The Shattered Genesis (Eternity) (32 page)

             
“Whoa, whoa…” James held up his hands in defense. “I know what just happened, Violet. I know better than anyone. I saw this long before anyone else
knew a thing. What I’m trying to tell you is that Brynna’s decision was not completely hers. The original group of people who had that dream, people from all over the world, mind you, voted. We decided that your parents couldn’t come with us
because they
were in the group that was going to leave us behind. Now, I will say that Brynna agreed. She wanted to leave them, too, but
only
for that reason. I can promise you, that it was only that.”

             
“You voted…” I repeated in a fierce, incredulous whisper. Before I
could stop myself, I had lunged forward and slapped him hard across the face. Thank God there weren’t many people around to witness that embarrassingly overcharged outburst.

             
“Violet Mae!” Maura and Brynna exclaimed in shock and outrage, respectively.

             
“
You voted over whether to let them live or die!” I screamed as I lunged forward to hit him again. “My
parents
!
”

             
Maura had pulled me away from him, but I was still charging forward, infuriated beyond any degree of anger I had ever felt. Who did he and his
psychic friends think they were? How could they have determined the salvation or death of people they had never met? Who was he to decide whether my parents were worthy of being saved?

             
I must specify that I knew both of my parents were not good. I knew th
at they possessed some quiet evil in their hearts that they were scarcely aware of. But that didn’t mean that they deserved to die. In fact, on Pangea, they might have been redeemed. Who was James Maxwell to decide that they didn’t even deserve that chance
?

             
“That is enough!” Brynna was standing in front of me, shaking with a strong anger of her own. “We are not barbarians, at least not yet! I would appreciate it if you would refrain from acting like one!”

             
Though that was a typical Brynna line, the way her
eyes flashed over from their usual icy blue to a fiery red was not.

             
“Brynna…” Maura whispered and her grip on me went lax. “What happened to you?”

             
After her arms released me, I fell onto my knees and stared up at Brynna in horror. Brynna looked at James
for help in deciphering exactly what we were talking about and he indicated his eyes. She nodded slightly and blinked to allow her own to dissolve back into their normal blue.

             
“Look in the mirror. And control yourself before you kill us all!” Brynna spat
at me as she pulled a cigarette from the pack with a shaking hand.

             
I stood up and hurried to the mirror that was hanging over a desk in the corner of the room. I firmly believe that my heart stopped beating as I took in the sight of my own reddened eyes.
How long had they been like that? What did it mean? I ran back to Maura and threw my arms around her neck, my whole body shaking with a new terror. It was the utter horror of finding myself unrecognizable. I was seeing clearly that something existed in me
that was not entirely human.

             
“We don’t know why that’s happening to people.” James explained quietly. “Besides being able to see things and to just know things, people have been mutating.”

             
“Into what?” Maura asked as she ran her own trembling hand down
the back of my hair and gripped me so tightly that I could barely breathe.

             
“We don’t know,” James continued calmly, “We have no idea.”

             
“I don’t want this. I never wanted any of this. Why didn’t you just leave me?” I cried before glaring at Brynna again.
             

             
“It is too late now. So I suppose it is time you start making peace with the fact that you’re here. But for the record, I would have dragged you kicking and screaming.”

             
“Why?! You don’t care about me! You don’t care about Maura or Elijah or Penny! You
only care about yourself!” I pointed my finger at her on the last part.

             
Behind her, a vase of flowers shattered, causing us all to jump and Maura to exclaim in horror. I looked at her, terrified, to see that she was grasping her heart, her eyes wide as sh
e breathed heavily.

             
I looked at James and Brynna, my anger dissipating only to be replaced by that same fear I had felt a moment earlier. I didn’t know what was happening to me but there was no way that those instances of anger causing some physical effec
t were meaningless. There was
something
happening. I felt it growing inside of me like a lethal cancer, eating through every part of me that I had possessed since birth. It was changing me over to some unfamiliar creature for reasons I couldn’t fathom. The
same thing, as I understood from witnessing Brynna’s brief transformation, was happening to her and James.

             
“Do not be afraid of it.” Brynna told me firmly. “It’s happening for a reason. Isn’t that what faithful people like you are supposed to believe, Vi
olet?” Her voice was dripping with condescension and the rage welled inside of me again. At least this time, nothing broke.

             
“You can’t tell me that you two think this is good.” Maura snapped in a fierce whisper. “You can’t tell me that you think this is a
ll just part of some plan! It’s wrong. It’s…
unnatural!
”

             
“How are we supposed to know what is natural?” Brynna asked after sitting down on the couch and lighting another cigarette. “Who are we to believe that what we knew was normal?”

             
“Because there was
nothing else! Before this, there was nothing else but what we knew.” I told her. I sat down now, too, to keep from fainting. “What, do you have some theory on why all of this is happening?”

             
She exhaled smoke as she chuckled to herself softly.

