Time to Prepare #2
Zodak lowered to his knees and placed his index finger along the side of his neck. Analyze energy. Low-intensity draw.
Vibration hummed through the haptic feedback system in his palm as the sensors fed the data directly into his nervous system. The vibration entered clean, high, and unnaturally regulated.
Zodak mentally pushed the command further. Locate the source.
His sensors reached deeper. The hum in his hand suddenly shattered into a high-frequency tremor, making his power modulators shriek with a frequency they couldn’t process.
Zodak’s neural interface triggered an emergency shutdown right as a kinetic shockwave erupted from the man’s body and hit him in the chest. The blast ripped Zodak off his feet and sent him flying into the glass wall with a bone-rattling force.
He hit the floor, gasping for air, his cybernetic hand twitching and spitting hot sparks.
The muffled sound of pounding boots reached his ears, Seer’s face before him, blue eyes boring into him. “Can you hear me? Zodak!”
His hearing cleared as his hand’s system rebooted. “Bishop is correct,” he said, winded, gripping Seer and King Dalk’s arm as they helped him stand. “There is something inside him that does not want to be discovered.” He looked at Seer for many seconds. “You must touch him,” Zodak realized.
****
Seer held Zodak’s sharp gaze, then glanced over his shoulder at Sinrik.
“I can assist,” King Dalk said.
“No, brother,” Zodak warned as Seer approached the mystery man on the floor. “Only him.”
Seer lowered to his knees and stared at the peaceful face. The first question for Seer was the what of him. Human or machine? Or both?
Maggie had touched him and it had produced several dozen prophetic pages. Spook had pried her away and he now wondered how many more pages she’d needed to draw. He wished he’d spoken to her.
Seer closed his eyes. Father, if it is your will for me to see. I am ready.
He placed his palm over the man’s heart and began searching. He drew in a slow, deep breath, relaxing into his trust of the divine process.
Movement caught Seer’s attention. A blooming sky-blue. It was warm.
He panned slowly left, searching for the source.
Then he panned right. The feeling inside him grew into a new kind of awareness.
A new kind of understanding. A different kind of vision.
A knowing without seeing, but not in the way he usually did.
This was... an understanding of something else.
Of something deeper and beyond human knowledge.
And yet… he was understanding whatever it was. But what he fathomed, he couldn’t name. Not with any part of his vocabulary.
The warmth bloomed more, circling his mind and suddenly settling gently onto it. His muscles braced. The heat turned up, becoming phenomenal, forming a band around his head. Gradually and gently, it began to tighten.
Seer’s pulse soared.
A shockwave punched the air from his lungs. Its power replaced his entire humanity, filling him with astonishing fullness.
“Do not touch him!” Zodak commanded, halting the stampede of footsteps rushing toward him. “This is not malevolence,” he whispered, voice trembling with awe.
Zodak could see what filled him. Even while Seer could not. Not the way he did. But he surely felt it. Billowing through him, showing him and yet not. Explaining everything without words. Without images.
It felt like it communed with his DNA.
He suddenly realized it.
And it tore a sob from his chest.
The Creator of the Universe was dancing with him. Gracefully writing a love note on the backside of his mind and heart.
Then He carefully unraveled from his cells and gently laid Seer’s soul on the floor, pulling out of him.
A bone crushing longing for his true home tore another sob from him. Don’t go! God, don’t go!
****
Bishop was in fucking agony. They all were. All needing to help their brother and not a one of them able to. They knew what he needed didn’t exist on this fallen Earth.
His heart crushing sobs finally dwindled down then took a sudden turn into chuckles. Bishop’s keen hearing picked up the numerous sighs of relief around him as he helped Seer to his feet who was now in full blown, howling laughter.
They all watched, tense and ready to catch him when he fell from whatever cliff he was fucking dangling from.
Seer hurried to Zodak and grabbed his shoulders. “Please tell me what you see, what you saw.”
Zodak looked right into his eyes, his face still etched with the trauma. “Light,” he whispered.
“What else,” he urged. Seer looked at Bishop. “You touched me, you saw something. What was it?”
Bishop shook his head at him. “I didn’t… recognize what it was.” He didn’t say divine, mostly because he wasn’t a thousand percent sure and didn’t want to blaspheme.
“What happened to you?” Nitro asked.
Seer held Bishop’s gaze, his arms slowly sliding off Zodak’s shoulders.
“I was shown things about him. What he is. What he’s not.
Why he is.” Every quiet confession was spoken directly to Bishop.
“I was shown his connection to your son. And to your wife. And to you. And to everybody,” he whispered, gaze filling with tears.
They all waited for the rest and Seer’s brows raised with the spread of his smile then that laughter.
“And you all want to know what it is,” he said, placing his hands on Bishop’s shoulders now, red-rimmed blue eyes locked on him.
“I know everything that needs to be known, brother. But was not given the words to speak it.”
That final part was spoken with astonished laughter.
“I was shown everything in a language that human tongues cannot speak,” he realized in shock and awe.
Wow.
And fuck.
“What can you tell us?” Bishop asked, his intuition not happy.
He gave him a joyful, mostly regretful look. “I can tell you one thing. He is not our enemy. And one other thing. He needs our help.”
Bishop fought his disgust with this dead end. “For what?”
Seer’s slow headshake didn’t help. “Guess we’ll know that when it’s time to know it.”
He held his stare a few moments. “Unbelievable.”
Seer nodded.
He aimed his loathing at Sinrik. “Why don’t I trust him?”
“Because he isn’t trustworthy,” Seer said, getting Bishop’s glare back on him.
“Is that part of your download of invisible information? This is not sarcasm, mon frere, it’s a genuine question,” he added, unable to hide his fucking anger.
“It is,” he said, fighting hard with his grin. “He’s not trustworthy yet because he has no idea about what I was shown.”
“Or about everything you don’t know.”
He nodded, sympathetic with that oxymoron they were stuck with.
“Mon fucking Dieu,” Bishop muttered, wanting to walk over and kick him in the head.
“So we’re just locking him up,” Bullets said, sounding ripped off.
“I got room at my Weigh Station,” Nitro said, hungry for an opportunity and excuse.
They all volunteered their jails now like good swamp Samaritans.
“He’ll stay in mine,” Bishop decided, glad he at least got to imprison their oblivious precious rock. For as long as it took. Which was until God showed him it was safe to do otherwise.
Sinrik would learn—hopefully the hardest fucking way—that in this swamp, ignorance wasn’t bliss.