Nemesis: Book Four (11 page)

M
orena kept her aura close
, nearly wrapped around her like a cocoon. She wanted no one to see her; the green was unmistakable. She didn't know how much of the world knew about what happened at her execution, but certainly The Council was aware. If they caught her now, she would need to kill again—and she didn’t want that.

Enough killing had taken place.

Her husband lay in a ship, his aura barely surviving. A room full of dead Bynums sat merely clicks away from Morena. She would leave; she would take Briten with her and maybe live somewhere else, at some other time. Maybe, or maybe they would float forever in an endless dark space. Either way, she didn't want to kill more Bynums. They were all innocent, all lied to, and now all searching for her and Briten.

She only had one last thing to do here, and then she would leave as quietly as possible.

Morena knew Veral would hide, that his bravado only existed when Chilras stood by him, while Morena sat locked inside a cage.

She thought she had found him though.

The structure was bare, the outside walls a plain, nondescript white. The building held no transparent parts; the yard was bare without any Solarity coming from the ground. An old building with no purpose any longer. Morena thought it once was used as a training facility for The Games, but that had been centuries ago. Now it was empty, yet not torn down.

Veral was inside, hiding from his fate.

It took her a while to find him, forcing her Knowledge in a way that she hadn’t before. Through sheer will, she demanded her Knowledge search out this single Bynum, and after wasting precious hours she thought she had a lock on him.

She stood on the bare walkway leading to a gray door. The building held no windows, no way for the athletes that used to train to look out and dream about doing something leisurely. Veral liked it, probably, because no one could see in—but he couldn't see out either.

Morena tried to force her Knowledge inside the building, but not even a dull image came back to her. She had exhausted her Knowledge’s capability, leaving Morena on her own with nothing to do but go inside. She didn't know how many other Bynums were inside, nor what weapons they might possess. She didn't want to harm anyone else, no one but Veral. Morena couldn’t turn around, though. She risked her husband's death, and whatever life they may have together, to come here. She wasn't leaving without the Assistant. No more time, for anyone involved. All three of them had reached their existence’s end on Bynimian, and Morena bore the responsibility of taking them away.

Her head down, she went to the door, her aura attuned to everything around her, every small happening that it could pick up. She would know if anyone walked on this small street besides her, would know if someone saw her, if they made any kind of movement.

She reached the door and paused for a moment. She brought her aura in closer, so close that it hovered maybe an inch off her flesh. She placed her hand on the door, her aura moving slightly into the white structure, communicating with it, and then it vanished—leaving an opening to the building.

Morena stepped in, looking across a long, long, empty room.

Empty except for him. For Veral.

No other Assistants occupied the room. No other Bynums at all. No weapons. Only him, sitting in a corner, his own aura plastered behind him against the wall, trying to get as far away from Morena as it could.

The door reformed behind Morena.

"Why didn't you go to The Council?" she said. She was genuinely confused at why he came here to hide, why he surrounded himself with no one.

Veral swallowed. Gone was the confidence of before; never again would he call her by her name instead of her title. "They're walled off. They think… you're coming for them."

"You knew better though, didn't you?" Morena whispered as her aura spread out around her, moving both forward and backward, revealing the power that rested inside her.

Veral's legs came to his chest and he slowly pushed himself up against the wall. "Please," he said. "You don't have to do this. You don't."

Morena moved forward. "Don't beg. It's beneath an Assistant."

"YOU WERE GOING TO KILL THEM!" he screamed at her, his voice ripping through the room like a squawking bird.

"They were going to kill us all," Morena whispered, moving closer to him. "They still will. Except for you and I. We're going to live, Veral."

He shook his head in short, quick movements.

"Yes, we are. You see, we can't stay here anymore. We'd most certainly be caught and killed. Escape is the only way we live. Do you know how we're going?"

"No," he said. "No, please don't. Let me go. PLEASE LET ME GO!"

Morena smiled, the hatred for him rearing up in her and her aura—this man was the reason for Briten, the reason her husband lay still, barely breathing, his aura a pale shade of what it once was. "We're all leaving in a ship. Briten and I in one, and you in another. We'll float forever. Doesn't that sound nice?"

She reached him, his yellow aura climbing the wall behind him, trying to leave in a way that he couldn't. It looked like someone threw paint up against the wall, recklessly—but no one besides Veral controlled his aura; it fed off his fear.

"PLEASE!" he shouted again, standing up and trying to scatter himself against the wall as well—as if he could somehow move right through it.

"I told you that whatever befell us would befall you too, Veral."

M
ichael Hems stood before a god
.

He didn't know any other way to term it, any other way to view what looked down on him.

The poison had entered Michael's veins, but at the same time, part of him must have been flowing into the creature. Michael didn’t inhabit his own body right now, but he wasn’t in the creature's either. He resided in some middle ground. Some place between both.

The thing in front of him was massive like a planet. It should have had a gravitational orbit, sucking everything around it into its fire. It held no shape that Michael could identify, but seemed to encompass everything, and yet Michael was separate from it. A huge, ever changing mass of red.

