Of all the things mankind has taught us, the strangest one for us to comprehend is choice. For us all things are possible, and all things that can be, will be. To choose one existence or another…it is a human ability, to shape your own fate. We need your help.
I let my thoughts open to them, my sense of self blurring at the edges as I try to feel what they feel, to understand what they’ve absorbed from us. The rage is there, a simmering force like a storm about to break. This is what the whispers fear, the fire consuming their world.
I let them touch my grief over Simon’s death, the newly opened wound of my mother’s death all those years ago, the sadness and guilt at being one of the only survivors from the Icarus. I let them see my anger at my father, the gut-wrenching stab of betrayal, the simmering rage at the creature who used me to wreak such destruction. Then, with an effort, I reach for those other, deeper memories, slipping past the coating of pain and hatred into what lies beyond.
Because behind it lies something more, a rainbow of deeper forces, waiting to be summoned. The joy of a little girl whose dreams have been painted the color of the sea. The loyalty of a boy who is ready to defend his home with his bare hands and the force of his will. The love of a man whose faith transcends death, whose strength feels like fire and poetry.
The fire of a girl who had everything taken from her, and still found it within herself to leap into the unknown to open this door. The determination of a boy who held out his hand to leap with her, who had faith in that moment that we were all worth saving, if only we had the chance to prove it.
This chance.
And from the inside, surrounded by the joy and devotion and loyalty of my friends, the shimmer of rage on the outside of our lives looks paper-thin.
As my thoughts open to them, I catch the faintest taste of their minds as well. They are far beyond anything I’ve ever known, the weight of infinite minds so entwined it’s impossible to know where one stops and another begins. I can feel what we’ve given them, the swell of emotions and ideas they don’t understand. But behind the fear, the anger, the desire for safety, I sense something all too familiar…longing.
I pause, trying to form my dazzled thoughts into words. We’ve always wondered if mankind was alone in the universe. Somewhere, behind the ever-expanding frontier of new planets and terraformed moons, there’s always been a sense of being incomplete, that we were searching for something else. Something more, something greater than ourselves. To be alone in this universe is an emptiness none of us could bear.
Is it possible that, for all our differences, for all the ways we don’t and never could understand each other, the whispers don’t want to be alone either?
Help us choose.
I can’t. I can’t tell you that if you stay, and learn from us, and learn to understand us, your kind will be safe. Because if you stay, then rage and grief and pain are inevitable. To live is to feel these things.
So you would have us leave?
On this side of the rift, in this world, nothing is certain. But the only shields against the darkness are the moments that bring light, and you have seen that in these people, their stories. They are unique, and they are all the same. I can think of no better armor. And we can teach you how to forge your own shields.
Think of everything you’ve learned from us, everything we’ve been through, every choice the six of us have made that has brought us here. Having experienced that, having felt life, love, trust, faith…can you really give it all up just to be safe?
I wait for an answer, but get no reply. I feel their minds pulling away from mine, and an insistent tug that I instinctively know is my tether to my own world, my own body. For a moment I want to cling to this world, to the shards of another kind of existence that no human could ever hope to truly understand.
But I have to let it all slip away and fade back into the light, wrapping myself once more in the roaring quiet. Into my thoughts creeps a single image, a pair of clasped hands—and with it, a single voice, saying, I choose you.
I will not go back. The pain is all there is—all I am, all I have to give. I am no longer one of you, and I cannot become part of you again. I cannot go home.
We are a part of you. You have been alone so long, but you will always belong with us.
Not anymore. I am vengeance. I am fear. I am everything you should leave behind.
We will learn to bear the darkness. They will show us how.
You cannot understand. I…I will not bring this pain to you. I could not bear to see it shared. Please, just let me go. Let me die.
If that is truly what you wish, that choice is yours to make. But we have seen how brightly light shines in the dark, how sweetly music fills the quiet. All these years you have known only shadow and silence, and we have so much to show you. To save you.
I am not worth saving.
We are all worth saving.
How can you know?
We cannot ever know, not truly.
But we have faith.
SOMETHING STIRS AGAINST ME, AND as I blink my eyes open, blue sparks still playing across my vision, I register Sofia’s warmth against my chest. Are we in my den? Did she crawl up to my end of the bed?
For a moment I’m in an impossibly vast place, my thoughts expanding with infinite speed—and then, an instant later, that space is contracting, flying back toward me until the world is the right size and shape again.
Like a bucket of cold water, the truth splashes over me, electrifying and sudden. We’re lying on the ground, piled on top of the rubble by the rift like so much debris, and Sofia’s wrapped in my arms.
“Did it work?” she whispers in an exhausted rasp. Then, almost as an afterthought, she adds, “Are we alive?”
My ribs are bruised, my shoulder aching where I think I landed on it, but I push upright, looking around for some sign of the others.
I see Flynn and Jubilee immediately. She’s muttering a curse in another language she must have learned from him, judging by the way he seems to understand it. I make eye contact with Flynn, and he lifts a hand to signal that they’re okay.
I follow his gaze across to where Tarver sits in the center of the room, curled in on himself. He starts to straighten, moving like every part of him is in pain. Like an old man.
“…the hell was that?” Jubilee groans.
“Disrupting the rift sets the whispers free,” I say, trying to climb to my feet and failing. “It worked on Elysium when Tarver and Lilac jumped. It worked on Avon, for you. She said they were trying to come through, and since she didn’t want them to…we thought maybe they would help us stop her.”
Beside me, Sofia sucks in a breath as I say Lilac’s name. “Gideon, where’s Lilac?”
“She just…” Flynn’s voice dies away. “She vanished. Pulled into the rift with you.”
My gaze sweeps the room frantically, and I try to climb to my feet again, staggering and crashing back down onto one knee as my legs give out. No. No, no, no. I felt her in the rift. In the instant we passed through that infinite space, I sensed her there, I know it.