Requiem (59 page)

Seline glanced
up at Sear. He offered no words, only that same esoteric expression
that could mean anything to anyone, that could mean whatever you
wanted it to mean. She looked down at her open palms. Her hands
were shaking. She clenched them into fists and closed her eyes.
'Whenever I think I'm remembering something I have this doubt that
I might just be making the whole thing up. I know some memories are
real because I've seen them on the blackbox but there's so much
more that I have no way of confirming... like when I heard her
voice through the sentinel... I have to figure it all out, fit all
that together... I could spend the rest of my life doing that and I
still wouldn't be able to reconcile even half of it. Maybe I was
right to try to avoid all this.'

Seline looked
at Sear again, unsure.

'Avoiding it is
what got you here in the first place,' said Sear, following her
eyes to her hands again.

'I know. You're
right.'

They stood
beside each other in silence for a long time. The sun warmed
Seline's skin, smoothed out the goosebumps from the wind. She
looked up at Darinus, hanging high and proud. Its bands of orange
and red were richer and somehow more familiar in the full light of
the sun. She thought of Earth, of the sickened discolouring of its
surface, of the debris and waste that it wore like a cloak. She
thought of the dishevelled souls that huddled to that burning
corpse of a planet and couldn't deny the fact that, for all the
pain they had caused her, she was one of them; that part of the
reason she'd left Earth was to hide from the reflection she saw in
their faces. There was shame in this strange sense of belonging but
it was belonging nonetheless.

'It was the
right decision to go back to Earth,' said Seline. Her voice was
quiet, barely audible over the gentle gusts of wind. 'It's still
hard to say but I know it was right. And if that blackbox can do
the things you say it can then maybe we'll be able to save them
too.'

Those final
three words rung in her head. She realised that they could've meant
a lot of different things given the situation but she had no desire
to dwell on any of them.

Sear was
looking down at the city when Seline turned and spoke to him.

'You never
actually told me why you stayed on Earth for so long.'

'I know,' he
said after his customary silence.

'It's just
that... you know all these things about me but I still don't know
anything about you.'

'I only know
those things because it's my job to do so.'

There was a
knife turning in Seline's stomach. She pulled away from the
balustrade. 'So... it's just a job? I thought...'

He said
nothing. She was blushing. The sun wasn't warm it was scolding,
burning, etching shades of red into the pores of her skin. She
turned away and looked down at the city but didn't see it. She
raised a hand, coughed into it, but kept her hand up to cover the
redness in her cheeks.

Still leaning
against the railing, Sear looked across at her.

'Seline,' he
said.

The knife
turned again.

'Seline, that's
not what I meant.'

She was about
to turn away but stopped herself. 'Then what
did
you mean,
Sear?'

It was so
unnatural for her – just to maintain eye contact. Unlike him, there
was no black veil to hide behind, nothing to quiet that screaming
vulnerability. Seline looked at him and realised that, for the
first time, he was unsure of himself. Yellow shaded disks became
visible in both his eyes. The blackness was sinking into them,
gravitating and condensing into a small point in their centres. For
a moment, she forgot her own anger.

'It was...
difficult,' he said. 'With your species, it always is.'

It wasn't the
words but the tone that she hadn't expected. His voices sounded
lost as if they were falling back down his throat. She tried to
gather herself but couldn't draw herself away.

'What?' she
managed to say. She was angry at herself for letting the anger slip
from her voice. 'What was difficult?'

'Trying to
help. Not to find a solution. Just to help.'

'I... I don't
understand.'

'Before I first
arrived on Earth, I thought I understood what it meant to be human.
I thought I knew what to expect.' Sear looked at the ground. 'But
even with everything I'd learned and with the ancient history we
share, I had no idea of your capacity for such... for such
self-destruction.'

Seline waited
in silence. Unsure of what to say. Unsure if she should say
anything at all. The yellow iris, the bleached white behind it, was
slowly emerging.

