***
Somehow, I fell asleep that night with relative ease. Penny was pressed between James and me, and she passed out in all of five minutes, so perhaps her exhaustion was contagious. Whatever the cause, I fell asleep with my head on James’s arm, as my anxiety was soothed by the feeling of his fingers brushing through my hair just above my ear. The sleep was heavy, resolute, unshakeable; my body fell under its spell without the slightest resistance, because to fall under that intoxicating darkness felt so good.
Sometimes, when I hovered just below the surface of consciousness, before the sea of sleep began to reach its blacker depths, I only dreamed in fragments. They were all innocuous images: strange little moving pictures, random words, flashes of real life mixed in with the bizarre or mundane. Flickers of movie scenes I remembered from the films on Earth, a random snippet of a song I had listened to on my computer, an image of a flower blooming… It was only when I was pulled into the darker depths that I Saw. Perhaps that was why I hated sleep so much; if I swam just below the surface, I was safe, but if I swam too deeply into the darkness, I would see the darkness. It would see me, and I would see it, and then, I would know what no one should know.
That night was no different.
The words danced in the water, strangely in focus despite how they rolled and churned with the currents of my sleep.
The one you have loved the longest will die. The one you have loved most dangerously will flee. It is simple, and it is written.
The prophecy was simple. They always tended to be. It was grappling with them that was difficult. Seeing them was a breeze. Understanding them was a breeze. Accepting them was where things got tricky. And painful.
Tyre was in his office, halfway across the world, on the Rover Phone, surrounded by his men, in their black uniforms. His top brass. His brains. Blancstizia had fallen. Paul was dead. Caspar was missing. Apparently, both had been thwarted by Luciana Miletus and my sister (Good girl, Violet. Color me impressed.) The Lapsarian had sunk. To their knowledge, everyone onboard had perished except a large lifeboat full of guards, and another large lifeboat full of prisoners. The former had washed up on the shores of Estersea, which was not far from where we were resting. In fact, we were closer to Estersea than we were to Del Mar. The latter had washed up in the western shores, closer to where our first house had been. They had disappeared.
“And Brynna Olivier? What of her and her little girl?” Tyre had asked, without disguising the obvious grief in his voice.
I expected him to say that we were dead, because that is what I had seen originally, but the voice on the phone spoke differently.
“We were told by our man that they are heading south, towards Del Mar.”
Tyre breathed a sigh of relief shamelessly. The men standing around him looked mildly uncomfortable when they saw how obviously relieved he was, because they thought that I was dangerous. They had heard of my antics on the Lapsarian. They had heard the rumors that had traveled of how I had killed the Warden. The Warden, Tyre’s brother, in whom, interestingly, he did not seem interested at all.
“I will not fear for her life like this again. Bring her to me now.” Tyre told another man, the man, the spy beside me, “If you must break her completely to bring her, then break her. I want her here. Use whatever means are necessary.”
My heart startled at the sight of the person on the other end of the call, at the identity of this spy who had been so close to me for all those years. But my mind would not hold the image. It would not commit it to memory, nor could my heart hold even an impression of the fear and hatred and rage and pure, blind sadness that the sight of it left behind.
I could feel the fear after I awoke, but I could not remember the sense of betrayal. I could not begin to gather any suspicion towards any one of the people in the room, though I knew that I should have been able to. I looked around at them all, as Adam rose from his sleep to be awake with me, as the realization dawned upon him that I had seen something terrible.
“We have to go. We have to go, Adam.” I told him, as I hopped up out of bed.
“What is that noise?” James asked, from across the room, and he set his glass of water down and zoomed off up the steps, but before he left, I saw how his eyes had turned over to white, how his pupils had elongated. The fight was coming to us, and he sensed it as much as I did.
Adam came to me, grasped my arms first and brought his hands up to rest on my face next, asking me to tell him what I had seen.
“They’re coming. And now, I can feel them. They’re close. Can’t you feel them?!”