             
“You are a
sking me if I have a theory. Do you want to ask me next if Homer wrote
The Odyssey
?”

             
“Please, darling, share it with us.” Maura snapped. I could see that her tolerance for the continued lunacy was wearing thin. It didn’t help that Brynna essentially gouge
d out our eyes and left us crawling around in the dark until she decided to heal our sight with her long withheld answers.

             
“It is adaptation. We are mutating in order to survive in a completely unfamiliar setting. We’re getting stronger, we’re getting sma
rter, and we’re getting a few extras thrown in. We are the last remnants of the human race. We are meant to start it over.”

             
“But,” I looked from her to James, “are we still human?”

             
“As far as we know. Our hearts are beating, we’re breathing. We must stil
l be human. We believe that we’ll remain human. We’ll just have some other skills to help us out. You don’t have to be a believer in anything to believe that.” James told me and I stared at him, watching my hand-print grow steadily clearer on his red cheek
.

             
“I shouldn’t have hit you.” I muttered after diverting my gaze away from him.

             
“It’s understandable.” He brushed off my apology calmly. “I won’t say that I didn’t vote against allowing them to come but I will say that your anger at it is understandable.
”

             
“I need to ask, for my own peace of mind, why you left them, Brynna.” Maura blurted out suddenly. When we looked at her, we all saw a steely resolve in her eyes. She was going to get the truth immediately. There would be no more skipping around it with
half-assed excuses or blatant lies.

             
Brynna was not weak when it came to Maura. She didn’t hold back or excuse her behavior. She never failed to be honest to the point of bluntness. The answer she gave Maura would be no exception.

             
“I knew they were not al
lowed to come. You all were. I made a choice.”

             
“Was it malicious? Did you leave them to die because of how much you hated them?” Maura pressed her.

             
Brynna stared at her for a long moment. Then, she shrugged but said nothing. Her response, or lack thereof
, was psychological torture at its cruelest.

             
“Just tell me you didn’t! Just lie to me, if that’s what it takes!” Maura’s pleading shouts broke my heart. “I can’t afford to see you differently now! None of us can afford that. Just tell me it wasn’t out of
hate, Brynna!”

             
I wanted to scream at Brynna to answer her as I watched Maura’s desperate need for that denial grow. But she just stared at her icily, raised one of her eyebrows and pursed her lips in an expression of contempt and slight confusion.

             
“What
makes you think I owe you anything at this point, Maura?” Brynna stubbed her cigarette out in the crystal ashtray on the table and walked away, leaving Maura to dissolve into tears that shook her entire body. I was responsible for comforting her now.

             
Jame
s hurried after Brynna, calling her name, sounding as though he was now at a level of fury
similar to Maura’s level of grief. The intensity of both of their mental states mirrored my own rage, my own growing hatred. How could anyone be so heartless? I didn
’t know what had made her that way, but I knew that while I loved her as my sister, I hated who she was at her core. Inside of her dwelt a spiteful, demonic creature that preyed on human weakness. It sniffed out every fear, every sadness and every regret a
person had ever suffered through and turned it against them. Through doing that, she controlled chaos because she
created
it.

             
I loved her because she was my sister. But after learning of what she had done to our parents, every last cruel act she had comm
itted in our lives was amplified to a loud droning that would remain omnipresent in my ears, possibly forever.

             
I wish now that I had forced her to make me understand why she allowed such evil to exist in her. But I was so young and so incredibly blinded b
y my own pride and my own frustration at not being able to understand. I loved her because I had seen goodness in her as she raised Penny and I through the years.

             
That love, despite its purity, was weak in strength. It was eaten by the very same beast tha
t lived inside of me, too.

Brynna

             
James had already been slapped once that day but he was clearly coming back for seconds. Though it had been Violet that had struck him, I was very close to doing the same despite my adversity to such dramatic consequen
ces of feeling. There was never a need to physically harm someone when one could simply cut them down with words. But when he grabbed my wrist in a painful hold and spun me around to face him, I had to stop myself from striking the other side of his face w
ith all of my newly discovered strength.

             
“What do you want?!”

             
“I want you to stop this. You are driving them crazy. What did they do to you? What did they do that makes you think it’s okay to be so cruel to them?”

             
“Is this a lecture? Am I supposed to
apologize? Are you living in that fantasy world where Brynna makes everything right by falling on her knees and begging for forgiveness?”

             
Believe it or not, that fantasy world’s population was booming.

             
“No, I live in the real world where Brynna is going
to go back and apologize. Then, Brynna is going to get her damn head on straight. Did you save them so that you would have punching bags? Is that what you need? Is that how you deal with your shit? By hurting other people?”
             

             
I giggled softly and pulled my
arm from his grip.

             
“You are seriously attempting to lecture me on how to run my family. The last I checked, we had only just met. Therefore, you hold no say over any of these things you are protesting. It is none of your business. Consequently, you shoul
d stay out of it. Thank you so much.”