Episode 5 - The Tide Recedes, and What it Leaves Behind

  Chapter 49 - Squall (2)

  Hands grasp me around my shoulders, lifting me upwards, and immediately triggering stabbing pains down the side of my body. Rhett props me upright against the wall, his eyebrows bunched together. The deep breath I take as he moves me sends a sharp pang through my side where the first hit landed, and I gasp out a guarded squeak of pain.

  “You right?” he asks.

  I can’t even form words, groaning as I lift my hand to grip my side. Each breath I take sends another spasm of pain. It whites out every other feeling in my mind on a regular cadence, blanketing my ability to feel my bond, and onwards to Adrian and Pooka. Unconsciously, I take small, shallow breaths, wincing with each attempt to avoid further suffering. It succeeds in only preventing the sharpest stabs, and does nothing to prevent the dull ache beginning to propagate through my torso.

  Rhett lifts the side of my shirt to inspect my side, pushing my hand aside. He hisses slightly between his teeth as he lays eyes on my skin. “Yeah, that’ll smart for a minute.” Then he twists to look around onto my back as well. His hands are cool and smooth, a welcome contrast to the throbbing. “Can you breathe?”

  “Barely. It hurts.”

  “Bruised rib, probably,” he diagnoses without pretense. “How about walking?”

  “Maybe?” I manage. I don’t feel brave enough to look down at my side as he pulls my shirt back into position.

  “You’ll need to get on your feet. We need to get out of here.” He steps over the unconscious guard to collect his weapons from the floor where they landed when I threw the table back in the ante-room.

  “Yeah, Pooka is off distracting everyone.”

  “Is Adrian running this? How did you get down here?”

  I grimace. What am I supposed to say? Whoops, I may have taken over your human communication unit for myself?

  Then Adrian chimes in without a single pause of hesitation. “Conrada has field command. You both have a clear exit while Conrad’s symbiont continues to wreak havoc. Take the emergency stairwell up. I’ll give you directions as you need them.”

  “Should I lock in?” asks Rhett, returning and putting one shoulder under my arm to lift me. I groan with pain as my torso stretches straight from my doubled-over hunch. Two wasps hover ominously around our heads.

  “Conrad is enough. I need only one of you.”

  Adrian is going to own me after this. I’ll do anything for that man. He doesn’t need to plant any 'traps' in my mind. A dark little side-thought hides itself for examination later; our knowledge of the other's secrets only continues to grow. We might as well each be holding a gun to the other's heads, equally armed with enough ammunition to destroy a life if we wanted.

  Rhett blinks. “It was your voice then? You locked in?”

  I nod, then brace myself against a holding cell door as I test taking my weight. He watches me with a knowing eye and takes a step back. “You’re gonna hate the stairs.”

  “Great.”

  “You’re gonna hate the ride back along the rooftops even more.”

  “Loving the commentary.”

  Rhett sniffs and glances up the corridor back towards the guard station. The guard at our feet is out cold, Rhett’s knuckles bruised and red, whatever damage he left knocking him out buried under the guy’s hairline, probably.

  “We might be able to save this,” says Rhett as we begin the fastest walk I can manage back out the way we came. “I stumbled into one of their servers a few floors up, broke the clean seal on my way in. With some hope, they will think that was our only target.” He places a hand on the wall as Pell steps down and climbs onto him again, perching on his head with her legs spread around his skull protectively.

  I don’t really have much energy to converse, letting my mind drift to pick up an awareness of our surroundings again. Pooka continues to rage, carving a path of wild destruction and chaos through offices and conference rooms. He's completely swept up in his distracted, wild rage - ignorant of my status and doing anything to keep attention away from us.

  Every step scatters my concentration, leaving my nerves fizzing and my sense of self distant. I gather what parts of my will I can, and use it to just keep on placing one step after the other in front of me.

  Rhett lowers me to the ground, and I lean against the base of the structural rig of the radio tower with a sigh of relief. I couldn’t help the wet tears streaming down my cheeks from the agony of climbing so many stairs. Rhett was basically dragging me up the last few flights by the end when my exhaustion finally caught up with me.

