The Chant of the Sibyl
Oct. 31st, 2008 11:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crows[And so it begins again. For NaNo this year, I'm writing more chunks of last year's story, and chunks of its sequel, called True Life. This is from the kickoff last night, between midnight and 3 AM; picking up where I left off before. Fragments. It is not spellchecked.]
Jadany sat on her knees, feeling her feet go numb against the cold concrete floor of the compound. The stone, the air, all felt warmer than Witch's gaze curiously down at her from where he sat across her, their knees only a hand's bredth apart in the half-darkened room. She breathed in once, laboured, and breathed out again.
“You don't have to,” his voice came, as if from beyond a great distance, the low rumble of thunder that might call one's attention to a stormy horizon.
“No,” Jadany breathed slowly out, letting her eyes fall finally shut to the heaviness that pressed them. “I do.”
Suddenly, Jada stood amongst grass that rose to her shoulder, flicking softly back and forth at the joy of an inconstant wind. She gasped the air, her lungs flooding with the pure elation of clean purity, the fleeting memories of many Autumns lost to her; crisp and dying away like apples fallen from the tree. Low thunder murmured in the distance, wavering on her consciousness. She didn't want to turn around and look, fear clutching lazily at her stomach.
Pressing her hands to her abdomen, she looked down to see a sweep of unfamiliar gingham cloth; a simple frock whose cotton did little to protect her skin from a gathering chill in the air. Electricity lanced her consciousness, making her skin prickle as the thunder announced itself again. It crawled in the distance to her back, stalking back and forth as she put off turning to face it, conscious of her presence, her hesitation. Conscious.
Jadany turned slowly, the blades of grass always licking at her bare arms, tickling the goosebumps raised by the pre-storm tension weighting the wind. Thunderheads came up out of the distance like proud fortresses, or the stern faces of generals that wait for the oncoming battle to finally reach the buttresses of all their carefully laid plans. Plans. Out of the dusk, which looked timid underneath the brow of those stormclouds, a single figure resolved itself out of the distance. On the pallete of gunmetal sky and terrain below dun and gold with wheat ready for harvest, a single splinter of paleness grew steadily more solid. Finally, it grew into the shape of a man whose gait and shoulders she could make out against the swaying grain. He walked toward her. The storm, despite all the sweeping energy that it seemed to carry, stayed behind him. His pace remained even, and at a distance that shouldn't have betrayed such detals to her, she was able to make out that his eyes were blue. Pale, calculating blue like the color of deep ice, under the sweep of his long hair the color of snow.
I know his name, Jadany thought to herself, suddenly without the nagging fear that the storm had thrown over her. I know his name... I know I remember it. She straightened in the grass, waving a hand to him. His eyes remained on her, but he didn't wave back. His name...
Lightening glittered in the clouds behind him, sparking from mass to mass and illuminating the roiling vapour but not yet flying groundward. A second on the heels of the light, thunder snapped demandingly, but the man did not hasten his pace towards her. A dream consciousness, or the notion of having scanned the unmemorable far horizon, reminded her that no shelter existed in this open, endless field of waiting grain. No farmhouse squatted along the furrows, no barn leaned to shadow lazy cattle fattening themselves in preparation for winter. The field stretched impossible behind her, and, in fact, in all directions out from where she stood. Even though she never took her eyes from the approaching man, she knew every inch of it, every mile that fell away from the point at which she stood. Suddenly, Jadany sensed an exhillerating understanding of being able tos ee in all directions at once. A sense of the endless bowl of sky, the black earth beneath her feet that waited for rain.
The tall man was only twenty paces from her now, and gaining. Now ten. Now five. She looked up at him as he drew near, his stern face chiseled in angles impossibly hard and fine. A diamond adamance hovered around his countenance, expression guarded but not unkind. He stopped only a breath's distance from her, reached for her hand. When her fingers met his, they were warm and strong, his skin tough.
“Stay with me,” he said only, without introducing himself to her, reminding her of the name she forgot. Jadany couldn't remember any names, now, even though it struck her to try.
She faltered, shaking her head slightly as her brow furrowed without understanding.
“Shh,” he admonished gently, holding her steady as his other hand settled weightlessly on her shoulder. “Just stay beside me. Walk with me, where I walk. And I will walk with you.”
“But I...” her voice came from some tiny place far away, as if through miles and miles of cotton batting strewn from ground to sky. “I can't remember your name... I'm so sorry...”
“You don't need to, where we are going.” He smiled a smile that was not alltogether pleasant, the grim consciousness of many horrors glowing faintly behind his expression.
“Where are we going?” Jadany asked innocently, blinking her wide, dark eyes.
