Cassiel Winters 1: Sky's End (36 page)

Instead of diving in face first, knowing I need to be IN the rift, not go through it, I dive sideways, almost backward, away from the Ops. They can’t see the rift and this should buy me the precious time I need to get all the way in. Pain rips through my back, going in at such a weird angle.

I’m just . . . going . . . to . . . make—

I’m not anywhere.

Rather, I’m in a bizarre state of being. Millions and millions of mirror images of me cause such an intense state of vertigo I stumble around slightly, as though drunk. I barf a little from the disorientation.

But I think I made it!

I did, I—

WHAM!
Something, no,
someone
, shoots through from the other side hitting me in the chest. I barely manage to stay upright.

Holy fucking shit.

Is that . . .
me?

From the other side. Diving through the rift.

I watch the woman’s torso and see she’s being dragged by absent legs back to her side. Soon her head appears from my dimension.
Yup
, definitely me.

For some reason, with her in here with me, the shattered reflections of me have disappeared.

Without thinking, I get down, grab her arms, and dig my heels in. She raises her face to me, shocked. For a moment she wraps her arms around me.

Then suddenly she releases them. Knowing. Knowing the two of us are no match for those SOSA men yanking her back.

“Let go.”

“No!” I shake my head, not knowing why. I should let her go, but I can’t.

I’m being pulled out with her. I grunt, and feel her shirt slipping up as she slides through my hands. She feels so . . . fragile.

“Hold on!” I yell at her, knowing it’s pointless. She’s resigned.

In one dramatic push, she frees herself from my grip . . . and is gone. Back to her dimension.

Now it’s up to me.

Chapter 33

Time does not pass. Here isn’t really a place. Somewhere, a memory pops up. Or’ic telling me that inside a rift, between dimensions, time’s different. Actually, I’m not sure there’s any time here.

No space. No time.

After the other me left, and the shattered images came back, I lost all physical sensations, as in all relationship or connection to physical matter. I was conscious, I think. My mind, I suppose, was evident. I had the sensation of nausea but no clear outlet to express it. I was confused but had no senses by which to make sense of matters. It’s not that I was blind or deaf. There was nothing to see or hear. Oddly, understanding this helped me to panic less. Because there was no ‘being’ I did not fret over there being no being. I did wonder if I was dead.

At some point, the convolution settled into a kind of fragmented dimension, of sorts, to my mind, which is so used to three-dimensional space and time, probably the best it could process. This returned me to the state that I’m calling ‘infinite visions.’ Double vision times infinity. It’s like when you look at your reflection of your reflection in a mirror, and there are an infinite number of ‘you’s staring back, only the ‘me’s are all around me. Beneath me. Beside me. Above me. In me.

I focus on trying to make it make sense but get nowhere.

Maybe, maybe I need to stop thinking so hard.

Just relax.

If there’s nothing to perceive, stop trying to perceive. Stop wanting. Stop needing.

Just be.

I get my first foothold on something relatable, and . . . it’s gone.

Idiot. You were trying to relate to it.

I focus on just being, no matter what, only being. And I hover there without thinking of time or anything. Eventually a calm waves through me in tiny ripples. Then, a shocking repossession of physical form. After it’s over, I allow myself to think on the horrid sensation. It didn’t hurt, but felt very ‘wrong’, as though my dissected being were being reassembled inch-by-inch methodically by a force I had no control over.

At some point, my eyes open. I’m surprised to have sight again. I’m on the ground, or a bottom of some kind, I think, face forward. I can’t really assimilate things like space. I lean up and back.

I’m all the others. The infinite ‘me’s.

I move my hand in front of my eyes and, somehow, I’m able to ascertain my hand despite all the other infinite versions of my hand moving in an infinite number of ways an infinite number of times in an infinite number of directions.

There must be time here! Otherwise I wouldn’t find some temporal core, such as this.
Right?
Oh, why didn’t I pay attention in astrophysics?
I’m shattered as my thoughts echo an infinite number of times behind me.

I tune them out.
How can I do that?
Somehow, I don’t need to tune out the physical repetitions. In fact, they mimic me, making me feel stronger. I embrace them, and as I do so, I stand up on my feet.
Steady she goes.

“Haste she makes, her own eyes belie distaste,” says a sweet voice, startling me an infinite number of times.

I spin around, and collapse into myself, rebounding onto my feet.

Melodious laughter rings in my ears.

Who? The sift?