  “Where’s Pooka?” he asks, watching back towards the way we came.

  “Coming.” I lean back and shut my eyes. “Can you get Pell to check the connection? Please.”

  Rhett narrows his eyes suspiciously.

  “They know we’re here. What extra harm can it do?” I beg.

  “Draw their attention to something I just went to a lot of effort to hide?”

  “Can you just check it please?” I sigh, my heart sinking. “I know… I just. I chose Regina not finding out as the higher priority. Maybe the destruction will keep them from noticing. Maybe I’ll get a few weeks out of it still, maybe months if the techs are busy or stupid. I broke things all the time and it would be months before I saw it get fixed… It's fine. It is what it is.”

  Things go wrong all the time. I improvised. I made the right choices. I cannot let myself think otherwise. But when I sniff, feeling my throat catch and tears start again in the corner of my eyes. I feel only my failure, my stupid impulsivity. I bury my head in my hands.

  It feels like I’ve given up so much to achieve so little.

  “Nothing ever goes perfectly,” says Adrian in my head across our connection.

  “I know,” I reply silently. “There’s just… a lot to do still.”

  Stolen novel; please report.

  “You need to finish up at Bio-Vats-”

  “It’s a cryptid, a jackalope,” I say simply, using the common name. “I saw it the first day we were here.”

  Adrian comes to a halt in my mind. I can feel him thinking, and I leave him to the privacy of his own thoughts as he does. I turn my head slightly, resting my cheek on my arm, and watch Rhett begin a climb up the ladder to the access hatch for the internals, Pell mounted on his shoulder.

  “Did you manifest the ability to see symbionts when you bonded with Pooka?” asks Adrian quietly.

  I bury my head again, sniffing as I barely hold back my exhausted tears. “I’ve always been this way.”

  “An artifact of your mother being pregnant when she manifested?”

  “I don’t know. My dad thought she could always see them too. Pooka calls me a conduit. It seems to just be how bonds with symbionts used to be once… I don’t know how or why things changed.”

  Adrian feels thoughtful. I can feel his body sitting upright in an armchair - not his wheelchair - alone in the dark of his private quarters with a cup of long cold coffee in one fist. The light from the city beyond illuminates his space in bands between the slats of his blinds. How many late nights does he spend with Aquila’s operatives?

  “A lot,” he answers. I flinch at my inability to have kept that thought from him. “I’ll do some thinking about it. Information from before scarcity is hard to come by.”

  “You’re not ratting me out?” I ask.

  “How many people know?”

  “Just you, my dad. That’s it. I’ve been keeping this secret since I could talk.”

  “I’ve kept darker secrets. This one is… curious.”

  "Darker secrets like your little 'traps'?"

  Adrian does not reply, letting a pregnant silence between us grow. There is a flash of guilt, and self-loathing as deep as his bones. A tumble of confusion that admits he has long since considered it unnecessary, but has never undone what has become habit. He recoils from me desperate not to talk about this.

  I take a breath, knowing suddenly what our relationship will be now. Neither of us will speak of what we both know, feigning ignorance of the deeply private worlds we've each seen. I draw the attention back to myself. “You’re not angry?”

  Adrian sighs across our bond, partially in relief and partially in answer to my question. “I feel little of things like that. Never have. Curious is about as good as I get these days.”

  “How long until the lock in wears off?”

  “Few hours.”

  “Will you be sick like you were with Rhett?”

  “No. I don’t think so. Although we best continue to avoid locking in now I know the reason you avoided it. Especially if anyone else is locked in as well.” There is a pause, like he hesitates asking his next question. “Can you… Can you ask my symbiont her name?”

  I wipe a tear from my cheek, a tiny smile managing to creep onto my lips. “You heard him?”

  A small voice, trembling and gentle, with a husky feminine rasp, returns.

  We have no name. We have never been heard before.

  Our kind does not have names we give ourselves. That has always been a human thing to do, formed in the joint space of the bond.

  You go by Pooka?

  You gave me that name, it is unique to this life.

  “How about Espah?” suggest Adrian, interrupting our conversation.