“Wherever you will lead me, because I know now that you will lead me where I need to go.”
His voice was beginning to change at a rate almost too slow for her to perceive. Sudden distrust flooded her, cold and unkind. Falling back a step, Jadany jerked her hand away from his, feeling the return of the same anxiety that gripped her when she first heard the thunder. The man's pale countenance began to shift and darken, twisting into something else. Some otherness, and also something uncomfortably familiar.
“Jada...” he whispered; the man that was not the man walking across the plains. His eyes warmed, the blue beginning to go green as his hair darkened in splotches as if stained with ink. “Jada, I have never stopped searching for you. Not for one day. Not one day.”
A scream began to tickle its way up her throat, testing for the tempurature of the air like a swimmer would a river. She backed up a step. He came forward to pursue, maintaining their prior distance of separation. She stepped back again.
“Adrian, no...” this was not the name she'd been looking for, not the name of the man who had come to her. “You weren't looking for me... you didn't come for me...”
Tears welled unexpectedly free of her eyes, coursing hotly down her cheeks in an unwelcome torrent. A ragged sob broke her words and she stepped back again. Adrian pursued her.
“But I have, Jadany. Let me show you.” He opened his hands to her. His palms were black, small holes without detail that extended to an endless depth. “Let me show you! You wanted me to show you!”
“Stop it!” Jada cried out. His hands flew to her shoulders, gripping her tightly as she struggled away from him.
“You told me you wanted to be part of what I was building! Well I tell you here, I have built it! You are a part of it! Its mother, its firstborn. You are the womb from which I, too, will be reborn ... a son of this thing we have created. Together.”
“You're lying to me!” Panic made Jadany's voice high and thin, trembling on the lip of the threatening clouds above their heads. “I have done nothing! You couldn't have wanted this!”
“I want only what is true,” Adrian said with a black smile. “Be quiet.”
Jadany pried her mouth open under his stare to scream, shaking herself violently in his arms to try and free herself.
“Be still!”
Thunder roared above them, viciously throwing its head this way and that.
Jadany fought the reaching arms. The voice pushed again through her thoughts, through her closed eyelids.
“I told you you didn't have to do this!”
A bright light seared away the fields, the thunderheads, the reaching hands, the old voice echoing through her mind. Darkness followed, and stillness.
A hearbeat threaded its way finally to her consciousness; elevated with fear or exertion. Sensation resolved before sight, as if her eyes had gone into her skin because they didn't want to see into the world. Fingers pressed her hair, her cheek to skin, an arm around her waist. Finally, Jadany realized that she was pressing her eyes closed so hard they ached. Breathing deeply, she made herself open them and pulled away.
Witch's face was pressed in the hard lines of a frown, suspicion and concern mingling equally on his features. “You should not have done that.”
Jadany shook her head, barely able to shake out the trembling words, “You still don't understand, I didn't have a choice.”
He let her go reluctantly, allowing her to slide backward and sit on the floor, leaning heavily on one braced hand. “Choice... is never mine,” the words stumbled out, accompanied by a scrap of hollow laughter.
“But you saw something,” Witch only spoke after a long, calculating silence. Jadany could tell he hadn't wanted to say anything at first, lest he set her off again. He opened his mouth, let it close again, opened it, and then pressed his lips firmly, lowering his gaze to her trembling arms.
“I'll tell you,” Jada gasped exhaustedly, unable to catch her breath. “I'll tell you... just give me..”
The clatter of footsteps interrupted her, a loose gaggle of sounds bursting through an open door.
“Jada?” The emotion that crested high in the voice seemed incongruous with its identifying notes. This was Ivan, pouring through the door in the far end of the chamber. She didn't turn to look up at him as he descended upon her, followed closely by Isolde's smaller hands. “What's wrong? What happened?”
Sensory awareness began to ebb from her again, spinning the room into more distand and more distant spirals. She worked her mouth to speak, unable to gain full control of her musculature. Her tongue felt heavy and snakelike against her teeth, something very different from a human instrument of speech.
Snatches of words drifted her direction from the muted pandemonium. Ivan had turned his focus on Witch who sat on silently, Isolde pleaded with one of them; hands brushed at her shoulders, kinder than Adrian's had been in the dream, lowering her onto the cold floor for a moment.
“My god, she's cold as ice...” Isolde's voice drifted through the haze with some more clarity, very close and very warm to her left cheek.
Something here about a blanket, something there about getting her to bed. A command, from Ivan; “Pick her up.”
Jadany tried to open her eyes and failed, tried to open her mouth and failed, eventually resigning herself to simply let her head roll against the curve of a man's shoulder.
“Don't make me go back,” she finally managed, and only with a great and heaving exertion of the last of her strength. Don't make me go back to him.