It saw him, Michael knew that. Saw him in a way that his mother and father never had, maybe in a way they never could. He came for this thing, not just the man that he touched in the Ether. That man was only a conduit to this, to…

His soul?

Yes, that seemed right. Whatever physical manifestation the man had taken out there, this lay beneath it all.

As Michael stared deeper into the shifting red, he saw a blackness in the center. The black ebbed and flowed just like the red around it, but it was growing, and the red shrinking as the blackness seemed to overtake it. Michael knew what it meant; the black color was death. The creature hanging in the air was dying, and perhaps that's why he was in the Ether to begin with.

And Michael was here because of that. Somehow, in this creature’s death, he called Michael here. To be judged.

Michael felt it looking at him, staring down the same as Christians believed God would one day, deciding whether Michael measured up. Michael couldn't judge this creature though; there was no way. It was outside the realm of what Michael understood, perhaps even outside the realm of what the Morena creature could withstand.

The black continued to grow and more knowledge moved through Michael. He realized that he was watching something die. Something with power beyond measure, but in a very real way, much like an old person lying in a hospital bed, their body riddled with cancer. This judgement was life or death for Michael, though he didn't know what he was being judged for or what happened if he lived. He only knew that the creature was deciding something, and in doing so, both its life and Michael's would be determined.

He opened his mouth to say something, but as soon as he did, the red flared out at him, not quite touching, but enveloping his body. It wrapped around him, moving just above his skin, so that if he moved at all, it would grab him.

Michael stared into the red and judgement was passed.

B
riten latched
onto the creature's brain, filtering through the membrane of each cell, flowing into both the executive function pieces of this mind as well as the underlying plumbing that kept everything going. He had felt this thing, this…
human
, that was the word he wanted… from far away. Briten didn't know how far, didn't truly know where he himself had been until this exact moment, but he felt this thing and so called it—bringing the only thing he could to him.

Now the human was here and Briten understood he had to make a choice—very quickly because his time was almost up. The body that he inhabited, both in reality and what now appeared to be the Ether, was dying. Nearly dead. He had to decide whether he would use this creature's body or die with his own. Some might say that wasn't much of a choice, but for Briten, it was all consuming. He wouldn't simply trade his life to inhabit some lesser being that would leave him blind and frail.

He would rather die than suffer that fate.

With as much speed as he could muster, he looked through the creature, trying to understand at some base level what he was getting himself into. He had no time to think about what happened before this or what would happen after. He needed to know whether he would die in his own body or try to live in this one.

Briten found disappointment in massive quantities. The body was weak, weaker than almost anything Briten had ever seen. It would die from only the mildest of shocks. He searched on though, wanting to use every last second he could, needing to understand all of the possibilities.

He found more, though none of it connected to the creature's body.

Briten realized that the physical structure of this creature was similar throughout the rest of the species, that it wouldn't have mattered who showed up here, the body would be just as feeble. He saw more though, things that seemed centered only on this person, and perhaps on no other. Briten didn't have the time to sift through memories or ideas that lay hidden in the recesses of its mind, but he did sense a certain amount of
grit
inside its cells. A strength that the body simply couldn't match, but that the cells inside the brain exuded. That was good—that could be used for whatever Briten faced when he left the Ether. Even if the body didn't compare to what he came from, the underlying nature of the creature could be utilized.

More, though. Deeper.

Quickly, now
. Because the body outside,
Briten's
body wouldn't last much longer, and when it died, he died with it.

He felt something familiar here, something outside of the frail body or mind's strength. Something familiar.

And when he understood that familiarity, all choice was stolen from Briten.

Traces of Bynimian. Traces of auras. Traces of Morena.

And that one word was all that mattered—that one name. Morena. Because Briten would have lived a thousand years in an organism without any brain if it meant a chance at seeing her again.

He let his body go, the one that served him so well for so long, the one bred to battle, bred to rule an entire species. He left it sitting in a gray world surrounded by gray things and came into a body bred only for survival.

B
riten opened his eyes
.

He could think of them as the other's eyes, as Michael's, but that would be pointless. Briten had no other body now, no other eyes. These were his and to think differently would create a delusion that Briten couldn't afford to hold. He had no other life, only this one that he now shared with a creature called a human.

He looked around the room, seeing only one other person sitting near him, in a chair next to a brown table. Briten was quickly assimilating the language of the creature, the human, trying to understand the world around him as fast as he could. The person in the room was Michael's father. Michael didn't know where they were, his father and he, so Briten let go of that search.

He didn't move from the bed, didn't even turn his head, simply used his eyes to see the room. The Michael creature was silent, observing Briten just as Briten observed the room around him.

After a few minutes, Briten decided he could gain nothing else by waiting. He felt certain that the father wouldn't harm his son, despite what appeared to be a complicated relationship. He sat up, turning his legs off the bed, so that his bare feet touched the floor beneath.

The man in front of him, Wren's, eyes opened wide as he watched what he thought to be his son sitting up.
Coming back from the dead
, Briten thought.