“No. I cannot feel them, sweetheart. You may just be dreaming still…”
He stopped. Because just then, he realized that he did feel them. It had taken a few minutes longer for him than it had for me.
“Janna!” He called, and she jerked awake, “Take Idan, Grace, Penny, and Illa, and go into the forest.”
“It is too late, Adam!” I exclaimed, my entire body shaking. “They are here. They are here.”
“Take them upstairs.”
Who had been on the other end of the phone? Who had told him where we were? The guards had seen us leave on the boat, but Pangaea was huge. The sea surrounding it was even bigger. Someone had known where we had brushed up on shore, and where we had gone once we had entered the jungle. Someone in our group. Someone close to me. The person who had always been there. The one Tyre had mentioned to me so many times. The person who had been near me at the house, in Shadow Village, on the Lapsarian… Someone I loved. One of the people in that room that I had known all along: Rael… Janna… No, Janna had not been with me in the house, but did that matter? Had he ever specifically mentioned the time in the house? Tony. Tony had been with me in the house, in Shadow Village, on the Lapsarian. I had told him so many things, confided in him so many times.
“Who is it? Who is it? Which one of you is it?” I asked in a trembling whisper, as I looked all around, as Adam tried to calm me, but then, the sound of breaking glass detonated the growing tension in the room, and each of us was scrambling. A canister was spinning on the dusty, wooden floor, filling up the space with toxic smoke. I dove to the ground, my hands slipping and sliding on the dust-and-soot covered planks as I crawled around aimlessly, trying to find her, trying to find Penny. The alarm bells were wailing in my mind, voices were screaming, worlds were burning, and all the while, the prophecy was replaying over and over again, and Tyre was telling me it was someone close to me…
Coughing, wretching, and scurrying across the floor, I somehow managed to evade the men in black uniforms—Tyre’s elite foot soldiers—who had stampeded into the house. Penny was smart, and she would know to go upstairs to get away from the gas, to escape the men beating down the front door. She would have stood on the staircase, screaming for me, sobbing, but when the door had come down, she would have run, knowing I would catch up, knowing I would follow. I had always held her at night, praying that there was some switch I could turn in her mind that would tell her to save herself, to make her abandon me if the situation called for it. Perhaps those thoughts had nestled their way into her mind and burrowed deep. Perhaps I had been more able to hide them there than I had thought.
One of the men, wearing a black gas mask, grasped my foot and began to pull me back to him, and I twisted my ankle out of his grasp and kicked him as hard as I could in the face. The mask shattered, shards of the thick plastic burrowed into the flesh of his face, into his eyes, but I did not stop to make sure the damage was sufficient enough to stop him from following me. The spy, the Deep Cover Agent, the one Tyre had implanted beside me for all those years was in the house, and whoever it was, I knew all bets were off now. No more hiding. No more pretending. Even in the utter chaos, I knew that I would know all by the end of that terrible night.
But even without the utter chaos, I never could have prepared myself for the sight behind the door I had thrown open to escape.
My mind registered one dead body, on
e limp body, a sea of blood, and James. That initial image expanded slowly, revealing that it was a dead soldier, and that James was holding the limp body, rocking back and forth, and as he did so, the blood streaming from the body’s hair was sending blood splatters pattering across the floor, where they ran together to join the larger sea of blood. The body’s hair was not red. It was not Grace. It was not maroon. It was not Illa. It was… auburn.
And even as all air left my body, and my ears filled to the brim with dizzying silence, and my mind tumbled away, I walked towards them. And it was then that I saw the knife in her chest. The brown leather grip, the long blade, attached to which were those two smaller blades, the trident… and James’s hand around the grip of it.
“What have you done?” My voice said, though my ears did not hear my voice say it, and he could barely hear, because I had barely said it.
“It’s supposed to make you go with me.”
“What have you done, James?”
“To him. To Tyre. To the Sanctum.”