Isolde and Ivan stood on one side of Jadany's cot. Witch stood on the other with his arms folded and his face stern.
“I didn't do this to her,” he said firmly. While Ivan thought he was just trying to absolve himself of guilt that, fairly, he didn't deserve to have pressed to him, Isolde sensed more delicately that he was trying to convince himself as well as the two doctors. The fear of a child, of an uncertain animal, shadowed just under his eyes. Reaching across the narrow cot, Isolde caught one of his hands as he shifted and gripped it tightly.
“I know,” she finally said firmly, leaning in to not release his fingers. “I know.”
Ivan looked between them unhappily.
“Jadany sometimes has... episodes,” Isolde continued, clearly unsure of where or how to explain the uncertain reaches of Jada's unique skillset. “I'm confident that she'll be fine. Usually, she just needs to rest for a while. She'll be alright.”
Witch said what Ivan was thinking, raising an argent brow. “Usually?”
All three pairs of eyes fell to Jadany's diminutive frame, prone on the cot they stood over, breathing shallowly. The blanket spread carefully over her body made it seem shapeless and impossibly fragile. Her dark hair flowed over the edge of the pillow, streaked her brow with shadow and made her look like some kind of siren hauled up from a depth that had clutched her too tightly to its bosom.
“I asked her to tell my fortune,” Witch said after a few seconds, frowning as he lowered his bulky body to a crouch and peered on a level with Jadany's closed eyes. “I didn't know...”
“You couldn't have,” this was Ivan, in a show of compassion that surprised Isolde somewhat. “There... isn't anyone else like her.” After four years, Ivan had become very confident of this. He didn't know whether Jadany was the way she was before the disaster, or if her 'talent' had only come after. Staring down at her unconscious face made him realize, with some guilt, that he'd never bothered to ask.
“I am not,” Witch said, lifting his eyes briefly to the pair before looking back down, his fingertips gingerly on the edge of the cot to maintain his balance.
“What do you mean?” replied Ivan, blinking.
“I am not, like her.”
“No... I mean, like I said... I've never met anyone that--”
“But I am not like you either.”
Ivan found himself pinned by Witch's icy scrutiny and fell silent. Isolde looked from one man to the other, filled with forboding. She reached for Ivan's arm, hooking her fingertips in the crook of his elbow.
“Why don't we let her get some rest. I'll peek in on her in an hour or so and see if she hasn't gotten a little bit of her color back.”
Recognizing the artificial cheeriness that Isolde used to cover fear dancing pleasantly in her voice, Ivan nodded and covered her hand with his other before clearing his throat and nodding a second time to Witch.
“She's right. Why don't we go back out to the mess and have a seat. Maybe they'll still have some tea hot.”
Without speaking further, the three departed the bunk area and walked stiff-legged out into the commons. From the corner of the room where Jada, Isolde, and a few others slept every night, the clutch of teenagers glanced furtively from a huddle of quiet voices.
Everybody's faces had gone different since earlier in the afternoon. Everyone had heard the helicopter, and people who didn't recognize it initially were swiftly told of what it was by those who did. The few that had followed them out and seen Ivan's conversation with Alexander Maze – though Ivan didn't know how much of the words that the quiet MDRA director had been heard – had told as much as they could to the others but the story was tangibly beginning to warp before their eyes as it raced around the compound in whispers.
Alex said he'd be in touch. That left Ivan nothing to do but wait and wonder what the man had in store. He wanted nothing more than to have a good reason to turn him down, but the simple, brutal facts of their situation that to do so would be certain death. He knew, without ever having to say it or consult Isolde's sometimes more rational mind, that there was no way he could refuse Alexander's offer in the good faith of the people who trusted him to lead them into as full and safe a life as possible under this new order.
This thought followed him in the eyes of the growing adolescents, and every other he met on the way from the bunks to the mess, a walk of some ten minutes at an inconsicuous pace. The occasional sidelong glance at Witch revealed a stern but empty face, unwilling to betray even the tiniest hint of intention or emotion about the man. They sat down at the same table they'd sat with Jadany at when the helicopter arrived hours before.
Isolde finally aired the other burning question.
“Did she tell you anything about what she saw?” her voice was more timid than usual. Witch shook his head.
“She was afraid, though.”
Silence settled down around them, making the room seem darker and smaller.
“Who was that man?” Witch's voice again stirred the pall, stubbornly resistant to the two doctors' mood about the situation.
“A scientist,” Ivan replied brusquely. Witch waited for followup that was not delivered; Isolde shifted uncomfortably in her seat.
