Chapter 11 The Spirit of Life #3
“Kay admires that you’re tough and brave because you’d do things he’d never think of doing.
He thinks this mission is you being tough and brave all over again, doesn’t he?
I’d do, and have done these things before, so I see a different side of it.
Tough and brave is a means to an end, but you’re chasing down a dream.
Tell me this–even if you find him, what are you expecting to happen in that head of yours?
What’s the dream? It was all just some big misunderstanding? ” he asked.
Ella withdrew her hand, looking at his eyes now. “You’re looking for someone who vanished over a hundred years ago.”
“Apparently, I vanished a hundred years ago too. I’m not looking for him.
I’m looking for information. I don’t want to find Peter.
No one actually wants to find him.” Jackson reasoned, still sitting in front of her.
She noticed for the first time that the darkness of his eyes had faint glints of chocolate brown.
“And when you get your information? Confirmation that he’s dead?” she asked.
“Sure, I’ll just off myself. No point in sticking around,” he said so naturally, it felt truthful.
Ella gawked as he removed another cigarette and walked back up to the rocks to smoke. “You will have worked all your life to preserve human life, and here you’re planning to kill yourself?” She asked as she leaned after him.
“My teams are all dead, the ROSE are all dead, everything I knew is gone. If your society is full of bleeding idealists like Kay, I’m better off jumping off the cliff right now.”
“Bleeding idealists? People that care?” she asked, voice raised as she still stared incredulously.
“People that are easy to manipulate because all they want to do is the right thing,” Jackson shot back, “which ironically is very different than the necessary thing about fifty percent of the time. Let me guess—your academy teaches all about principle and progress but you’ve got poor people piled up on the streets in the bad sides of town?
Still hold public executions? Idealism is just a balm for the ego.
People don’t actually act on it most of the time anyway. ”
“That’s every society,” Ella shot back, unsure if she believed her own words but feeling compelled to disagree with him.
“Then I guess what I’m saying is that I don’t want to be a part of society.” He said without hesitation.
“The ROSE died so that society could exist,” she reasoned, every exchanged line in the argument causing her to sit up straighter.
He shrugged, “We were dreamers too, Ella. We died for the dream. No one ever wants to see reality. You don’t actually want to find Crow. I don’t actually want to live the peaceful life I fought for. It’s the search you love. It’s the fighting I love. That’s life. Chasing. Tension.”
“Sounds like a nightmare,” Ella breathed, leaning back against the stone and he laughed, exhaling the smoke into the air before looking back at her with a full grin as if she’d told a joke.
It wasn’t until she saw the genuine lightness of his smile that she realized she had. That was the joke, after all, and he’d been laughing about it perhaps for years.
“You don’t have to take it so seriously,” he said, and at that moment, she felt some burden on her chest lift.
It wasn’t just a joke, but an inside-joke, one that felt somehow wrong and scandalous and yet she realized in that moment she’d been waiting to hear it for a while, to laugh with someone about it.
The lightness was interrupted by the intrusive thought that even just a moment ago he’d mentioned killing himself in that same spirit and her smile faded. He seemed to notice and they sat there both with vacant expressions, watching each other.
“You don’t have to take it so seriously,” she repeated the words on a breath, just spoken from a man who’d helped bring down an empire.
Ella wondered why she suddenly felt so close to him and if that should alarm her. She leaned her head back against the rocks and closed her eyes, relieved when Kay at last walked from around the structure.
“Very empty,” Kay said, “and dusty. Not exactly what I would have expected from the spirit of Life. How’s your arm?”
“Fine,” Ella whispered with her eyes closed.
Pencil still in hand, he eased to the edge of the cleft, and started scribbling away as he inspected the landscape.
Ella looked curiously from where he’d come and decided it might be worthwhile to explore while Kay did his sketches and Jackson continued to parse out the possibility of a settlement in the north.
Kay was right in his summary, and Ella didn’t know if he’d expected an apparition from Life itself, but she found herself content enough to explore the vast tower and large atrium in its center.
She found the silence rather peaceful and laid down with the cool marble at her back.