  His symbiont does not respond. But the Vespa on my ear stills its wings, and the night is silent of its drone for a moment. I stare at the ground ahead of me and try to keep out of the silence in the space in my head we all coexist in now. It feels like a room I shouldn’t be in, even if I created it.

  “Here.”

  I start, snapping back to my own body. Rhett stands over me, handing down my tablet from my backpack that had been left on the roof during our hunt to the lower floors. I reach a hand, take it from his grip and look at the screen.

  There is a message log, hundreds long. He downloaded every message sent to and from the IDs I’d given him since I left Aquila. I brush my hair out of my face and tug the tablet closer, beginning to scroll and not really reading any of the words. My eyes watch the IDs though, one after another, such familiar numbers that I saw daily in my old life.

  Meiko is ‘MRG2002322G’. There’s a whole log of chats with her complaining about a change in her shift schedule at the power plant. She must have manifested an electrical symbiont like her family; they were all Hystrix of one species or another. It would have been perfect for her.

  There’s a scattering from Harris in there too. ‘MRG2044987D’. He stayed friends with Meiko and Jason, looking at the logs, and moved up in the world quickly too. Looks like he might even be a supervisor now.

  Finally, I spot some from ‘SB0088907A’. Dad. I laugh bitterly as I scroll by one complaining to Gilroy that someone left the lab in a mess while he was out. There aren't many. I realize he probably doesn’t have many people to message with a lonely pang.

  They’re all fine. They’re all alive. They are living lives that seem happy from a distance.

  Without me.

  The rush of a victory I barely have time to feel is shut behind that swinging gate of thought containing two words. Another exhausted tear rolls down my face, and I tap the side button to turn the screen black. Rhett sits at my side, knees tucked up to his chest and hands hanging in front of him to wait.

  “It didn’t work?”

  “It worked,” I reply.

  “Hmm?”

  I rub my nose. My body aches. I’m tired. I haven’t slept. This feels so stupid, that I wanted this so much and it hurts to finally get it. I’m an idiot. I’ve always been.

  “Just, ah… feeling left behind.”

  “Hmm.”

  I put the tablet down, and finally let myself cry freely into the palm of my hands, tucked like a ball in the cold air on a roof in a city I no longer live in. All the rush and danger and adrenaline are gone. I’m too tired now. I just want to go home, wherever that is.

  Whatever Rhett and Adrian think of me, they both stay silent and wait.

  Time passes, and I’m finally disturbed by a furred form butting a cold wet nose into my hand. I lift my head, and Pooka shoves his muzzle into the cage I’ve built for myself in my arms. His whiskers twitch against my hands, and I tuck my face into his forehead, wrapping my arms around his furred neck and drawing him closer to me. He pushes his weight back into me, pressing his chest against my legs, and leans on me. He feels cold. He always feels so cold. He wraps us both away from the communion of the confusing bond I have with Adrian and Espah, binding me in his presence. And he warms me by bundling my thoughts with his own until there is only the two of us.

  We wander through his memories together. He shows me a waterfall carved into a rock face, roaring like a mighty beast and spraying white foam into the air. He shows me a clearing between the forests, ancient trees of sizes I can’t imagine casting moving shadows across shifting blades of grass that sway with the breeze.

  He shows me falling rain. It is clear, and cascades from a mournful gray sky. It drips down the sides of rocks in rivulets, each droplet gathering until they are fat and heavy, and then falling one after another. And the clouds shift, letting ribbons of white light through.

  We share no words.

  I have some Patreon announcements for Book 2/Season 2. I will finally be introducing advanced chapters (starting with 4 which is 2 weeks ahead of RR and building to 8 over the next few months). It will be offered at the low price of $4 a month for the 4 and if you join now you will be grandfathered into that price as I increase up to 8 chapters (which will be offered for $8), letting you get the full 8 once we get there for the original $4. Everything will go live with the first chapter of Season 2 on Oct 11 (a little over 1 week from now), so if you join you can read the first 5 chapters (1 dropped on Oct 11 on RR + 4 advance for Patreon members) all in one go!

  Patreon here! Looking forward to having you all on this continued journey! We got a lot of questions to answer still.