all over her arms to pump her full of liquid Elixir, with tubes down her throat because her lungs had collapsed. All of it was pulling her back from the brink of death, repairing her slowly. The Old Spirits had done all of that to her. Tyre had commanded it, and they had acted. For two long years, she had been theirs.

  “God…” Alice whispered, and when I had looked at her, I had seen the tears streaking silently from her eyes, “She looks like Brynnie, doesn’t she?”

  By the time Lara regained consciousness, we had begun to find other Anarchy folks, and it was then that we received word that the Oliviers and James were dead. John waited to tell her until she had recovered, and through the glass, we had watched her shake her head, saying, “No,” over and over again, not out of grief but out of disbelief.

  When she had gathered enough strength, she used it to scream:

  “I CAN STILL FEEL HER, JOHN!”

  And no one ever said that her children were dead in her presence after that. She was prone to moments of rage that left her screaming until she turned red, and until glass broke from the force of the sound, when she would hit him, push him, and scratch him like a wild animal. There were times when she would cry until she had deprived herself of breath for so long that she passed out. There were times when she wouldn’t talk to anyone but John until Eli turned up out of the blue. We had watched through the window into her hospital room as Eli held her, both of them crying. We had seen how he hadn’t let go for hours. Then, she started talking to Alice and me, minimally but never unkindly, though she still had her fits of rage and sadness just as intensely even six years after her girls had died.

  “It’s alright,” John would tell her patiently, even when she was physically attacking him, “It’s alright, baby. You’re alright.” He would just keep repeating himself softly until she calmed, and she always did, and only because of him.

  Alice sat at her bedside while she recovered and told her stories about Brynna, Violet, and Penny, but also about James and Adam, about how they had loved Brynna so much, and how she had loved them. Lara always loved hearing those stories. She was bedridden for a year, recovering from her terrible injuries, and Alice’s stories were what got her through. One night, I overheard them talking, and when I peeked in, I saw that Alice was holding her hand, and Lara was crying softly. When she was finally able to speak, her voice was choked with her tears.

  “She was… She was happy? Very happy?”

  Alice had nodded, and I saw her cry for the first time in a year, for the first time since we had heard that awful news that they were all gone.

  “Yes.” Alice said, “She was so happy, Lara.”

  Lara had only nodded at first, but then she began to cry harder. We all knew by then that that meant one of her fits was coming, but Alice hadn’t called out for John.

  “Show Mama where you are,” She was saying through her tears, “Sh
ow me, baby! Show me, so I can come find you!”

  “It’s alright, Lara.” Alice told her, “Everything’s going to be alright.”

  After that, Alice became the second person who could calm Lara down. They grew even closer, each providing a link to the people they loved most whom they had lost. Alice could tell Lara all about who her daughters had become in their new lives, and Lara was their mother—without her, they never would have existed—so Alice had a living link to them.

  Lara’s rages were the result of her animal nature trying to protect herself from even more harm, but her sadness was purely human. It was longing for her daughters, whom she firmly believed were still out there. She always found one phrase that she would cry out when that sadness took her.

  “I was a terrible mother.”

  “It’s alright,” John would tell her, because they both knew it was true then but wasn’t true anymore, and she didn’t want or need him to lie to her about it. “You wouldn’t be now.”

  “I deserved it.”

  “No.” He and Alice would tell her firmly. “No one could deserve that.”

  “Brynna… Brynna…”

  John told us that for the longest time, Lara would only say Brynna’s name. Paul had told Brynna that her name was the only word that came out of Lara’s mouth, and for once, he hadn’t been lying.

  After a particularly rough night with Lara, when her cries wouldn’t calm for anything, when she just wouldn’t stop saying Brynna’s name, Alice gently told her the story of Paul’s temptation.

  “He told her if she traded Adam and his wife, Janna, they would hand you and John over. She was still so angry with you, so she tried to ignore it, but she couldn’t just let them hurt you like they were. No matter how hard she tried, though, she couldn’t figure out if you really were alive, but she was going to trick them into making the trade. They brought her someone else, and after all hell broke loose, she asked Paul if you were alive. But he wouldn’t tell her, and she attacked him. She felt terrible for leaving you behind, Lara. It haunted her every day that we were here.”

  “She had every right to leave me.” Lara had whispered. “I didn’t deserve her help.”

  “She didn’t think so.” Alice told her, “She wanted you back, and she said that it was for Violet and Penny, but it was for her, too. She didn’t think you would want to see her because of… because of Luc…”

  Lara, even after so many years had passed since her son had died, still winced when she heard his name.

  “I’m sorry.” Alice said, “But she said she didn’t care. She just wanted you to be with Violet and Penny.”

  It made her cry harder, hearing that. She cried into her hands, and Alice rested her hand on her shoulder gently and told her again that everything was going to be okay.

  “But I love her.” Lara had said, as if Brynna should have known, or maybe that was just how I heard it, because even though I pitied her for all she had suffered, I remembered the stories the Oliviers had told me about how she had treated Brynna after Luc’s accident, and it made me angry.