“Earth beneath my feet,” Caleb breathed to himself after a long exhallation through his respirator. “Earth in my hands.” Adrian's brief mantra had started to lose eaning for him after the millions of times he'd said it. Nonetheless, though he forgot the initial lecture that those eight words had come with, it still carried some semblance of soothing. The earth so called beneath his feet crunched with the weight of his boots rocking across it as he descended the small slope to consult with some men struggling to negotiate a flat of powercells over the lip of a small ridge. Lending the strength of his back, Caleb stole furtive glances into the tired eyes that peered over and through the respirator masks. Effort strained the lines ther e – both men older than he – and sweat glistened beyind the protective lenses. They were all used to being worked to the bone, sometimes out of Adrian's radical moods but mostly out of necessity.
The skid lurched, threatening to spill a stack of cells that Caleb caught with a swift hand, and then finally slid back onto the path being dredge out by similar flats scraping back and forth from fortress to shore.
“This haul is amazing,.” Donovan's singularly emphatic voice startled him as he fell back from the skid he'd been pushing, letting the two men be on their way as the drug it along. Donovan was cataloguing and loading in the belly of the base, must have traded off with someone else and quite recently for the way his breath was fast in his mask, hands excitedly on his hips. Caleb smiled wearily, feeling a small stab of envy about how really only a few years of the boy's youth seemed to make such a difference in the boundlessness of his energy and, similarly, his devotion.
“Yes,” Caleb said after a second, trying to excuse his tardy response by looking hard over the crawling line of people taking things to and fro. “I'm sure Adrian will be very pleased. You're testing them, before they come up?”
“Yes! Yes of course,” Donovan rocked from heel to toe to heel again, grinning behind the insect-shape of his gas mask. “They're almost all good. The... I'm really startled, to tell you the truth, Caleb. After last night... I hardly knew what to think. I didn't think anything good could possibly come of that.” He pause for a second, and then shook his head. “I mean not that, I'm not saying I would trade Carl or anything, not even for--”
Caleb's hand on his arm stilled him, and the unseen grin that creased his eyes fell away into a frown below the black filter at his mouth.
“Sometimes, you have to, Donovan. You didn't make the trade, this time. It wasn't your choice. But always remember that someday it might be, and sometimes, you do have to.”
“Have to what?”
“Trade.”
The boy's shoulders slumped slightly, a similar weariness to the one Caleb felt dogged by finally breaking through his features. He felt guilty for disillusioning the boy, but more, he suspected that this was more truly how Donovan felt. If the wise were not immune to the nagging fear and uncertainty of the last years, the young certainly couldn't be either. Caleb squeezed the boy's shoulder, trying to be reassuring but doubting himself in the endeavor.
“I'm going to go back down there and see if they need my help.”
“Donovan...” Caleb let his hand fall to his side, feeling his fingers slacken in his gloves.
“Yes?” Donovan looked up, drawing himself straight and trying to school away the look of disappointment in his face, obscured though it was by the mask.
“Get some rest. Give yourself a break. I know you haven't slept for just as long as I haven't slept and it's killing me. It's ok. That's why everyone else is here now.”
“Yea, I know. But I mean, I'm not that tired, I'd rather help if I can. Either way, I told them I'd be right-”
Cutting him off again, Caleb tilted his head and then cast a pointed look back to the shore, where lay a cluster of smaller boats waiting chug heavily back to the aircraft carrier, loaded deep with powercells and whatever else they were able to scavenge.
“Go on. I'll go down there and tell them you're needed elsewhere.”
Hesitation registered clearly in Donovan's posture, keeping him where he was for a minute before he finally caved and broke away. “Ok, Caleb. I'll go back with the next boatful.”
“Good boy,” Caleb smiled to him, and turned to walk up the sweeping incline to the entrance of the base. Fortunately, a little more judicious scouting from the inside revealed still-working controlls for the ballistic gates on the sea-facing wall of the compound, allowing men and skids to get in and out without risking the same grisly end that met Carl Resher. Nobody really knew who'd gone ashore, and while Caleb had betrayed the news quietly to an unresponsive Adrian sitting with his back to the door of his berth, nobody else really knew. His body lay on the far side of the base, turning slowly paler as it prepared to succub to decay. Caleb didn't feel the need to take anyone on a field trip to pay final respects; Carl was no longer Carl, nothing but a badly mutilated corpse slowly leeching into the dirt.
Inside the walls, the air withheld the chill that morning had begun to lift as it burned slowly on toward midday. No direct sunlight beamed down, the sky instead filled with an indistinct grey glare as the never-displaced clouds swirled high overhead, an atmosphere scarred and milky by the afflections of the earth below. He fancied that the chill grew as he went closer into the center of the base itself, tracing his way down the antlike line of men huffing and straining to drag their skids back out to the lower ground and eventually the shore.
