43 Calvin The Descent
Calvin: The Descent
Alone. Reggie has left me alone. The tether connecting us slips away from me like greased rope.
Nothing remains but the burn in my hands from the fight to hold on.
Reggie’s had a grip on my soul since long before I knew such a thing was possible, and the emptiness after she pulls away rips my breath from my lungs, leaving me gasping.
She turns away from me, steps toward Adele, arm outstretched. I know what she’s going to do the moment before she does it. I lunge for her. If she drags me down, so be it, but if there’s even the slimmest chance I can save her, I’m taking it.
Luca barrels into me, knocking me back. I can’t control the transformation now, and it’s instinct to fight back, for a moment not caring if I hurt him.
Reggie shouts something, but I’m too gone to hear it. Luca falters, though, just enough that I pull free and I’m racing toward Reggie. And then Reggie leaps from the cliffside, pulling Adele down with her.
Screams fill the air—my own, Reggie’s sisters’, Eldi’s.
Luca tackles me again just before I reach the edge. His weight, warm and alive and human, pins me down. I shudder back into my human form, and I struggle free, whirling around to face him. “What did you do?” I mean to shout, but it comes out a whisper.
Empty space. All that is left. Empty space and silence, a gaping void. I’m grasping at nothing; Reggie is gone over the edge.
Luca is on his hands and knees next to me, breathing in shaky gasps.
“What did you do?” I snarl.
He doesn’t answer, only curls down into himself.
“What did you do?” I scream.
“Only what I promised her I would.”
Reggie jumped. He let her. The dual betrayal, both of them colluding, cuts me to the bone.
“I love her.” My voice cracks.
Luca moans. He’s shaking, and though I can’t see his face, I know he’s crying too.
“I love her!” I shout. As if somehow that will bring her back. As if the universe will hear me and return what it took.
Luca exhales a broken laugh, pushes up from the ground to look at me.
“You think I don’t know that? Do you really think you’re the only one who loves her?” Luca says.
Eldi is completely silent and still, Orion curled around her, his silent tears trickling into her hair.
Meredith and Zara cling to each other. Meredith, wide eyed and pale, comforts Zara, who keeps shaking her head in disbelief, as if she can keep the truth away.
I meet Luca’s eyes, and I want to hate him, but my anger is abruptly too heavy to carry.
Then Meredith screams and points toward the cliff. A coiling whirl of robotic limbs rises from the drop-off. Doug and Dave appear from below, bringing with them—
Reggie. My entire body goes numb with relief.
But she’s limp and lifeless in their grasp. The robots set her gently on the ground, and I lean over her, listening. Luca, Meredith and Zara, Orion and Eldi, gather in close around us. Even Doug and Dave wait with bated breath. There’s the faintest flutter of air against my face. An exhale.
“She’s breathing,” I manage to say.
“A pulse,” Zara says, Reggie’s wrist in her grasp.
But Reggie is utterly still. I know without knowing how I know. Reggie is gone. This is simply her body; her soul is missing. She is empty.
“What’s wrong with her?” Meredith whimpers.
“She jumped. She jumped into the void,” Zara says. Her voice, calm and hollowed out. Clinical almost, a doctor doling out an unpleasant diagnosis. “We didn’t catch her in time.”
The hope that was momentarily rising inside me tamps back down.
“Carpathia,” Luca whispers.
“What did you say?” I ask, tearing my gaze from Reggie to meet his eyes. There’s a strange tone to his voice.
“Carpathia,” Luca says, “Carpathia, Carpathia!”
He’s shouting now, and a broad smile is spreading across his face.
“What are you talking about?”
“That’s what she shouted at me before she jumped.”
“So?”
“This isn’t the fucking Titanic!” Luca shouts. He grips his head with his hands, his eyes feverish. “Man the lifeboats! We’re the lifeboats!”
I’m completely lost, sharing concerned looks with the others.
“Luca, we’re in the desert,” I say hopelessly. “Reggie is gone, in some magical other realm.”
“Calvin.” Luca grabs me by my shoulders. “The Carpathia was the ship that came to save the survivors when the Titanic sank. The rescuers. We’re her Carpathia. She wants us to come to save her.”
“Reggie said we have one thing Adele never had—tethers,” Zara says.
“Exactly,” Luca says.
“We tether each other and go after her,” I say as sudden understanding floods my body with adrenaline. “Adele said when she fell into the magic void that she held on and climbed back out. Reggie must be trying to do the same now.”
“We have to be the rescue ship that retrieves her soul from that realm before she falls too far to come back to her body,” Luca says.
I grasp one of Reggie’s hands in my own; Luca holds the other.
Meredith slips her hand in mine, as Orion takes Luca’s.
I let myself feel them, reach out and grab hold.
Meredith and Zara lend unfamiliar and unflinching support.
Orion and Eldi are more otherworldly, harder to hold on to, but they throw their strength toward me with all their might.
Luca meets my eyes, leans forward over Reggie, to press his forehead against mine.
“Trust me,” he whispers. Question or command, it doesn’t matter; the answer is the same.
“Yes.”
Luca’s tether wraps around me, stronger than any I’ve felt aside from Reggie’s. He is familiar, as wild and restless as Reggie’s soul. But he’s steadier, more settled and sure than Reggie has ever been.
For a split second, I see double. A cliffside in Nevada, six of us crouched around the center of a universe of our own making, an alien ship in the sky. Luca’s hand on a doorknob, yanking open a doorway, a vast darkness looming just through it.
“Hold on, Reggie; we’re coming,” I say as I close my eyes.
When I open them, I’m awestruck. The universe unfurls around me. Luca stands beside me. A vast abyss stretching endlessly down has replaced the desert cliffside.
“Where’s everyone else?” I ask.
Luca gestures to a rope coiled next to us that stretches back through the doorway. “Tethering us,” he says, reaching to pick up the coil of rope. “So do we draw straws or what?” Luca huffs, looking toward the edge.
“I’m going after her,” I say without hesitation.
“I know,” Luca says wryly. “And anyway, you need someone up here to anchor you. Safety first.” He yanks at me, turns me back from the edge, and I’m about to resist until I realize what he’s up to. I’m wearing a rock-climbing harness, Luca deftly tightening and adjusting the straps.
“Didn’t anticipate how handy this hobby of mine would be,” he says with a shrug. He ties knots, fastens clips, rigs up some sort of pulley as he gives me instructions.
“All you have to do is make it to Reggie and secure her to yourself. I can haul you both up from there.” The technical instructions he continues murmuring under his breath are more to steady himself than me, I think, but his voice calms me too.
Luca braces himself, hands on the rope, as I step backward away from him and lean back over the edge of the void. For a moment, paralyzing fear sweeps over me. Luca and I lock eyes.
“That first step is the hardest. It gets easier, I promise.”
“Don’t drop me.”
“I’ve got you.”
I push off the cliff edge and descend into the darkness.