The Irreversible Reckoning

  Brynna

  My lungs drew in a gasp so sharp that even while I was stuck in the paralysis brought on by the state of dreaming, my hand somehow managed to jerk up and grasp my chest. My body broke completely free from that paralysis, with my chest rising first and then pulling the rest of my body up with it. Janna and Adam awoke with gasps of their own and both immediately sat up to begin trying to comfort me.

  “Penny isn’t with them.” I murmured, to stop them from talking, to stop them from trying to tell me that it was just a nightmare. When Adam went to speak again, I repeated myself louder, more forcefully. “Penny isn’t with them! She is not with Violet! She never made it back!”

  “Brynna, how do you know this?” Janna asked, and even though I was not looking back at them, I knew that Adam must have given her the look asking if she was seriously posing such a silly question to me. My power was legendary; everyone knew I was an Athene, though they did not know just how powerful of an Athene I was.

  “Never mind. Of course. Never mind me.” Janna said, and I slid down to the end of the bed so I could stand and begin pacing.

  “What if they have her?” I muttered, more to myself than to them, though in my peripheral vision, I could see Adam beginning to stand. He came over to me and tried to wrap one of the throw blankets around my shoulders, and I shook him off at first.

  “Brynna. Come now, it is too cold in here…”

  “I don’t care. What if they have her, Adam? And Violet… The Old Spirits were at the bunker, and they have her now, too. And they probably have Alice and Quinn, and Nick is dead! Violet is devastated because Nick is gone, and what am I going to do?”

  I was shaking, and the tremors were the result of the adrenaline coursing through me, certainly, but the fear I felt for the lives of Violet, Quinn, and Alice, but especially Penny, was driving my body to tremble that way, as well. But also, I was shaking because Adam was right: that room was freezing. When I turned away from him, I was hugging myself as I often did when I became overwhelmed with emotion and when I was cold, and he wrapped the throw blanket around me and began to rub my arms. At first, I was going to storm away, because the last thing I wanted was to be comforted while Penny was out there, in someplace unknown to me, lost and afraid and alone. But just as I went to walk away, the feeling of his hands rubbing up and down my arms calmed my mind enough that I could begin to think on a straighter, clearer path, and I released the deep breath I had not realized I had been holding and relaxed my body against him.

  “We have to get out of here.” I told him, “We have to escape from here, Adam. I need to find her. Something terrible is going to happen to her out there. She will not survive on her own.”

  “You are right.” He said, “So we will…”

  But just then, the door opened, and Janna immediately stood and joined us.

  “Ah,” Tyre said, “You are both looking better. And my, you are quieter.” He said to Janna, who scowled at him but said nothing, though I could see that there was plenty she wished to say.

  “Do not speak to her.” Adam snarled.

  “She is no longer your concern, Adam.”

  “She is my concern.”

  “No. Her husband is here to take her away.”

  It was devastating to me, but the second he entered the room, my skin prickled painfully, and my body recoiled further into Adam. It was a reflex, one that I could not have prevented if I had tried; it was an animal’s instinctual drive to avoid experiencing pain. Adam was standing behind me, and his grip on me tightened because he had felt my body press harder against his, and he had seen my shoulders tense, and my head turn away from James. Because he was touching me, and because my defenses against entering the minds of others had briefly been shattered by the sight of James, I read into his thoughts to see that he pitied us both terribly. If you have read the transmissions proceeding this, then you know how he hated James, and how he wished for the demise of our relationship so that he could have me. But seeing us in such a state brought my new husband no joy at all. In fact, it hurt him, and it was not just me for whom he was hurting; he was hurting for James, too.

  “No man or woman deserves it.” He said to me without speaking out loud, because he knew that I was in his mind and could hear him. “Not even him. Especially not you.”

  James did not appear to suffer when he saw me. His eyes scanned me like I was a stranger, albeit one that provoked him to feel a great deal of disgust. However, I knew that if I were to lunge towards him, threatening to touch him, he would not only recoil in the way that I had, but he would more than likely strike out at me. It was amazing that their torture method had been so effective on both of us in such different ways. Clearly, because he had been the one to break in the end, he would be the one to feel the resentment towards me. But actually, it was not resentment; it was downright hatred. He saw me as the cause of the terrible agony he had endured for hours upon hours upon hours; he did not blame them for those hours, he blamed me. Because I had been the one who had held on just a little bit longer, I did not feel towards him the resentment or the hatred. I felt only the love I had always felt for him and the hopeless realization that he would never feel towards me again that love I knew he had felt for so long. He was the one left with the broken mind, I was the one left with the broken heart. And wasn’t that little swap of broken things ironic? His heart was stronger than mine, and my mind was stronger than his; at least our strongest parts had not been broken, I suppose.

  “Let’s go.” He said to Janna, and he reached out his hand to her. She looked between Adam and me apologetically, and while Adam showed no reaction to watching the wife he had chosen walk to the man they had chosen for her, a man whom he hated, I nodded, telling her that it was alright. Despite the self-satisfaction that she had felt after their one-night affair, I could see her guilt now, and her reluctance to showcase right in front of me that she would be his wife, not me. I nodded, because it was not her fault, and there was nothing either of us could do, but the sight of her taking his hand and turning away to leave with him burnt through me like a powerful, corrosive acid. It was anger, it was envy, it was disgust… My eyes fell on Tyre while he was watching them, and for one second, I felt them change over to red. He had been the one to order that punishment for James and me; he had been the one to separate us; he had been the one to irreversibly take him from me… He was the one showcasing that Janna was James’s wife right in front of me; he was the one keeping me locked up in that room; he was the one not letting me find Penny, who was out there, afraid and alone…

  “James.” I said, and we both startled ever so slightly, me because my voice had taken on a will of its own to speak his name, and him because he had not expected me to speak to him.