  “I love her so much.” She said again, and I realized that she wasn’t saying it because Brynna should have known, she was saying it because she wanted, more than anything, for Brynna to know.

  “I can feel her out there.” Lara said, “I can’t feel Penny or Violet, but she can, so I know they’re alright. But I can feel Brynna. She’s with me always. All these years, she’s been with me, and she’s still here now…”

  “Quinn, hell-ooo?” Alice called to me, and I snapped out of all those memories and looked at her. “You want to keep your head in this? We’re about to go down the Main Hall. Where were you?”

  “Thinking about…”

  “What?” She demanded.

  “Lara. I was thinking about Lara.”

  I hadn’t wanted to say her name because I knew that Alice’s eyes would ice over, and her features would darken. I could feel her heart trying to harden itself, only to have its defenses torn down effortlessly. It would be better for Alice if she talked about what had happened, but she refused.

  “Why would you say her name to me?” She asked me, and her voice was soft yet dangerous, like a mine lying in wait. “Why would you say it at all but why especially would you say it here?”

  “You asked me what I was thinking about. I was thinking about her.”

  “Well, don’t! Not now! Not while we’re doing this!”

  “What’s the first thing you’re going to beat out of him, Allie?” I asked, walking towards her.

  “I will not talk about this right now. Not here, and not now.”

  “They’re going to play you the same way they played her.”

  “Stop it. Stop talking!” She snapped, and I knew that I was prodding her rage, which I shouldn’t have been doing, especially not there, but Alice’s constant drive, her quest for vengeance, her ability to only feel level when she was in the throes of combat, were not just the result of wanting to avenge the family we had had before the Fall.

  “She didn’t do it so you could die out here, Allie!” I snapped, “You think that’s what she wanted?”

  I remembered it, even after all the nights of her crying or screaming or both, when we were attacked at home in Luna Moors, and the Lord of War was eviscerating everything in his path, and when we were hiding, waiting for the moment he found us and killed us or worse, she stood up, hands in the air, and began to limp towards him, and John, fighting her influence over his mind, was trying to scream out to her, trying to get to her, but she let the Lord of War take her away, back to Tyre, who had never stopped tearing the world apart to find her, to find his fallen woman. She knew if she did not go, his brother would kill every man, woman, and child in our village until he found her, so she sacrificed herself.

  John had been inconsolable, and if he hadn’t been consumed by the same rage as Alice, I know he would have just killed himself. He had lost everything, unlike Alice, who still had me. So Eli and John set out with a team to the North, Khaled Jalily (a man from Shadow Village whose whole family had been captured and imprisoned on the Lapsarian, including his three small children) and Luke, mine and James’s friend from Security, set out with a team to the West, and Alice, made Commander after her epic defense of Luna Moors, set off with our people to the South and East while Don held down the fort at home. Or rather, he sat around doing nothing except screwing women who wanted to screw him because he was the leader while others took care of the many surviving Anarchy folks. He was “being a figurehead,” he liked to say. Every six months, we went home, stayed for a while, and it was during those times that Alice was nearly unrecognizable to me. She was emotionless, except for the energy she had. Like I said before, she didn’t sleep any more than two hours a night, and she spent much of her time exercising, jogging far out into the Moors, through crags and caves she found, or doing pull-ups on the sycamore tree in our backyard. She never stopped moving, and our relationship didn’t really suffer as a result, at least not completely. Maybe it’s because despite my inability to be quite on that level with her, I totally understood her rage. Time didn’t heal wounds, it only opened them further, and when Lara was taken, any healing that had been done on the wounds caused by the deaths of Brynna, James, Penny, Violet, Nick, and the rest of our friends was reversed. Every year that passed made the original wounds a little deeper and made the new pain of Lara’s absence even more intense.

  We had three missions in our territories: 1. Listen for word of the Lapsarian, 2. Search for Tyre, who would have Lara, and 3. Kill as many Old Spirit troops and capture as many Old Spirit commanders as possible.

  It was the third mission that had brought us to Hollowshall, and when Alice kicked down the intricately carved wooden doors leading into the Commander’s personal chambers, we found a family huddled around a body, crying. Six children, one wife, and the Commander of the city dead with a bullet in his skull.

  I didn’t look at her, because I didn?
??t want to see the look of rage contort her face. I didn’t want to watch the idea of killing them all cross her mind, even though I knew that she wouldn’t act on it. They turned around to look at us, and the oldest son, a boy of about eight, grabbed the gun from his father’s dead hand, and pointed it at us.

  “No!” His mother yelled, and she dove in front of him and pushed his hand down. When she looked up at us, I saw that her eyes were dry. “I’m from Earth. So is she.” She pointed at her daughter, whose aging had stopped at around fourteen, “Please… just let us go. We’ll go to…”

  “I don’t care.” Alice said, “Just go.”

  She walked forward, snatched the gun from the boy’s hand, turned around, and calmly walked out of the room.