I was on my knees, in front of him, and her large, beautiful blue eyes, full of tears, of terror, of pleading, of… confusion, and hurt and pain, slowly losing their light, were looking at me, begging me to hold her, to make the pain stop, to tell her why…
How could I not have known? How could I not have seen it? After all those years?
“Oh, my God, James, what have you done to her? James… Oh, my God… James.”
“It’s over.” He whispered, and I could not look at him, but I could smell the tears falling from his eyes, “It’s done. He said it would happen like this. It’s done, so you’ve got nothing left to lose anymore.”
I was babbling. Her name, his name, looking at her, looking at him, tears beginning to stream as I yanked her from his arms, as I held her to my chest, focused my healing power, knowing it was too late, knowing that I couldn’t do it, my mind was too muddled, too unfocused, too overcome with emotion, too devoid of rationality, too lost in him, too possessed by him, by what he had done, by what he was doing, by how I couldn’t have known, after twenty-five years of hearing about the person buried deeply in our camp, purposely put close to me, how I could not have known or even suspected that it could be him…
“It’s time to end this.” He whispered, and his shaking hand reached out to me, “How many more people have to die before you go to him and help him end this for good? End Adam for good?”
“You did this.” I said, and my voice was still barely a whisper, “You did this… You…”
“It will be over fast, okay? I promise. He said once the war is over, he’ll give you to someone good, okay? You just have to help him end it. He can’t end it without you. So, let’s…” The door banged open, and the five soldiers stood there, training their guns on me, the bright lights on the end of the muzzles shining on me, blinding me. James held his hand up, and they stayed back.
God, it was true. It was all true.
“Let’s sit here until she goes, okay? And then we’ll… Brynna.” He said warningly, when he saw my body twitch, when my eyes turned over, when my grip on her tightened, and I began to look like I was going to run. “We’ll go, alright? I’m sorry. I’m so sorry it’s like this, Brynna.”
“James…” I whispered, and the tears began to gush from my eyes as Penny whimpered in my arms, as the tears fell from her eyes, as she reached out for him and whispered, “Daddy?”
And it shattered him, too. The sobs convulsed his body, but he did not reach out to take her outstretched hand. If I needed any more proof that it was true, I had it then. He was not a monster. Not completely. He felt guilt for what he had done. He had loved her. I think. But he did not love her enough to take her hand as she lay dying from the mortal wound he had inflicted upon her.
“Don’t touch her!” I screamed, when his hand began to raise, and behind me the window shattered, and the torches in the grate roared to life. The house began to rattle, and James signaled the guards to approach, to switch their guns over to tranquilizers.
But in a blink, I placed Penny beside a fallen desk, out of harm’s way, and rushed straight into the guards before they could fire the guns. The rage was pumping through me like battery acid, driving me to hit harder, bite deeper, and rip off limps with more force. I do not remember much of the fight, except that by the end, heads were literally rolling across the floor, and there was so much blood splattered across the walls that it looked like a fresh coat of paint. James charged me, and we fell to the ground, actually splashing into the sea of red on the floor, and as he pinned me down with one hand, I watched as he pulled a tranquilizer dart from one of the guns I had used to bash open one of the gas mask-helmets on one of the guards. My knee came up, nailing him between the legs, and I pushed him aside, rolled on top of him, bit down into him wherever I could, ready to kill him, ready to fucking destroy him. My hand came back, my nails scratched across his face, leaving welts deep enough to turn to scars, and he reached up and landed a solid hit across my jaw that left me seeing stars but still able to stagger away from him. I turned, faced him, and as he stood, catching his breath, spitting out the blood from his mouth, I charged him, tackled him around the middle, trying to remember the nights we had fought together, when he had told me his weaknesses, when we had been rehearsing for our fights onboard the Lapsarian, but I could not see those nights, when I had loved him so much, with every part of me, shamelessly, passionately, when we had made love afterwards, when he had held me as I fell asleep. I could not see the nights or the days or the months or the years when I had been so blind to who he was…
He pushed back against me, digging his heels in as I pushed him back towards the broken window, ready to throw him through, to end him forever, that sick bastard, that son of a bitch, that motherfucker, my fucking love, my love, my love… The blood on the floor was making him slip, so the weight advantage he had on me was nothing, and I pushed him across the floor and then shoved once we had reached the window.
