“It’s good, isn’t it, girl,” he says. “Rain. What we’ve needed for so long. If not for this downpour, I’d have to go sell my soul to something off world.”
Those words trigger something deep inside me. I burst into tears of relief, run to him, and hug him so tight he complains about not being able to breathe.
“Don’t do that,” I say. “Don’t go away again. Please. Stay here.”
He grins at me with that devil-may-care expression that I inherited, but still find unsettling to see on his face. I have a very strange feeling, almost as if I am straddling two worlds. It doesn’t make sense.
“I haven’t gone anywhere, girl,” he says. “And I’m not going to.”
“I was having a dream,” I say, because that’s the easiest way to explain having dual memories of something that didn’t exist and something that clearly does in my mind at the exact same time. “That you’d gone, and you didn’t come back, and I got flung into the sun, but I didn’t die, and then I almost drowned and there were aliens. Like, a lot of aliens…”
The more I think about it, the more I realize itmusthave been a dream. None of that could really happen, obviously. My father wouldn’t leave me. And I would never let myself be captured by aliens, obviously. It’s all so far-fetched. I’ve just had some kind of near-waking dream state that probably came on because my father and I have been working so hard lately. I probably need more magnesium.
“It’s strange,” he says, half to himself. “I had a dream of sorts that I got shot to death by pirates on a smuggling run.”
“Don’t do that again,” I tell him. “We have to stay here. This is the only part of the universe that’s safe. And even here isn’t that safe. If you go, the elders are going to try to marry me off to Jimothy again, and if I won’t marry him, they’ll shoot me into the sun.”
My father laughs and ruffles my hair. “You have such a strong imagination,” he smirks. “Don’t worry. I’m not going anywhere. There’s nothing in this world, or off it, that would make me leave you behind.”
Except there was, once. In a dream that I’ve now been spared. And there’s something else, too, or maybe someone else I’m forgetting…
CHAPTER 11
Freak
“You knew you were never going to get away with that,” Alara hisses at me.
“Was I trying to get away with it?”
She narrows her eyes and I know I have said the wrong thing. There isn’t really a right thing to say. The world is full of wrong things in this moment, and I’m at peace with that.
I have been caught, obviously.
It’s very hard to dissolve an entire reality and not be caught. I wasn’t really even trying not to be caught. Well, not for everything, anyway. I’ve done a lot of work in a way designed not to be noticed, and then finally topped it with the thing she could not help but notice.
Alara is fuming. Steam is rising from her head and shoulders as she smolders at me. If she could kill me, she would. But Psyonsare functionally immortal and we do not have the death penalty. So she’s going to have to get creative.
I don’t think she has the mental capacity to be particularly artistic about these events. One moment she was about to form an evil alliance with the DC; the next, none of that had ever happened.
I did not expect every Psyon in existence to be here, but I suppose it’s hard to make an example if it doesn’t happen publicly. Also, their simultaneous appearance might be my fault, now that I think about it.
When a timeline collapses, a Psyon standing on the brink of it has no choice but to return to the place from whence he came.
Alara and I appeared at the temple at the same time. That makes sense.
The fact that everyone else was also in the same position, that is interesting. That tells me I was perhaps the only Psyon not in on this plan. And that explains why I languished in a DC torture facility for years. I’ve been assuming the goodwill of my kind for years, but my agenda has clearly not been meshing well with theirs for a long time.
“Why were you all so keen to merge with the Datari Composite?”
“Fresh blood, new power. Joining forces would have made us beings to reckon with,” Alara says.
“But we are already…”
I trail off. For some beings, a taste of power is both too much and not enough. I thought we were better than this. But we’re not. And perhaps even I am not truly any more advanced thanthe others. It’s just that what I wanted—or rather, who I wanted—had a different face.
Alara and I are not all that different. For a long time, we were both on the verge of power. It is clear that she tried to get rid of me once. I am sure she is going to get rid of me again now.
Though they cannot kill me, it feels like a good day for an execution. The sun is warm, like it always is. The dunes are mathematically perfect, as they always are. The wind has a hint of jasmine and a little pine, and some daisy. All the fundamental plants of the universe.