I try not to focus and,
there!
, all of us can finally see another. He who is actually he, or the infinite core of him.

I gasp, shaken to my own infinite core, and the sound is like the universes have been sucked back into a singularity.

A child!

A sweet, skinny, cherubic boy, with perfect almond-shaped hazel eyes, soft, curly brown hair, no ears, and a wet, pink nose, which twitches with uncertainty.

“The Seraph arrives,” he whispers, his merriness turned to shock.

He stares at me open-eyed, obviously frightened.

“Don’t be scared,” I say, smiling at him even though my heart’s breaking. A child! They’re hunting a child! I bet Daz was helping him, helping him to hide!

I move forward and notice that my infinite beings follow me smoothly. He seems to watch them too, with awe and terror. Then I notice he has but a few, fading and ethereal. “I am—”

“Cassiel, she says, the seraph of solitude and tears.” He whispers this, cutting me off. He steps back when I step forward.

Seraph of solitude and tears? What’s he talking about?

“Don’t be frightened,” I say quietly, slipping back so he doesn’t think I’ll hurt him.

“Fear not, for the end, it shines bright with forgiveness.” He says this solemnly, voice trembling, as though he’s repeating a prayer, one he does not necessarily believe. Pools of dark form at the corners of his eyes.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” I say quickly. “Look, I’ll go away. I will. I just—”

He turns his head away reluctantly, as though he has no choice but to listen. I want to take him in my arms and protect him from all of this. The Aeons had him once. How had he managed to escape?

Oh, his legs are shaking. Dark brown viscous materials pool thickly in his eyes. Whatever his species, these must be tears.

Why am
I
scaring him?

Here I thought he could help me. Answer my questions. Help me understand all of this. Make sense of it for me, when he’s actually more helpless, more frightened than me.

But-but he did escape the Aeons. He was trying to negotiate something . . . amnesty for information.
What information?

He remains in the same spot. Stoically.

Before I can think of what to say next, he whispers, “She seeks her divine right. The amaranthine compact kept safe by the forsaken.”

Compact? Forsaken?

“What are you saying? How do you know my name?” I try instead, deciding to start with the simple first. “Did my brother, Daz”—I nod knowingly at him—“tell you?”

His eyes brighten.

“The human relation,” he whispers. “Message for a favor.”

“Yes! The note,” I say, pleased that we’re getting somewhere.

“Self-reliance,” he says, satisfied by our awkward communication that the note was received in my favorite book.

“Disdain for caution meets head harder than Linor,” he adds, almost to himself.

I smile at this. Yes. He speaks of Daz. The child refers to Daz’s obstinacy. But . . . “Disdain? What do you mean? That I wouldn’t have hid?” I’m crouching now so I’m eye-level with the boy.

“The legacy of the sift is everlasting,” he says sadly.

Suddenly, a tsunami of regret fills me. All the oceans on Earth could not contain it. I fall forward to my knees as do my infinite beings all around me.

“Stop,” we whisper, begging him. The sense of loss, that vacuous unyielding space of unending err . . .

He steps forward. Trembling, he places his hand on my shoulder.

I live a whole history. The sifter’s legacy. It’s an epic. In this exchange, how long it is I have no idea, I discover that this is what we do as sifters; we pass on this tragic legacy, and now this young sift, called Lai Tes, is passing the ‘amaranthine compact’ on to me. It’s a horrible burden, and now it’s my destiny.

Sifters evolved from a species called Libidions, quadrillions of years ago during the first universes of the expanse. A select few Libidions could travel interdimensionally into the recent past or present.

Their people, a graceful, passionate, thoughtful species, always among the first in every universe to evolve and grow into a dominant force, recognized their sifters’ power and the potential for havoc it could unleash.

Imagine being able to see into other universes. To interfere in them, or even to alter your own, based on knowledge from other universes’ successes or failures?

So they kept sifters a secret among only their people, and built a set of rules, which they adhered to carefully. Among those rules, never tell others of what they see and never ever interfere in a universe. Sifters naturally kept to themselves, always observing. Only observing. They grew to be a lonely race, often choosing to live out their lives in inconsequential groups together, breeding together.

As a result, over time, a rare number of sifters evolved the ability to travel across dimensions
into the future
. This turned out to be a devastating affliction. Within each universe, within a lifetime, Seraphs Sifters (what future seers are called) would be unable to prevent themselves from traveling across universes into the future, unlocking all the riddles of the expanse, coming to understand the beginning of all things—which lie in the very end of all things. M-law. Known among sifters as the eternal curse.