There was a second about which I would remain unsure for many years to come. When my mind would find him after that terrible night, I would remember how just before he fell, he grabbed onto me, his eyes full of fear, because he realized that I was going to push him through, that I was going to kill him. His mind reached out, flailing as desperately as his hands were grabbing, and when our minds connected, I saw that in the forefront of his was that moment from the night before, when he had said that no matter what he did, it was always for me. He had to have been thinking it because he thought that pushing it into my mind would stop me from throwing him through the window. That is what I told myself afterwards, anyway.
In the moment, though, I pushed that memory from my mind and from his, and sent him hurtling backwards through the broken glass into open space. He grabbed onto me, but then, he let go, and when he tried to hold onto the window frame to stop his fall, his hand was cut on the jagged glass and immediately released its grip. I heard him bang against the outer wall, and I watched as he tumbled away. He was not dead, but after the damage I had inflicted upon him in our fight, coupled with the damage from his fall, he might have been soon.
More guards were coming. Tyre had sent all his best men to the fight, knowing that it would literally take an army to subdue me once my child was gone and the man I had loved for half my life had been revealed to me as the traitor who had long been beside me.
“Baby…” I whispered, as I lifted Penny and cradled her against my chest. She was crying weakly now, slipping away from me, her body trembling as it slipped into shock, and I tried to focus my mind again on healing her, but I had to get us away from the guards. I slipped and slid in the blood, stumbled over bodies, and then barged through the remnants of the broken door that was blocking my path into the hallway. What had killed the people in this house? Could it have been something as utterly apocalyptic as what had just happened to us? To our family? As what had just shattered us completely?
The guards were stomping up the stair
s, shouting, “It’s her!” and firing. Instinct told me to drop to my knees, to slide across the wooden floor, because they had fired at me while I was standing, and on the ground, their tranquilizer bullets would not find their mark. At the end of the hallway, I rounded a corner, slid on the old rug, busted my knee against the floor, dislocating my kneecap, surely, but I felt no pain. I felt none of it. Not my fear for Penny. Not the betrayal I felt when I thought about James. All I knew was that I had to get away. Maybe I could save her. Maybe once we were hidden away in the jungle, I could focus my mind enough to heal her.
They were right on my heels, and I knew that I was reaching a dead-end. At the end of the hallway, there were two more bedrooms, and then, there was another large window dead ahead of me. In the bedrooms, I could try to close the door and rappel out a window before the guards broke the door down. But the chances of being that quick while I was holding Penny were slim to none. So, the choice was simple, and I made it quickly, without hesitation.
With Penny latched to my chest, I let go of her, whacked the decorative vase off the small table just in front of the window, grabbed the table, and threw it through the window to break the glass (but not enough, I am afraid). I turned so my back was facing it, so Penny would not go through the barely broken glass first, and jumped through backwards. My knees tucked up, and my upper body curled down to protect her, so I went through in a reverse-cannonball, and thinking about jumping like a cannonball put Luc into my head, because I remembered how he had loved to show off his pool-jumps. And thinking about Luc reminded me that Penny was dying, that if I lost her, that was two siblings, two innocent lives, that I had lost, and I could not fathom it. As she and I crashed through open space, as we free-fell through the air and crashed onto the ground below, as the wind was snatched from my lungs when I crashed onto the ground, I resolved to simply not accept that her death was a possibility.
I had turned on my side in mid-air and maneuvered Penny so she would not hit the ground. I had been unable to land on my feet, so I had landed on my side, and I heard a crack, and when I stood at first, my body gave out, but then, the pain disappeared from my consciousness, and I was limping rather quickly towards the jungle.