'Perhaps,' Sear
continued, 'it was the expressiveness of your species. Whatever
humans do you attach your emotions so closely to and display it in
such beauty of subtlety, much more so than any Yurrick could.
But... even so, it was the same fear. The same love. The same hate.
The same capacities for suffering and happiness. Within the human
race I saw all that we shared and so little of what we didn't.
Within your species I saw my own – and that frightened me more than
anything.'

'But why? Why
stay so long? Why subject yourself to that?'

'I owed it to
Cooper. When he disappeared, I couldn't just leave the orphanage, I
couldn't just leave the children. It was months after Cooper had
disappeared when NeoCorp arrived to strip the city. I was away from
the orphanage, tracking down some food when they came. I didn't
make it back in time. The old school... NeoCorp weren't even
interested in it. They only wanted it out of the way so that they
could bring in their machines to strip the cell blocks next to it.
They blew it to pieces. I spent days searching.' He looked down at
his hands as if the dried and muddied blood had never left them. 'I
found only two bodies. Michael and Izzy.' He looked up at Seline.
'You remind me so much of her, of Izzy.'

'Is that why
you helped me, back on Earth when we first met?'

'It is what
made me speak to you... but it is not the reason I want to be with
you.'

Seline hadn't
looked away from his eyes. The blackness had dissolved into milky
white. In the centre was the iris, a transient shade of yellow.
Thin black lines, like fissures, crept outward from the pupils.

Sear was
looking at the palm of his hand not knowing what say or how to say
it.

‘Your eyes...’
said Seline. 'I can see...'

He turned.
Seline placed her hand on his shoulder and gently pulled him back.
No resistance. The thumping of her heart provided the back-beat to
her movements. The swarming butterflies in her stomach gave rhythm
to her shallow breath. She raised her hands and placed them on
either side of his face and gently pulled herself closer. She
pushed herself up onto her toes. Sear's hands found her waist. Her
eyes closed as their noses touched. She pressed her lips to his.
The taste pulled her further into him. She stretched the frozen
seconds in her mind, as far as she dared, letting the weight of
reality dust itself from her shoulders.

Seline pulled
away and looked into his eyes again. The colour was still there,
she felt, she
knew
, she was seeing him for the first time.
He was staring straight at her, through her, inside her. She didn't
know what to say or if it mattered that she said nothing.

A day later and
the Doctor had finally given Seline clearance to leave the
hospital. He reinforced the cast around her shattered knee and gave
her a pair of crutches to get around on, telling her, 'Just because
you can walk doesn't mean you can run. The stem cells have made
good progress on your knee. I don't want it to all be undone just
because you couldn't resist the urge to kick certain people.' He
looked at Belameir as he said this.

She decided
that she needed to pay her respects to Abigail and insisted that
she needed to do it alone. She took a taxi to the Ruined Gardens
and walked along the track Belameir told her to take. She turned
off the elevated path that hung within the forest canopy and walked
along the dirt path on the forest floor.

It didn't take
long before she had to stop. The heat beneath the canopy was
stifling. She wanted to split the cast, peel the gauze off and
scratch her skin raw. She hobbled to the edge of the path and slid
down awkwardly to the ground, using one of the trees for
support.

She was
breathless and unbelievably tired. She laid her head against the
tree trunk, closed her eyes just for a moment.

Her arms were
bound behind the chair and fists were hammering against her body. A
relentless, crashing wave. There were tears, burning the back of
her eyes and blood was leaking from every pore. The pain was
blinding, ratcheted to her body like a straitjacket. The Frog was
smiling, laughing as his fists drove into her stomach. The
Cockroach was grunting from somewhere, the sound of his frantic
hand against his own skin and then the taste as he forced his
fingers to the back of her throat.

Her eyes shot
open. She rolled onto her side. She heaved and threw up everything
her stomach had to offer. She spat then wiped the acid from her
lips. She closed her eyes, opened them again. She was still on the
forest floor on the side of the dirt path. The white room was
gone.

