* * *
Freak
I am going to murder them all with extreme violence.
I am going to unwrite them from the universal ledger. I am going to ensure that their bloodlines turn to dust, that their births never took place.
My enemies are searching for me in the skies. They are guarding their facilities against me. They are sending out scouts to try to find me because they do not know where I am and they cannot understand why I have not surrendered myself to them. Maybe they are wondering if I have abandoned my pet. Whatever they are doing to her is about to be answered for many times over.
I am, at this time, standing on a proto-planet hundreds of thousands of years before any of them were born. The skies are roiling with carbon dioxide-rich air that makes the place feel perpetually damp. There is dew on everything, including me.
I am at this specific place, in this specific time, because Alara refused to help. She gloated about her lover, she exposed her plan, believing me helpless to end it on my own.
She has forgotten first principles. Silly thing.
I crouch down in the undergrowth, where a little lizard has just laid a particular kind of egg. I stand, watching it as it squeezes that little white cylinder out. Nobody realizes what potential islocked away in the contents of that egg; nobody understands that downstream from here, trillions of lives of all kinds spring from this particular little bauble.
If I walk away now, I choose to allow the Datari Composite to continue their expansion across space and time. I choose to let them continue to develop weapons that evade Psyonic tech, and turn us into captives and worse. I choose to let them take my pet, and end her at a time of their convenience after doing what they please to her. I also choose to keep my standing among my people, to maintain my power in the universe. I choose to follow the codes and laws to which I was born, and to which I have pledged my loyalty.
All I have to do is walk away, and I get to keep it all.
“I think not,” I say to myself.
I pick up the egg. This one fateful egg with the one fateful mutation that will, many generations from now, allow for these lizards to begin to not only grow, but walk upright and develop opposable thumbs. I let it roll on my palm. It is warm. The sun is beating down on me.
There is quiet in this place, far removed in time and space from any of the problems I most wish to solve. I am at risk of taking all this perspective and beginning to think that my little problems do not warrant this level of action. A good Psyon would not be here.
But I am not a good Psyon anymore. I am what is left after everything that can be taken from a man is taken from him. My pride, my dignity, and my pet.
I move to the little campsite I set up earlier. A gas burner is alight under a pot of boiling water.
I drop the egg into the boiling water.
I sit down beside it and I wait for seven meditative minutes. Then I turn the boiler off and drain the water. I reclaim the egg, crack the shell, and eat it whole.
I chew slowly, then I swallow. From here, time ripples out in a long ribbon of cause and effect, myriad uncontrollable changes taking place in times and places I have never gone and will never be. I cannot feel any of it from this place, but I know the home realm with be awash with temporal distortions. Alara will be furious. The council will be assembled. The foundational laws will be enacted against me.
It does not matter.
It is done.
CHAPTER 10
Mara
The Lizard King keeps me close, out of the brig, but now on a chain. He finds me amusing in the way old mad kings used to find jesters amusing. He thinks my reactions to his horrors are funny to provoke and observe. It’s like what Freak did to me, but worse in every single way. There’s no softness to this lizard. He has no fondness for me. I am entertainment and nothing more.
The world is very cold for me now. I do not know where my rescuers are, or if I have rescuers at all. Something is keeping Freak from coming for me. Something is preventing my father from returning. Everyone I love is taken from me and I never get to know what happened. For all I know they are both dead now.
I am starting to lose hope. I am starting to forget what hope even felt like. I do not know how long I have been in the lizard’s custody. I do know that it has been too long.
I shift in the attempt to get more comfortable, but the riveted floor is brutal on every part of my body. He prefers me to kneel,but I can only do that for so long. Now I am sitting beside his space throne, my head in my hands, knees drawn to my chest.
“Hello, darling.”
It’s a feminine voice, and an elegant one. It lacks all the sibilant hissing of the lizard aliens, so I know it doesn’t come from one of them. It’s also familiar, though my fear- and hunger-addled mind can’t place the origin.
“Hello, my love,” the Lizard King greets the new arrival.