Every time I had been severely injured, I had thought that there would never be a moment, except for perhaps when I finally died, in which I would ever be more severely injured. As I hobbled off into the greenery, I was sure that my number was up, and I knew what I had to do. I would sacrifice my life for Penny’s. I would bargain with God or the Gods to take me instead. I would be able to heal her once I had made that bargain. I would pump my life-force into her as I had done to the Warden. My hip was shattered on one side of my body, my knee was shattered on the other, I was stuck through with glass, and bruised and bleeding from my fight with James and the guards. Surely, I would not survive, and even if I could survive, I would still sacrifice my life for hers. I wanted her to grow up, to go to school, to fall in love, if she wanted. I wanted her to learn from the tale of her mother, from the tale of her “father’s” betrayal, but I wanted her to have a happy life, whatever that meant for her. I wanted Adam and Janna to care for her, as I would care for Idan if harm befell them. But I had no idea if they were even alive. I had no idea how far the ripples of that night had gone, how many lives had been lost in the process.
“BRYNNA!” A voice was shouting, and it sounded like James, but it also might have been Adam, or perhaps it was Tony. It was a man shouting, but I could only hear Penny’s breathing rattling more dangerously now. I could only feel my legs finally give out. I crashed down, sitting in the dirt of the forest floor, tears falling from my eyes, noises neither human nor animal falling from me as I held her, a sobbing noise, a moaning noise, and gasps that sounded like each would be the last.
“Penny, please.” I cried, “Penny, please. Baby, please stay awake. Penny, please. Penny, please. Penny, please. Baby, please.” I begged, “Baby, please. I love you. I love you. Penny, please stay with me.”
All around me, the jungle was rattling, and I did not care if it was Tyre’s guards, or Adam and Janna and Grace, or God himself.
“Mama?” She asked, as her wandering eyes finally came to look at me. She opened her mouth to say something else, and I began to dread hearing those words, because surely, she would ask me why? Why had Daddy hurt her? Why had I let Daddy hurt her? Why hadn’t I known? Why hadn’t she known? Surely, if she did not blame me, she would say she loved me, because she knew, in her strange wisdom that was so beyond her years, that no other words truly mattered in the end. Instead, though, she just asked again, “Mama?” And she sounded so lost, so confused, so scared… Again, she asked, “Mama?”
“I’m right here, baby.” I whispered, “I’m right here, baby. My baby, my baby…”
Her hand came up with great effort, just as the tears of pain fell from her eyes. It rested against my cheek, and for a long moment, our eyes met. For a long moment, I looked at her, and she looked at me, and I felt the love I had felt for her for all those many, many years. I felt the love she had felt for me. I felt the moment she had first been in my arms, the first time I had soothed her cries, the first time I had held her hands as she walked… I saw the nights in our apartment, I saw her in her bassinet under the Christmas tree, as Rachel and I opened the gifts that we had bought for her, all her little onesies and bibs and little infant toys… I saw the nights I had read to her in bed, I saw the night on the ship when she had looked out the great window at the rushing sea of color and light and stars, her eyes alight with wonder, with utter awe.
And she saw all of it, too.
She saw the nights we had spent in the house in the year after we first arrived. How the three of us—her, James, and me—had stayed up late, playing games, how we had gone swimming in the lake, how she had helped me make meals in the kitchen, how she had played for hours on the lawn with the other children. She saw our time in Shadow Village, when we had lived in our house in the trees. How she and Idan had become the very best of friends. How they had gone to school together, and gotten up to their mischief together. How James had told her stories before bed each night, how she had crawled into bed with us when the thunderstorms frightened her, how she had never felt safer than she had felt when she was with us. How on the Lapsarian, she had counted the hours until we would be with her, how she had dreaded the moment when we left. She saw Violet and Alice and Quinn and Eli and Nick and our mother and even John, whom she had only met once, but whom she had liked. But she saw James, and I did not understand how she could.