Imprudently lost to his own thoughts, Caleb failed to note the initial disturbance up the way behind him.
Jadany sat on her knees, feeling her feet go numb against the cold concrete floor of the compound. The stone, the air, all felt warmer than Witch's gaze curiously down at her from where he sat across her, their knees only a hand's bredth apart in the half-darkened room. She breathed in once, laboured, and breathed out again.
“You don't have to,” his voice came, as if from beyond a great distance, the low rumble of thunder that might call one's attention to a stormy horizon.
“No,” Jadany breathed slowly out, letting her eyes fall finally shut to the heaviness that pressed them. “I do.”
Suddenly, Jada stood amongst grass that rose to her shoulder, flicking softly back and forth at the joy of an inconstant wind. She gasped the air, her lungs flooding with the pure elation of clean purity, the fleeting memories of many Autumns lost to her; crisp and dying away like apples fallen from the tree. Low thunder murmured in the distance, wavering on her consciousness. She didn't want to turn around and look, fear clutching lazily at her stomach.
Pressing her hands to her abdomen, she looked down to see a sweep of unfamiliar gingham cloth; a simple frock whose cotton did little to protect her skin from a gathering chill in the air. Electricity lanced her consciousness, making her skin prickle as the thunder announced itself again. It crawled in the distance to her back, stalking back and forth as she put off turning to face it, conscious of her presence, her hesitation. Conscious.
Jadany turned slowly, the blades of grass always licking at her bare arms, tickling the goosebumps raised by the pre-storm tension weighting the wind. Thunderheads came up out of the distance like proud fortresses, or the stern faces of generals that wait for the oncoming battle to finally reach the buttresses of all their carefully laid plans. Plans. Out of the dusk, which looked timid underneath the brow of those stormclouds, a single figure resolved itself out of the distance. On the pallete of gunmetal sky and terrain below dun and gold with wheat ready for harvest, a single splinter of paleness grew steadily more solid. Finally, it grew into the shape of a man whose gait and shoulders she could make out against the swaying grain. He walked toward her. The storm, despite all the sweeping energy that it seemed to carry, stayed behind him. His pace remained even, and at a distance that shouldn't have betrayed such detals to her, she was able to make out that his eyes were blue. Pale, calculating blue like the color of deep ice, under the sweep of his long hair the color of snow.
I know his name, Jadany thought to herself, suddenly without the nagging fear that the storm had thrown over her. I know his name... I know I remember it. She straightened in the grass, waving a hand to him. His eyes remained on her, but he didn't wave back. His name...
Lightening glittered in the clouds behind him, sparking from mass to mass and illuminating the roiling vapour but not yet flying groundward. A second on the heels of the light, thunder snapped demandingly, but the man did not hasten his pace towards her. A dream consciousness, or the notion of having scanned the unmemorable far horizon, reminded her that no shelter existed in this open, endless field of waiting grain. No farmhouse squatted along the furrows, no barn leaned to shadow lazy cattle fattening themselves in preparation for winter. The field stretched impossible behind her, and, in fact, in all directions out from where she stood. Even though she never took her eyes from the approaching man, she knew every inch of it, every mile that fell away from the point at which she stood. Suddenly, Jadany sensed an exhillerating understanding of being able tos ee in all directions at once. A sense of the endless bowl of sky, the black earth beneath her feet that waited for rain.
The tall man was only twenty paces from her now, and gaining. Now ten. Now five. She looked up at him as he drew near, his stern face chiseled in angles impossibly hard and fine. A diamond adamance hovered around his countenance, expression guarded but not unkind. He stopped only a breath's distance from her, reached for her hand. When her fingers met his, they were warm and strong, his skin tough.
“Stay with me,” he said only, without introducing himself to her, reminding her of the name she forgot. Jadany couldn't remember any names, now, even though it struck her to try.
She faltered, shaking her head slightly as her brow furrowed without understanding.
“Shh,” he admonished gently, holding her steady as his other hand settled weightlessly on her shoulder. “Just stay beside me. Walk with me, where I walk. And I will walk with you.”
“But I...” her voice came from some tiny place far away, as if through miles and miles of cotton batting strewn from ground to sky. “I can't remember your name... I'm so sorry...”
“You don't need to, where we are going.” He smiled a smile that was not alltogether pleasant, the grim consciousness of many horrors glowing faintly behind his expression.
“Where are we going?” Jadany asked innocently, blinking her wide, dark eyes.
“Wherever you will lead me, because I know now that you will lead me where I need to go.”
