CHAPTER THREE
Nowhere Fast
Cody Martin and Mercedes Lackey
We didn’t know any of that, of course. By “we,” I mean Echo and CCCP. Merc was incommunicado, and the Seraphym didn’t exactly talk much. Well…not to most of us anyway.
One, though, she did speak to…unlikely confidant that he was.
We had to save the world, but first we had to save ourselves…but some of us had help from unexpected sources.
John was restless, again. He hated lying around and having people wait on him. Hospitals were the worst, and the CCCP HQ’s medbay wasn’t too much better than any of the hospitals he’d been in. He seemed to be taking longer to heal than usual too. Either he’d been hurt worse than he thought, or he’d been running on fumes for so long there wasn’t enough left to heal with. He had been feeling dizzy the last few days, and inordinately sore. Granted, he was lucky to be alive and he was far sturdier than the average person, but his unease was palpable.
Nightmares didn’t help either. But the real tragedy was that there wasn’t any beer.
He was sitting on the ledge of the CCCP HQ’s roof, staring towards the west and his neighborhood. There were a depressingly small number of lights on. The one thing to be thankful for was the lack of light pollution; he reckoned that it was rare to see the stars so clearly in Atlanta, or any major city.
You should see them from the depths of space, John Murdock.
“Stars are stars, Angel. I like lookin’ at them from the ground.” He turned his head to glance over his shoulder. Her fires were muted tonight, only enough of a glow to see by. As always, it was her eyes that marked her as profoundly other, the smoldering golden glow without even a hint of pupil. She offered a bottle beaded with condensation. “Much obliged,” he said, accepting the beer. “How long have you been watching me?”
Just now, or in general?
“Just now. The latter answer might scare me. An’ let’s talk for real. This mind stuff doesn’t sit well with me.” He took a long swig from the bottle, staring out over the cityscape.
She moved, lightly and gracefully, to perch like a bird on the ledge beside him. Not too near, not too far. “I arrived only a minute or so before I spoke.”
“Busy night for ya, Angel?”
“Somewhat. Some rescue…some other things. Much sorting through possibilities.” She moved her head restlessly, her smoldering hair stirred like little campfire flames. “So many threads, so many lives, and things changing all the time.” Now she turned her head to look at him again. “Had you rather I looked more mortal?”
“How would that work?” John didn’t turn his head to look at her, instead focusing on the stars above. He had never been able to stare at Sera, except for the first time he ever saw her.
“I can look as I please. This is not my true form, but no one mortal could bear that.” She tossed her head, and between one moment and the next, she…changed. Changed to a red-haired woman, in a gown that looked like the representation of fire, rather than fire itself.
He risked a look at her. “Cute trick. I’d rather that you look like whatever you’re comfortable with.” He shifted where he sat, obviously uncomfortable with her effortless power. “Whaddya think of this bunch below us?”
Her eyes were the same. She blinked slowly. “They are…important. Very important. For so few, they have the potential to do so much, and they are not fettered by the self-doubt and constraint of those who could do as much, were they not bound by things that, in this confrontation, are meaningless.”
“So, what you’re saying is, that they’d be good sorts to stick around with?”
She blinked again. “I believe it is important that you do so. For your sake, and for theirs. You are the keys to each others’ locks.”
He looked at her sideways. “Never a straight answer with you, is there?” John shook his head, sipping at his beer again. “I figure I’ll stick with them. My neighborhood is going to need all the help it can get, and a mutual support network will keep my ass out of the fire if things get hectic. Plus, their uniforms don’t look that bad.”
“A straight answer…I can give you some. First: there are more things I am not permitted to tell you than there are things that I may. And there is a reason for this. The Infinite…it does not, as Einstein said, ‘play at dice with the universe.’ It does not ‘play’ at all. All those beings that think…they are not toys, nor slaves, nor”—she winced a little, hardly more than a flicker—“things of entertainment.”
John chuckled. “I seem to entertain ya a fair bit.”
She tilted her head to the side, quizzically. “I am sorry if I gave you that impression.” She stared at him a moment more. “The creatures that think are…possessed of Free Will. The Infinite rarely meddles in their lives. It took…a great violation, a great peril, for me to be permitted to be an instrument here. You are in a moment where…Free Will and all the right choices may not save you.”
He looked at her soberly. “Even if we play our cards right, you think we can beat something like this?” His hand swept over the ruined metropolis. Over the destruction corridors, the scattered lights, and the smoldering remains of buildings in the distance.
Her lips parted a moment. A single tear, like a bead of crystal, moved slowly down one cheek. John’s hand twitched to wipe it away, but he kept it at his side. “Insofar as I can do what I am permitted to do…I am trying, John Murdock. I am trying.” The tear splashed to the tarpaper roof.