She held her
hand palm down on the path. The backs of her nailless fingers
ached, cracked, bled anew as she clenched them around a fistful of
dirt. She lifted her hand from the ground, feeling the weight of
it. She let it slip through her fingers then wiped the tears from
her eyes with the back of her wrist. She looked up, down the path.
It looked much brighter. A break in the canopy. She forced herself
to her feet with her crutches and continued down the path until she
reached the light.

The grove was
an open meadow no more than fifty metres in diameter. There was a
gentle rise directly in its centre which tapered away to the forest
at its edges. At the top of the rise stood a tree. Gnarled and
senescent, the branches hung down from the top of the trunk, thin,
weeping the colour of amber.

Seline walked
to the top of the rise. The tree stood no more than three or four
metres tall. She brushed her hand over the weeping branches and
felt the leaves like blunted shards of glass. Seline turned and
noticed a small mound of freshly dug dirt right at the edge of the
meadow.

She approached
the grave. There was no marker save the sapling planted at the head
of the grave.
Archinum
. She remembered the name from her
first visit to the gardens.

She stared at
the grave, trying to concentrate on something relevant, something
meaningful. Her feet sunk down into the fresh mound of dirt.
Nothing relevant. Nothing meaningful.

She slid down
on her crutches, onto the ground. She sat awkwardly with
outstretched legs.

She imagined a
green door, a small tea cup, a tower of books. It felt forced. She
closed her eyes. The Warlord holding her with Abigail talking from
behind a rifle. Bodies lying in a blood soaked hallway, formerly
white. White. A thick white border. Two men shaking hands in a
street. One on fire.

The image was
there. Vivid like only an altered memory could be. Bold. Strident.
Utterly confused. It would do. A mother, a friend, a killer, a
saviour, whatever Abigail was, this image captured it somehow.

Tired muscles
were quietly spasming beneath her skin. Tiny droplets of rain fell
from the overcast sky. She watched it dribbling along on her
arms.

For over an
hour the soft, noiseless rain descended upon her. She had no idea
what she was waiting for. If the shame was going to go away then it
would have washed off in the rain by now.

She closed her
eyes. The door was silhouetted against the darkness, pulling her
towards it and pushing her away at the same time. Her scars were
pulsing with the memory of pain. There was the voice of Abigail
speaking from behind the door. The same voice she read those fake
messages in. A fakeness that she alone couldn't see. It was begging
her to open it, to trust her. Then the prick of a needle in her
neck for doing so and a dead body that wouldn't say a thing. The
body of Abigail or the body she left on Earth? The body of the
twelve year old girl that died the day her mother left. And the
shadow of Icarus, hanging above it all, swallowing the door, the
Cockroach, the Frog, Abigail, and every planet she could hope to
call home.

She had to
force herself to open her eyes. The colours rushed in, swirling in
her head, as if they were lighting up every part of her brain at
once. She leaned forward. She choked back the vomit. It came again
but she held it down.

Her eyes closed
again, so tight it hurt. So tight she'd never be able to open them
again. Two men shaking hands, one on fire. Which one was she?

Another day had
passed and Seline was back in the medical bay in the hospital at
the Doctor's request. He'd checked the progress of the fractures
beneath the cast and applied bandages to her left hand. He'd asked
her why her hands were dirtied and bleeding again. She'd told him
she was in a boxing match, to which the Doctor replied, 'I used to
be a boxer, you know?'

Seline assumed
he was joking but the Doctor launched into the beginnings of a
twenty minute oration on his boxing career before Seline could
think of an excuse to leave. As he narrated the seventh round of
his fifth bout against The Killer from Val Riller she nodded
politely and made her way towards the door. The Doctor insisted she
stay. He continued to run tests which Seline realised were not even
applicable to humans and were merely a means of having her stay to
listen to his tale of 'temptation and redemption' as he called
it.