His voice was beginning to change at a rate almost too slow for her to perceive. Sudden distrust flooded her, cold and unkind. Falling back a step, Jadany jerked her hand away from his, feeling the return of the same anxiety that gripped her when she first heard the thunder. The man's pale countenance began to shift and darken, twisting into something else. Some otherness, and also something uncomfortably familiar.
“Jada...” he whispered; the man that was not the man walking across the plains. His eyes warmed, the blue beginning to go green as his hair darkened in splotches as if stained with ink. “Jada, I have never stopped searching for you. Not for one day. Not one day.”
A scream began to tickle its way up her throat, testing for the tempurature of the air like a swimmer would a river. She backed up a step. He came forward to pursue, maintaining their prior distance of separation. She stepped back again.
“Adrian, no...” this was not the name she'd been looking for, not the name of the man who had come to her. “You weren't looking for me... you didn't come for me...”
Tears welled unexpectedly free of her eyes, coursing hotly down her cheeks in an unwelcome torrent. A ragged sob broke her words and she stepped back again. Adrian pursued her.
“But I have, Jadany. Let me show you.” He opened his hands to her. His palms were black, small holes without detail that extended to an endless depth. “Let me show you! You wanted me to show you!”
“Stop it!” Jada cried out. His hands flew to her shoulders, gripping her tightly as she struggled away from him.
“You told me you wanted to be part of what I was building! Well I tell you here, I have built it! You are a part of it! Its mother, its firstborn. You are the womb from which I, too, will be reborn ... a son of this thing we have created. Together.”
“You're lying to me!” Panic made Jadany's voice high and thin, trembling on the lip of the threatening clouds above their heads. “I have done nothing! You couldn't have wanted this!”
“I want only what is true,” Adrian said with a black smile. “Be quiet.”
Jadany pried her mouth open under his stare to scream, shaking herself violently in his arms to try and free herself.
“Be still!”
Thunder roared above them, viciously throwing its head this way and that.
Jadany fought the reaching arms. The voice pushed again through her thoughts, through her closed eyelids.
“I told you you didn't have to do this!”
A bright light seared away the fields, the thunderheads, the reaching hands, the old voice echoing through her mind. Darkness followed, and stillness.
A hearbeat threaded its way finally to her consciousness; elevated with fear or exertion. Sensation resolved before sight, as if her eyes had gone into her skin because they didn't want to see into the world. Fingers pressed her hair, her cheek to skin, an arm around her waist. Finally, Jadany realized that she was pressing her eyes closed so hard they ached. Breathing deeply, she made herself open them and pulled away.
Witch's face was pressed in the hard lines of a frown, suspicion and concern mingling equally on his features. “You should not have done that.”
Jadany shook her head, barely able to shake out the trembling words, “You still don't understand, I didn't have a choice.”
He let her go reluctantly, allowing her to slide backward and sit on the floor, leaning heavily on one braced hand. “Choice... is never mine,” the words stumbled out, accompanied by a scrap of hollow laughter.
“But you saw something,” Witch only spoke after a long, calculating silence. Jadany could tell he hadn't wanted to say anything at first, lest he set her off again. He opened his mouth, let it close again, opened it, and then pressed his lips firmly, lowering his gaze to her trembling arms.
“I'll tell you,” Jada gasped exhaustedly, unable to catch her breath. “I'll tell you... just give me..”
The clatter of footsteps interrupted her, a loose gaggle of sounds bursting through an open door.
“Jada?” The emotion that crested high in the voice seemed incongruous with its identifying notes. This was Ivan, pouring through the door in the far end of the chamber. She didn't turn to look up at him as he descended upon her, followed closely by Isolde's smaller hands. “What's wrong? What happened?”
Sensory awareness began to ebb from her again, spinning the room into more distand and more distant spirals. She worked her mouth to speak, unable to gain full control of her musculature. Her tongue felt heavy and snakelike against her teeth, something very different from a human instrument of speech.
Snatches of words drifted her direction from the muted pandemonium. Ivan had turned his focus on Witch who sat on silently, Isolde pleaded with one of them; hands brushed at her shoulders, kinder than Adrian's had been in the dream, lowering her onto the cold floor for a moment.
“My god, she's cold as ice...” Isolde's voice drifted through the haze with some more clarity, very close and very warm to her left cheek.
Something here about a blanket, something there about getting her to bed. A command, from Ivan; “Pick her up.”
Jadany tried to open her eyes and failed, tried to open her mouth and failed, eventually resigning herself to simply let her head roll against the curve of a man's shoulder.
“Don't make me go back,” she finally managed, and only with a great and heaving exertion of the last of her strength. Don't make me go back to him.
Isolde and Ivan stood on one side of Jadany's cot. Witch stood on the other with his arms folded and his face stern.