She saw our lives together as a family, and she felt no anger, no hurt, no sense of betrayal. She just loved him, despite what he had done. And it was that love she felt for him that shattered me beyond anything else. It was seeing that love that finally erupted the pain inside of me, the unimaginable pain that was unlike anything I had ever felt before in all my years of feeling unimaginable pain. It was how someone so good could be taken in such a terrible way. How my little girl with her beautiful, loving heart, and her eternally kind, beautiful soul could die such an ugly death.
And she did die. Penny died in my arms just before our first dawn as free people broke the horizon. There is not much I can say about it, even now. What could I possibly say? That it hurt? That it was my worst nightmare coming true? That it was pain beyond the worst pain, that it was grief beyond the worst grief? That there was a sick irony in it, because I had dreaded so long her growing older, her not being my little girl anymore, and then she died as a little girl in my arms? That I was so stupid, that I had not realized that she was the one I had loved the longest, that the prophecy had been about her? I could say all those things, because they are all true. But I cannot say anything else about it. In the same way that James had “saved” me from dying in the destruction of Earth, I had then saved Penny. I had brought her to a faraway land to keep her safe, to give her a chance at a life, but instead, I had brought her to a world more disgusting and broken and sad a
nd sick than the world we had left. It is so sad. It is so incomprehensible, even now.
Adam was in front of me. His hand was on my blood-smeared cheek. I had never seen him cry like he was crying then, as he said my name, as he tried to elicit some response from me, but as I just sat, still as the dead, eyes as blank as hers, as he felt in my heart every part of me falling away, every piece of the person I had been before that moment—that ultimate, horrific moment—dissolve, and when time had passed, and they tried to take her from my arms, he got his response.
The scream that erupted from me sent a wave of energy so powerful it knocked them back. My fangs had shot out, my body was shaking, and my power was beginning to run rampant, on its own, wreaking havoc on my heart’s behalf. Behind us, the house caught on fire and burned to the ground, and around us, the trees began to fall, and a mile from us, the ocean began to lash against the shore, and from the heavens, ice began to pour. It settled on the foliage, freezing it, turning it white with frost first, and then black with rot. And as I held her tighter, I screamed until my voice buckled.
One of them took her from me, and just when I thought my ability to make any sound at all had been exhausted, my scream turned midway into a roar. Somehow, my broken body managed to throw itself up, and I managed to charge forward, but Adam’s arms were around me, holding me back. I was strong, stronger than I should have been, so strong that each time I thrust myself forward, roaring in utter rage, I pulled him with me, until finally, he lifted me off of my feet.
“Take her.” Adam said, his voice broken, nearly unrecognizable, “You have to take her away, Tony.”
Tony crying. Sobbing. Holding Penny.
“NO!” I shrieked, my roars dissolving into screams again, into words. “NO! PENNY! PENNY! PENNY! Oh, God…” I moaned, “Oh, God… NO!”
How could I not have known? How could I not have seen it? It was right there, all along. He was right there all along.
The one you have loved the longest… The one you have loved the longest…
And she was gone. She was lost to me.
“Penny! Penny! Oh, God… Oh, my God…”
Why had she paid the price for my ignorance? Why did it have to be her?
“Penny, please. Penny, please. Penny, please. Penny, please…”
It was burning through me. It was ripping me apart, that pain. My cheeks were burning, and yet inside, I felt so cold. Everything was broken. Everything was lost. Why had it been her? Why had it been her? Why had it been her? Why had it been her?
“Oh, God… Why didn’t I see it? Why didn’t I see it? Oh, God… Oh, my God…”
It was the wound that would never stop bleeding. It was the end of time. It was the final extinction. The irreparable shattering. The cataclysm. The ultimate, absolute conclusion.
“Penny.”
The irreversible reckoning.
The fourth book in the Eternity series will be available in Late 2015/Early 2016
Follow T. Rudacille on her blog, T. Rudacille is Shamelessly Self-Promoting, for updates and sneak peeks, and follow her on Twitter @teerudyeternity!
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