"Michael?" the man said, his voice a hoarse whisper. "Michael are you okay?"

Briten looked at him for a few seconds, saying nothing. The man was thin, oddly so, as if unhealthy. A bright memory flooded Briten's consciousness, one containing Wren—of him sitting on a chair and taking a bottle of some clear liquid to his mouth.

Vodka
. The word came with the image, permeating it the way the smell of the liquid permeated the memory. That bottle was the sickness, what made this man so thin. And did it still run through him? Was he still sick? Briten didn't know, but if looks gave any part of the picture, the sickness wasn't giving up its hold easily.

"Michael?" Wren said again, sitting up in the chair, moving to stand.

Briten stood first, feeling the muscles in his legs tense as he raised the (
your
) body. Weak, yes, but the thing wasn't completely useless. He wouldn't need to crawl across the world like a slug.

Wren stood too, saying something else, but Briten didn't listen to him. He wanted to get out of this room because he hadn't come here to sit and talk with this man. He lost his choice in taking over this body when he sensed Morena moving through the human he now inhabited. And he could still sense her, a piece of her mixing with this human the same as Briten, only on a much lesser scale. He thought, though, he would sense more outside of this room, because he didn't think Morena had first inhabited this body. He thought she first inhabited this world.

He went to the door, opening it and leaving the man standing behind him, his mouth still agape.

Briten heard the door close automatically behind him as the air attacked his senses. His skin, his nose, even his eyes.

His heart filled as he started deciphering it all, filled in a way that he never thought possible again. Because he remembered why his body was now dead, why it hung in the Ether for so long. He killed for Morena, killed knowing the whole time that he would never see her again, but that he needed to try and free her. He killed without the knowledge whether his sacrifice even mattered, whether she survived. And now, with everything swirling in front of him, he knew that she had. He saw her in the sky above, felt her in the breeze on his skin, smelled her even so far away.

Briten didn't know what was happening on this planet, nor why Morena was here. Morena was Var, though—and Briten understood what that meant perhaps better than Morena did, or at least in a different fashion. Morena would sacrifice all for Bynums. She didn't know how to stop being a mother; it wasn't in her. And so wherever this place was, Morena brought that with her.

Morena was filling this world the way she filled her own.

"Michael?" Wren said as he opened the door. "What's happening? What's wrong?"

M
ichael thought
he had stood before a god back inside the Ether. He thought that he could not be more amazed by what he found in that other world.

Michael had been wrong.

Was he a prisoner?

The question floated through his mind like someone contemplating what they might have for lunch. Something that would need to be addressed, though the answer didn't matter too much. He had more important things to consider, more important things to see right now.

Michael thought Bryan and Thera had been held in a similar situation, yet also extremely different. The story that Bryan told, the sheer terror in the way he spoke of Morena, let Michael know that he had been a prisoner, without doubt. A prisoner given no thought at best, and actively hated at worst.

That didn’t apply to Michael. The creature that overtook him, Briten, had judged him, and in that judgment, found at least some part of him worthy. Those things hadn't happened for Bryan and Thera. Michael thought he understood some of
why
they were taken, and it appeared dissimilar to what this Briten wanted. At least right now.

Michael realized the creature's body was dead; he also knew Briten understood that too. They were wedded now, but as Michael walked around—given free roam, apparently—he thought he knew something that Briten didn't know yet either.

He thought that the creature was dying in here too, dying inside Michael. They were wedded, but as all lasting marriages eventually find out, death would part them. The creature didn't understand it because he was focused, singularly, on finding Morena. Because he loved her.

Michael now lived with a diseased being, one that didn't understand the disease, at least not on any conscious level.

And it saddened him. Because something this great shouldn't have to die. It should never pass from existence because its birth was a miracle beyond comprehension. He wanted to make the creature aware, to make him see that death was still creeping upon him even though he no longer inhabited his other body. Michael couldn't though, not right now. The being was too focused, too enraptured by the possibility of seeing his love again.

Michael looked out of his eyes, seeing the motel parking lot as Briten leaned against the railing.

He's sensing her
, he thought.
He knows she's here, can somehow feel her all around.

Did Wren ever feel like that? For mom?

The thought startled him, brought him out of the trance that this creature had placed him in. Had his father ever felt such love for Michael’s mother, a love so deep that even the thought of seeing her filled his being and pushed everything else out?

When she died, he thought of nothing else—until he forced her out with the bottle
.

The thought was cold, without emotion one way or the other for his dad. And it opened up a small hole in the darkness that shrouded the room of Michael and his father. A tiny stream of light that moved from the ceiling to the floor. This creature traveled for millions of years, and the first possibility of his wife living changed his life’s purpose.

Linda’s death changed the purpose of Wren's.

"What's happening? What's wrong?"

Michael heard his father speaking from behind him, but Briten didn't turn around. He couldn't; he was frozen by his senses, the assault of his lover too great. He didn't pay attention until Wren reached up and grabbed Michael's shoulder.