“I didn't do this to her,” he said firmly. While Ivan thought he was just trying to absolve himself of guilt that, fairly, he didn't deserve to have pressed to him, Isolde sensed more delicately that he was trying to convince himself as well as the two doctors. The fear of a child, of an uncertain animal, shadowed just under his eyes. Reaching across the narrow cot, Isolde caught one of his hands as he shifted and gripped it tightly.
“I know,” she finally said firmly, leaning in to not release his fingers. “I know.”
Ivan looked between them unhappily.
“Jadany sometimes has... episodes,” Isolde continued, clearly unsure of where or how to explain the uncertain reaches of Jada's unique skillset. “I'm confident that she'll be fine. Usually, she just needs to rest for a while. She'll be alright.”
Witch said what Ivan was thinking, raising an argent brow. “Usually?”
All three pairs of eyes fell to Jadany's diminutive frame, prone on the cot they stood over, breathing shallowly. The blanket spread carefully over her body made it seem shapeless and impossibly fragile. Her dark hair flowed over the edge of the pillow, streaked her brow with shadow and made her look like some kind of siren hauled up from a depth that had clutched her too tightly to its bosom.
“I asked her to tell my fortune,” Witch said after a few seconds, frowning as he lowered his bulky body to a crouch and peered on a level with Jadany's closed eyes. “I didn't know...”
“You couldn't have,” this was Ivan, in a show of compassion that surprised Isolde somewhat. “There... isn't anyone else like her.” After four years, Ivan had become very confident of this. He didn't know whether Jadany was the way she was before the disaster, or if her 'talent' had only come after. Staring down at her unconscious face made him realize, with some guilt, that he'd never bothered to ask.
“I am not,” Witch said, lifting his eyes briefly to the pair before looking back down, his fingertips gingerly on the edge of the cot to maintain his balance.
“What do you mean?” replied Ivan, blinking.
“I am not, like her.”
“No... I mean, like I said... I've never met anyone that--”
“But I am not like you either.”
Ivan found himself pinned by Witch's icy scrutiny and fell silent. Isolde looked from one man to the other, filled with forboding. She reached for Ivan's arm, hooking her fingertips in the crook of his elbow.
“Why don't we let her get some rest. I'll peek in on her in an hour or so and see if she hasn't gotten a little bit of her color back.”
Recognizing the artificial cheeriness that Isolde used to cover fear dancing pleasantly in her voice, Ivan nodded and covered her hand with his other before clearing his throat and nodding a second time to Witch.
“She's right. Why don't we go back out to the mess and have a seat. Maybe they'll still have some tea hot.”
Without speaking further, the three departed the bunk area and walked stiff-legged out into the commons. From the corner of the room where Jada, Isolde, and a few others slept every night, the clutch of teenagers glanced furtively from a huddle of quiet voices.
Everybody's faces had gone different since earlier in the afternoon. Everyone had heard the helicopter, and people who didn't recognize it initially were swiftly told of what it was by those who did. The few that had followed them out and seen Ivan's conversation with Alexander Maze – though Ivan didn't know how much of the words that the quiet MDRA director had been heard – had told as much as they could to the others but the story was tangibly beginning to warp before their eyes as it raced around the compound in whispers.
Alex said he'd be in touch. That left Ivan nothing to do but wait and wonder what the man had in store. He wanted nothing more than to have a good reason to turn him down, but the simple, brutal facts of their situation that to do so would be certain death. He knew, without ever having to say it or consult Isolde's sometimes more rational mind, that there was no way he could refuse Alexander's offer in the good faith of the people who trusted him to lead them into as full and safe a life as possible under this new order.
This thought followed him in the eyes of the growing adolescents, and every other he met on the way from the bunks to the mess, a walk of some ten minutes at an inconsicuous pace. The occasional sidelong glance at Witch revealed a stern but empty face, unwilling to betray even the tiniest hint of intention or emotion about the man. They sat down at the same table they'd sat with Jadany at when the helicopter arrived hours before.
Isolde finally aired the other burning question.
“Did she tell you anything about what she saw?” her voice was more timid than usual. Witch shook his head.
“She was afraid, though.”
Silence settled down around them, making the room seem darker and smaller.
“Who was that man?” Witch's voice again stirred the pall, stubbornly resistant to the two doctors' mood about the situation.
“A scientist,” Ivan replied brusquely. Witch waited for followup that was not delivered; Isolde shifted uncomfortably in her seat.
