shall I descend, before my course is run.
Still when I get there I may hope to find
I come as a dear friend to my dear father
To you, my mother, and my brother too.
All three of you have known my hand in death
I wash your bodies…
It is my uncle’s voice. Is this the Vale? Is this the road I walk before death? It can’t be. In the Vale there is no pain, but my body aches. My legs sting. Still I hear his voice ahead of me, drawing me through the mist. The man who taught me to dance after my father died, who guarded me and sent me to Ares. Who died himself in a mineshaft and dwells now in the Vale.
I thought it would be Eo who greeted me. Or my father. Not Narol.
“Keep reading,” another voice whispers. “Dr. Virany said he can hear us. He just has to find his way back.” Even as I walk, I feel a bed under me. The air around cold and crisp in my lungs. The sheets soft and clean. The muscles in my legs twitch. Feels like little bees are stinging them. And with each sting, the dream world fades and I slide back into my body.
“Well, if we’re gonna read to the squabber, might as well be something Red. Not this poncy Violet shit.”
“Dancer said this was one of his favorites.”
My eyes open. I’m in a bed. White sheets, IVs going into my arms. Under the sheets, I touch the ant-sized nodes that have been stuck to my legs to channel electrical current through my muscles to combat atrophy. The room’s a cave. Scientific equipment, machines, and terraria litter it.
It was Uncle Narol I heard in the dream after all. But he’s not in the Vale. He’s alive. He sits at my bedside, squinting down at one of Mickey’s old books. He’s grizzled and wiry, even for a Red. Callused hands trying to be gentle with the frail paper pages. He’s bald now, and deeply sunburned on his forearms and the back of his neck. Still looks like he was cobbled together out of cracked old leather. He’ll be forty-one now. Looks older. More savage. A brooding danger to him, lent teeth by the railgun in his thigh holster. A slingBlade has been sewn onto his black military jacket above a Society logo that’s been peeled off and inverted. Red at the top. Gold the foundation.
The man’s been at war.
Beside him sits my mother. A bent, fragile woman since her stroke. How many times did I imagine the Jackal standing over her, pliers in hand? She’s been safe the whole time. Her crooked fingers weave needle and thread through tattered socks, patching the holes. They don’t move like they used to. Age and infirmity have slowed her. Her broken body is not what she is on the inside. There she stands tall as any Gold, broad as any Obsidian.
Watching her sit there breathing quietly, intent on her task, I want to protect her more than anything else in the world. I want to heal her. Give her all she never had. I love her so much, I don’t know what to say. What to do that can ever show her how much she means to me. “Mother…” I whisper.
They look up. Narol frozen in his chair. My mother setting a hand on his and rising slowly to my bedside. Her steps slow, wary. “Hello, child.”
She stands above me, overwhelming me with the love in her eyes. My hand is almost larger than her head, but I gently touch her face as if to prove to myself she is real. I trace the crow’s-feet from her eyes to the gray hair at her temples. As a boy, I did not like her as much as I liked father. She would hit me at times. She would weep alone and pretend nothing was wrong. And now all I want is to listen to her hum as she cooks. All I want are those still nights where we had peace and I was a child.
I want the time back.
“I’m sorry…,” I find myself saying. “I’m so sorry…”
She kisses my forehead and rocks her head against mine. She smells like rust and sweat and oil. Like home. She tells me I am her son. There is nothing to apologize for. I am safe. I am loved. The family is here. Kieran, Leanna, their children. Waiting to see me. I sob uncontrollably, sharing all the pain my solitude forced me to hoard. The tears a deeper language than my tongue can afford. I’m exhausted by the time she kisses me again on the head and pulls back. Narol comes to her side and puts a hand on my arm. “Narol…”
“Hello, you little bastard,” he says roughly. “Still your father’s son, eh?”
“I thought you were dead,” I say.
“Nah. Death chewed on me a bit. Then spat my bloody ass back out. Said there was killing that needed doin’ and some wild blood of mine that needed savin’.” He grins down at me. That old scar on his lips joined by two new ones.
“We’ve been waiting for you to wake up,” Mother says. “It’s been two days since they brought you back in the shuttle.”
I can still taste the smoke from burned flesh in the back of my throat.
“Where are we?” I ask.
“Tinos. The city of Ares.”
“Tinos…,” I whisper. I sit up quickly. “Sevro…Ragnar…”
“They’re alive,” Narol grunts, pushing me back down. “Don’t rip out your tubes and resFlesh. Took Dr. Virany hours to thread you up after that bloody mess of an escape. Boneriders were supposed to be in EMP radius. They weren’t. They ripped us to pieces in the tunnels. Ragnar’s the only reason you’re living.”