According to the laws of physics and reform theory, those minor collisions between universes that sifters can perceive and travel across are the result of the inevitable expansion of every universe due to the mysterious dark energy that composes every universe.

At some point in time, every universe expands so greatly and collides so strongly into another universe, they both retract into a singularity, from which they are both reborn in an explosion, expanding again, until everything, starting from the very primordial beginning, happens all over again . . . and again . . . and again . . .

This revelation’s a terrible burden to bear for the Seraph Sifters, for they have to prepare for such enormous loss, not just of the ones they love, but loss of all living things, including themselves. Imagine being faced with total annihilation and no guarantee that the events from the collision would one day lead to thriving living beings. Just one altered or missing molecule from a singularity, and the building blocks that lead to life would be gone, erased, from all space and time.

They longed to inform all life of its fate, but they believed that the knowledge would only cause more grief among species. For they believed that hope was all that made life worth living. They believed that hope was the singular foundation of survival. And they knew this to be true, because of their own terrible existence clinging to it. Observing progress among all species in caritas, knowing it would all end and maybe never be again, or at best, would be million years of strife to repeat, was misery without hope, especially for those Seraphs who were nearing the end of a universe. To have to watch so much bloodshed, suffering, and violence, over and over, through trillions of years across dimensions, before species finally almost, reach a utopia, only to have it all end suddenly in a collision . . .

The Seraph Sifters called themselves The Forsaken, and only found comfort in knowing that others were spared from the devastating knowledge of the eternal curse.

And so these Seraphs made a compact, the Amaranthine Compact. In it, they agreed never to interfere with the Brane Cycle, the ending and rebirth of universes. In it, they pledged to uphold the ceaseless eventual obliteration of life, and leave the future of all living beings to chance.

But it was not to be.

One Seraph came along who believed in his heart of hearts that his fellow sifters were wrong. He could not bear to lose his family, to witness the end of the universe in which he lived, which had come so far, which so many Forsaken before him had silently sacrificed to hide the truth. So he broke the pact.

We, that is, all the echoes of me, pull away from Lai, unable to withstand the great chamber of pain any longer. But this does not free us from it. It’s here, now, inside, always, echoing eternally. It’s amaranthine.

“How, how do we bear it?” we croak, heaving on our hands and knees.

I look up at Lai, who I know is a member of a slight species called Tilnory. He’s a child. Before I broke away he told me only that he was used by Aeons and forced to break the Amaranthine Pact against his will, as have been so many Seraphs before him.

Aeons will stop at nothing in order to find the means to travel to the next universe, survive the eternal curse, and live on.

Doubled over in misery, I wonder if that is really such a horrible end goal—to end the constant ending?

“She would grow in strength a new armor. Stronger than the faith itself.” With his knuckles, he taps the part of his chest where his heart sits, as though knocking on a door. It does not make a noise.

“Cassiel’s faith is the final providence,” he adds, this time without regret.

What the fuck does he mean by that?
I clasp my heads, which ache horribly. I sit back on my many heels groping for some memory of what my life was like before I carried this grief. This sense of loss. Anything to prevent me from spiraling into madness. I would give anything to be like everyone else, not knowing. Never knowing the truth. In here the weight of life itself resting on my shoulders.
Yes, in here.
It’s worse in the rift. It must be.

“Can-can we leave here?” I ask, rather desperately. I sense that the tonnage of regret could kill me.

I notice that Lai’s other selves number even fewer.
How long have I been here?
This is the first real thought I have had since I got here. Whatever the internal battery inside of me, inside all of us, that keeps the heart beating, the lungs breathing, is flashing ‘empty.’ It dawns on me that this place, hiding in here, is killing him. Killing me.

Of course!
I focus on his sweet little face. Sad. Determined. He’s here to die. I blink away our tears. He wants to end the slow death by misery, the compounded energy of all the past universes lost. Surely not. He’s so young!

“You don’t have to stay here,” I say hurriedly.

“Thell’eon’s Truth Path is no light,” he answers.

“You don’t have to join them! You could come with my people. My people would protect you!” I say this from my heart, thinking I’ll protect him. Somehow. Some way. “Humans, we’re different. We won’t . . .” I can’t think what to say.

A spark of something lifts his face briefly, before it falls, darker than ever.

“No!” he screams suddenly. “The story half told!”