John nodded. “I think that that’s more important than actually winning. The fact that we are fighting. It’s all in the struggle.” He sighed. “Besides, if it were easy, where would the fun be?”
She smiled wanly. “I had rather you all did not join my Siblings too soon. Life…is a vast blessing, when there is joy.” She was silent a moment. “This, I am permitted to say. There is not one future. There are many, many. Threads and threads and threads, weaving, reweaving, being broken and knotted up again. More than you can possibly imagine. Something…happened. Something terrible grew and grew and began to change the endings of many, now most, of those threads.”
“Y’know, if you were really trying to cheer me up…well, that sucked.” He grinned, flashing his teeth.
Unexpectedly, she gave him a real, dazzling smile. “But that is why I am an instrument here, now, John. I am trying to find the way to the bright-ended threads. That is why it must be me, and not one of you—you can see only what you know, but I can see it all, and not go mad.” She paused. “And I must weave my own way through Free Will, show a little here, do a little there, save a life, guide a very, very little…a touch here, a touch there. Do…do you understand?” She lost the smile, and a look of unbearable sadness came over her. “So many…do not. They cry for miracles. They do not understand that for a miracle to occur, something equally miraculous must be sacrificed. Those who would make that sacrifice are not always the ones that should, and seldom the ones who can.”
He sighed. “I stopped praying years ago. Too many prayers, not enough to show for it. I think I understand what you’re saying, but I—I’m not sure I’m ready to commit an’ subscribe to your magazine, if you get my drift. I’ve been making my own way for most of my life; all the good that’s ever happened to me has been because of me…for the most part.” His eyes glazed over slightly, staring out across the empty space again. His eyes lost their spark, looking like they belonged to a corpse more than a breathing man.
Without him noticing, she had moved closer; she could be preternaturally graceful, and didn’t move so much as glide next to him. The lightest touch of a finger on the back of his hand, the first time she had actually touched him, punctuated her next words. “All the good that happens does so because we reach out to each other, John. The more we connect, the more we achieve.”
He started, almost recoiling from her. After a moment, his eyes took on their normal sheen, animated and ablaze with life again. He whispered, “And the bad?”
Her eyes blazed. “I make no apology for evil. It is the choice of those who seek it. Were I given a free hand…” The fires died in her eyes. “But I am not. That must be the choice of the good, to oppose the evil, to battle it, to succor those who have suffered from it. To reach out.” There was a small, grim smile on her face. “But in the here and now, I have been given some small ability to fight it directly, and where I can, I do, and I will.”
“And what happens if you overstep? If you take things into your own hands?” There was a hint of something else in his voice, but Seraphym couldn’t place it. He was guarding something.
“For myself alone…I am bound by stricter laws than any mortal.” Her grim smile turned wry. “With great power comes…great restrictions. I must be a surgeon with a…weapons-grade laser. But for mortals?” She looked away, and up, at the stars. Each word came slowly, as if it was being chosen with infinite care from a hundred thousand dictionaries. “Mortals are not granted infinite knowledge. They can only act on what they know. Mistakes are made. Terrible things are done—sometimes, nay, oftentimes, under the pressure of terrible things done to them. Much, much can be forgiven.”
John shook his head, stifling a deep cough as he did so. “Not everything.” Again, more that was being hidden. More that he was keeping from her specifically.
Again, she lightly touched his hand. “Look at me, John Murdock. Please.” With what looked like monumental effort, John raised his eyes to meet her unearthly eyes. This time the fires that burned there were not of anger, nor sadness, nor the reflection of whatever place she had come from. There was within them, not a fire, but a glow. If he could have put a name to it, it would have been compassion. Not pity, which he would have rejected. It was something raw, unadulterated, and primal. “John, I pledge to you on my very existence. Forgiveness is always possible. There must also come acceptance of that forgiveness, and repentance, and sometimes reparation. Repayment. Atonement. But the forgiveness itself? It is there, as the air you breathe is there.”
John stared in her eyes for several long moments, and opened his mouth to speak. There was pain in his eyes, and Sera knew that something important to John was about to be said. Before he could speak, however, the door access for the roof swung open, bathing the entire rooftop in a wide swath of amber light.
“Comrade Murdock. You are not to be moving from your bed.” Jadwiga, the CCCP’s doctor, also known by the callsign of Soviette, stood in the open doorway with her fists planted on her hips. “All over, I have been looking for you.”
John looked to where Seraphym had been sitting. The only thing left was a golden-red feather, resting peacefully next to him. “I hear ya, Nurse Hearse. Gimme a second.” He smiled to himself, and then finished his beer, setting the empty bottle on the ledge. “Back to the salt mines, huh?”
“You should not joke about salt mines,” Soviette scolded. “Some of the comrades were sent there by Stalin.” She shooed him down the stairs as if she was herding a chicken. And then looked back. “In bed with you. And…where are you getting beer?”