“Earth beneath my feet,” Caleb breathed to himself after a long exhallation through his respirator. “Earth in my hands.” Adrian's brief mantra had started to lose eaning for him after the millions of times he'd said it. Nonetheless, though he forgot the initial lecture that those eight words had come with, it still carried some semblance of soothing. The earth so called beneath his feet crunched with the weight of his boots rocking across it as he descended the small slope to consult with some men struggling to negotiate a flat of powercells over the lip of a small ridge. Lending the strength of his back, Caleb stole furtive glances into the tired eyes that peered over and through the respirator masks. Effort strained the lines ther e – both men older than he – and sweat glistened beyind the protective lenses. They were all used to being worked to the bone, sometimes out of Adrian's radical moods but mostly out of necessity.
The skid lurched, threatening to spill a stack of cells that Caleb caught with a swift hand, and then finally slid back onto the path being dredge out by similar flats scraping back and forth from fortress to shore.
“This haul is amazing,.” Donovan's singularly emphatic voice startled him as he fell back from the skid he'd been pushing, letting the two men be on their way as the drug it along. Donovan was cataloguing and loading in the belly of the base, must have traded off with someone else and quite recently for the way his breath was fast in his mask, hands excitedly on his hips. Caleb smiled wearily, feeling a small stab of envy about how really only a few years of the boy's youth seemed to make such a difference in the boundlessness of his energy and, similarly, his devotion.
“Yes,” Caleb said after a second, trying to excuse his tardy response by looking hard over the crawling line of people taking things to and fro. “I'm sure Adrian will be very pleased. You're testing them, before they come up?”
“Yes! Yes of course,” Donovan rocked from heel to toe to heel again, grinning behind the insect-shape of his gas mask. “They're almost all good. The... I'm really startled, to tell you the truth, Caleb. After last night... I hardly knew what to think. I didn't think anything good could possibly come of that.” He pause for a second, and then shook his head. “I mean not that, I'm not saying I would trade Carl or anything, not even for--”
Caleb's hand on his arm stilled him, and the unseen grin that creased his eyes fell away into a frown below the black filter at his mouth.
“Sometimes, you have to, Donovan. You didn't make the trade, this time. It wasn't your choice. But always remember that someday it might be, and sometimes, you do have to.”
“Have to what?”
“Trade.”
The boy's shoulders slumped slightly, a similar weariness to the one Caleb felt dogged by finally breaking through his features. He felt guilty for disillusioning the boy, but more, he suspected that this was more truly how Donovan felt. If the wise were not immune to the nagging fear and uncertainty of the last years, the young certainly couldn't be either. Caleb squeezed the boy's shoulder, trying to be reassuring but doubting himself in the endeavor.
“I'm going to go back down there and see if they need my help.”
“Donovan...” Caleb let his hand fall to his side, feeling his fingers slacken in his gloves.
“Yes?” Donovan looked up, drawing himself straight and trying to school away the look of disappointment in his face, obscured though it was by the mask.
“Get some rest. Give yourself a break. I know you haven't slept for just as long as I haven't slept and it's killing me. It's ok. That's why everyone else is here now.”
“Yea, I know. But I mean, I'm not that tired, I'd rather help if I can. Either way, I told them I'd be right-”
Cutting him off again, Caleb tilted his head and then cast a pointed look back to the shore, where lay a cluster of smaller boats waiting chug heavily back to the aircraft carrier, loaded deep with powercells and whatever else they were able to scavenge.
“Go on. I'll go down there and tell them you're needed elsewhere.”
Hesitation registered clearly in Donovan's posture, keeping him where he was for a minute before he finally caved and broke away. “Ok, Caleb. I'll go back with the next boatful.”
“Good boy,” Caleb smiled to him, and turned to walk up the sweeping incline to the entrance of the base. Fortunately, a little more judicious scouting from the inside revealed still-working controlls for the ballistic gates on the sea-facing wall of the compound, allowing men and skids to get in and out without risking the same grisly end that met Carl Resher. Nobody really knew who'd gone ashore, and while Caleb had betrayed the news quietly to an unresponsive Adrian sitting with his back to the door of his berth, nobody else really knew. His body lay on the far side of the base, turning slowly paler as it prepared to succub to decay. Caleb didn't feel the need to take anyone on a field trip to pay final respects; Carl was no longer Carl, nothing but a badly mutilated corpse slowly leeching into the dirt.
Inside the walls, the air withheld the chill that morning had begun to lift as it burned slowly on toward midday. No direct sunlight beamed down, the sky instead filled with an indistinct grey glare as the never-displaced clouds swirled high overhead, an atmosphere scarred and milky by the afflections of the earth below. He fancied that the chill grew as he went closer into the center of the base itself, tracing his way down the antlike line of men huffing and straining to drag their skids back out to the lower ground and eventually the shore.
Imprudently lost to his own thoughts, Caleb failed to note the initial disturbance up the way behind him.