It was a refreshing replacement to the sun on her neck and it was a relief to give her legs a rest. As she closed her eyes, she let her mind wander restlessly from Crow, to her team, to Jackson and Kay in a blur of confusing hopes and fears.
Her thoughts drifted into a dreamlike haze, Ella feeling the ground soften and grow warm beneath her, melting the pain out of her body. Eyes still closed, and almost asleep, she marveled at the painlessness in her arm and stretched it out.
Her body felt strong again and perfectly healthy, Ella arching her back against what felt like a bed beneath her before settling into it without question.
The moment felt fragile but immersive, as if opening her eyes would make it all disappear and so absorbed in the relief of it all she wished for a moment that she could stay there forever.
Ella. A voice impressed softly into her brain.
She shifted, feeling like a teenager again when Samual had prompted her out of bed before dawn to tend to the animals. The idea of going back to where she was in reality sent grief blooming through her.
She got the strangest sense that she was indeed lying in a bed, in a place very far away. She stretched her arm, experimenting with the dream and the idea of waking up.
She felt renewed, body buzzing with energy, more alive perhaps than she’d felt in a long time.
Ella opened her eyes, and she was lying on the same hard surface. The feelings of relief hadn’t faded, her face wet with tears.
She moved her body against the marble, head drifting over to her arm as she began to move and test it.
It had been completely healed.
She sat up frantically, scanning the room and she inspected her arm. A presence faded from the room and Ella laid back down, closing her eyes as she tried to focus on it, catching up with it.
This time, the presence swept around her and she was standing in a grand room, like a ballroom, the faintest outlines of it lingering like a bright light after the lights went out.
She could almost trace the outlines, and eased to her feet.
She was standing on a carpet, someone sitting several feet away from her on the stairs of a grand, empty staircase.
Welcome back.
“You,” she whispered with the faintest feeling of recognition, doing her best to trace the feelings, leaning heavily on Samual’s early teachings for Listeners.
She felt crippled by the limited nature of her abilities, accidentally opening her eyes and stepping back as a strange headache formed in the pit of her skull. She pushed her eyes closed again and there she was back in that strange, distant room.
“What are you?” she asked.
You know.
“A Strike?” she replied, and remembered the dangerous feeling she’d found at the bottom of Jackson’s memories. She’d told Jackson she hadn’t seen anything when he’d been so intent on asking. The creature she sensed hadn’t looked like a Strike. Then again, she’d only really seen a twisted shadow.
Without saying anything more, she opened her eyes, stood, and turned back toward the door.
And what do you think Jackson will do when he knows you can hear me? The impression came like a whisper, as if through a tunnel, but Ella stopped.
She stood there in complete silence, arm pressing up against the nearest wall as if to steady herself as she closed her eyes and focused back on the source of the voice.
She was standing in a different version of the current room, a version where a murky figure waited there with her.
“I want my bullet wound back,” Ella said, “everything you did. Reverse it. Now.”
You want to be in pain?
“I can’t afford to owe someone like you.”
There was perhaps a chuckle, or the sensation of humor, Ella picking up on the subtlest impression of it through her senses.
I’m in your debt for setting us free, and the pleasure of power is to be used, you know.
“I doubt that’s how Strike use their power. Give it back. Now.”
The mirage sitting nearby lifted a hand, fingers poised to snap. Ella opened her eyes and eased down against the wall, focusing on the floor ahead of her as she waited.
I’m not like the other Strike. In fact, I’m quite the opposite. I never served Peter.
She heard the finger snap and pain, made so much worse by the contrast of her good health ravaged through her. Ella nearly threw up, heaving against the floor as she bit her sleeve to try and muscle down the intensity of the groan that surged through her.
Her entire body shook, and she trembled as she remained huddled against the wall. She felt lightheaded, eyes closed.
You’re going to need me to get to the truth, the voice echoed from a distant place.
Ella opened her eyes, forcing herself up as she pushed up against the wall. Wiping the sweat from her face, she walked uneasily out of the room and down the steps, hating the state of herself and struggling through what she should do next.