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“TRES!?” I roar her name into the blackness.
“I’m here,” she sings, her voice a hymn on the breeze. “I’m waiting for you.”
“I’m coming for you, Tres. Wherever you are. Whenever you are. I’m coming. Stay strong.”
“I miss you.”
“I love you.”
We can only touch via our words, but our words are enough to let me know that she survives in some form. Maybe the girl in the cave died, but that was never who Tres really was. She was always something more than herself, an angel trapped in a limited body. I will find her again. I swear it. If it takes a thousand lifetimes, I will find her.
“LET ME OUT!” I growl the words as I come back to consciousness, yanking and writhing against my bonds. I will fight every moment they try to keep me restrained. These chains will lose their battle before I do.
“Still can’t do that, chief,” Vrel says. “You’re still heavily sedated. I know it doesn’t feel like it, but you are.”
“I heard Tres. She’s waiting for me. I have to get to her.”
The medics exchange looks. “You might experience some hallucinogenic side effects. Try not to let them get to you.”
“It wasn’t a hallucination. It was her.”
They look at one another again. It is as if they are speaking without words. Vrel and Tzan were double hatched, both coming from the same egg. They are, in essence, the same scythkin in two bodies. It’s difficult to decide which one of them deserves to be destroyed first. Tzan tends to take the lead, so it might be more effective to eliminate Vrel.
Murder within the brood is so rare as to effectively never happen, but I would kill endlessly if it meant being able to find Tres - and I will certainly never find her while I am trussed up like a chicken, being poked at and thrown repeatedly into unconsciousness by these two.
“He’s been completely broken,” Vrel says to Tzan. “No sense of reality. Auditory hallucinations. This is bad.”
They think I have been driven insane by grief, and perhaps I have, but scythkin do not dream and we do not hallucinate. Tres is alive. Somewhere in time, somewhere in space, she still exists, and she is reaching out to me.
Tzan lowers his voice and turns away slightly. They think I don’t hear them. They’re wrong.
“There is a mind wiping technique that works on humans, but I don’t know if it will do anything for him…”
“Don’t you dare,” I snarl.
They both turn to me with bright, superficial smiles.
“Don’t worry. We’ll up the sedative, and soon you won’t have any memory of her at all. It will be as if the entire episode down on Earth never happened at all…”
“NO!”
Another one of those infernal pricks finds my skin. This time I fight going down into the dark, but there is no way to stop the swallowing shadows from overwhelming me.
“TRES!” I call her name, hearing something new in my voice. Fear. I have never been afraid before, but I am now, so close to losing even the memory of her forever. They’re trying to erase everything. They’re trying to take her from me again. The primal rage which rises in me at that realization is more powerful than anything I have ever felt before. My muscles flex, and the chains fall from me as if they were made of paper.
I do not bother looking for an exit. If they wanted to let me go gracefully, they should have done that earlier. Now, I gather my clawed hand in a fist and I punch through the wall itself, curling back the hull of the ship.
Emergency systems kick in to repair the hole, but not before I throw myself into the void beyond, the big black inky darkness of true space swallowing me whole. Ordinarily, when someone is thrown from a ship, they suffocate in space almost immediately. I am expecting death to shroud me, but I do not care. I do not think I will find Tres again in this life. I have always known the universe was made up of many strands of space, matter, and time. I cannot skip between them while encumbered by this body. I have to rid myself of my scythkin form and…
A golden glow emerges from the darkness, followed by a crown of blue. The Earth rises out of space to catch me, as if I am something special to it. As if I belong there. Once again, I am standing on a green grass plain, the volcano above me, the river gleaming in the distance - and the field of grain where Tres’ song once drew me.
I walk toward the grain, hoping that somehow I will be returned to her.
I hear a faint note, something that I don’t dare believe is a song. It is probably a bird. The animals around here are prone to melody. Though I start at a walk, I am soon running. I can see a female figure in the field.