  “No.” Tyre said, and his voice had regained that kindness and patience with which he had spoken to me before he had forced me to look at James’s dead body. “Brynna, he does not belong to you anymore. He is hers. There is nothing for you to say to him. Adam, tell your wife that you will not permit her to speak to him.”

  “Penny is missing!” I said, before Adam could speak. James’s head turned to me, but he said nothing. “She did not make it back to Violet. I don’t know where she is; she is probably out in the woods, all alone…”

  He turned to me, his eyes boring into me so intensely, but his face remaining totally impassive. For a moment, I thought that he was trying to communicate with me telepathically, so I opened my mind to receive his message. But there was nothing. His mind was blank. When I pushed further to see into his heart, I saw that it was as empty of activity as his mind.

  “James!” I exclaimed, still keeping the channel open, trying to fill the vacuum of space in his mind and heart with my absolute terror for our daughter. She was ours, I was her mother, and he was her father; she called him ‘Daddy,’ she loved him tremendously, and she needed us. She was out there alone, waiting for us to find her.

  But there was nothing. His mind was emittin
g thoughts of confusion, because why should he care about my kid? What did she have to do with him? He did not have amnesia; he remembered how we had been raising her together, how he had been a present force in her life every day for the previous two years, how he had put her to bed at night, told her stories, taken her to school, patched up her cuts when she got hurt, stayed up through the night with her when she got sick, how she had called him ‘Daddy’ for the last months of our time together as a family… He just did not care. They had not just robbed him of his love for me, they had robbed him of his love for her, too.

  And that hurt worse than anything they could ever have done to me.

  “She’s yours.” He said, and he shrugged slightly, “It’s your problem. Deal with it.”

  “James, you’re in there.” I said, and I started to walk forward, but Adam wrapped his arms around me and held me back. That didn’t stop me from continuing to try to reach James. “I know you’re still in there, and I need you to remember her. I don’t care about me, I just need you to remember your love for her. She loves you so much, you’re her father!”

  “I am not her father!” He snapped at me, and he was starting to storm towards me now. Tyre held out one arm and was able to hold him back, even though three of the formerly Earthean guards who had tried to stop him when he had first lunged had been unable to hinder him at all. “She is nothing! You are nothing! Do you hear me?! You are nothing!”

  “Come on.” Janna was saying softly, and she had both of her hands on his shoulders. “Come on, James. It is time to go.”

  His eyes were blazing into mine, so red that there was no way that he was forcing it. He could not falsify enough rage to make his eyes so deeply red. He could not falsify the thoughts in his head that proclaimed how little he cared for me and for Penny. When he turned to Janna, grabbed the back of her head, and pulled her into him so he could kiss her, it made me sick, but not nearly as sick as what he had said about Penny, the fact that he was lost to her irreversibly…

  Janna took his hand, not chancing an apologetic glance back at me because Tyre was watching them, and together, hand-in-hand, she and James left the room.

  “So, Penelope is among the missing? Who told you this, Brynna?” Tyre asked me, but I was not going to speak to him. I was going to glare at him, with eyes that were even more deeply red than James’s had been. I knew that James could not falsify his rage for me, and Tyre knew from looking into my eyes that I could not falsify the rage I felt towards him; I loathed him down to his core, and I would kill him the second I got the chance.

  “Oh, I know that you are angry now, Brynna, but you will come to thank me one day. For all of this. Believe you me, there will come a day when you rue the moment you met James Maxwell, and I have spared you that now. All the truths there are to know about him, all the lies he has told… But no matter. All of that ugliness is of little importance now.”

  I did not believe a word out of his mouth, though he paused for a moment to let them all sink in.

  “Now,” He said, “Who told you about Penelope being missing?”

  “I just know it.” I snapped at him, because it seemed as though the person who had told me would suffer repercussions if he found out who she was, and obviously, I would not endanger Violet.

  “She is not missing, and if she were missing, you would have seen it, and then you would have ‘just known it.’ Someone told you. Is your sister communicating with you, Mrs. Elohimson?”

  Still weird.

  “No. I saw it in a dream that Penny is missing. Where is she, Tyre?”

  “She is alright.”

  “Where is she?!” I yelled at him, and he snapped; his closed fist was delivered in a vicious backhand punch across my face, and if Adam had not been lightly holding me, I would have crashed to the floor.

  “Get out!” Adam bellowed. His body was trembling violently, and I knew that he had never wanted to kill anyone in all his thousands of years more than he wanted to kill Tyre right then.

  Tyre sighed and ran his hands backwards over his hair, pushing it back into place. He reached out and grasped my chin.

  “She is safe, but she will not be for long if you continue on this infuriating path of disobedience. I will not tolerate your defiance for much longer. I am making a concentrated effort to be calm and gentle with you, Brynna, but you are trying my patience. And you…” He pointed at Adam, “…You had better enjoy this time with her now, because soon, I will place her into the General Population, and you will see her only when I say that you may.”

  “General Population?” I managed to ask, and my heart sunk, because suddenly, it dawned on me. I looked up at him, and Adam looked at him, because together, we realized it.

  “Yes.” Tyre said, “Welcome to the great and terrible Lapsarian.”