The Shattered Genesis (Eternity) (54 page)

             
“You were right.” He told me instantly. “I should have been honest with...”

             
I sat up and held my lips to his for a long, dazzling second.

             
“It's alright. Let's just move on from it.”

             
“Well, let me just say
before we forget it that it will never happen again. I promise you, Brynna, I will never lie to you again. You had every right to be angry. I couldn't accept that at the time. I didn't understand it. But now I do. That, for you, is the ultimate betrayal. I
t won't happen again.”

             
I put both of my hands on his face and whispered, “I know, James.”

             
I took his arms and wrapped them around me before resting my head against his chest.

             
“We can only stay like this for a few more minutes and then we have to go find
Elijah, Violet and Penny.”

             
“They're out here?” James asked.

             
“Of course. You didn't think after all of this that I would leave them behind, did you? But then, I wasn't really the one that saved them this time. They saved themselves.”

             
“From what?”

             
“It i
s such a long story. I'll tell you while we're looking. For a few minutes, though, just don’t let go of me.”

             
We were silent for a moment, our bodies pressed together to shield ourselves from the bitter cold of morning. It was more than just a survival met
hod, of course. It was the wonderfully tender embrace of two lovers.

             
“Can I tell you something?” I asked, looking up at him.

             
“Of course you can.”

             
“I never thought I could do that with anyone. You suggested that you knew what had happened to me. Do you k
now the extent of it?”

             
“I don't know the details. But the outline is enough.” He replied, and a darkness came over his eyes that I had not been expecting. A fury that rivaled and perhaps surpassed my own was ablaze in his heart.

             
“There is no use being an
gry over it anymore, honey.”

             
Wow. I was even able to call him by a pet name, a phenomenon in relationships that I had always found pathetically stupid and inescapably pointless.

             
“I know. I just hate that you had to go through that. No one should have to
go through that, let alone a young girl. Do you mind if I ask...”

             
“I think you have the right to ask about it now.”

             
“That's not true. That's your story to tell and don't let anyone ever say differently. You don't have to share that with anyone you don't
want to. But if you do want to tell me, can I ask how old you were?”

             
“Nine.” I surprised myself with the candid response. I had always run when the subject had been poached by anyone from my mother to reporters to a stranger who had read about the trial.
But with James, I was safe. I could be honest with him without fear of being rejected or looked down upon. That safety was as essential as the air in my lungs.

             
“Nine...” He repeated in very slight disgust. He was attempting to hide his anger from me becau
se he knew that I would be upset by it. I did not want two of us to carry the burden. It was mine to carry and I would not inflict it on anyone else.

             
He must have read those thoughts in my mind because he looked down at me in surprise.

             
“I'd carry all of
it for you if I could. I'd take that pain from you without a second thought, Brynna.”

             
Tears rushed into my eyes upon hearing those words. I had been able to garner the strength it required to overcome my fear of intimacy but I was still not ready to let h
im see me cry. I blinked several times as I kissed him again, feeling the tears slowly disintegrate back to wherever they had come from.

             
“Physical intimacy always scared me, perhaps irrationally.” I said after a minute, “I couldn't stand the idea of feeli
ng so vulnerable. I could not even think about allowing someone to get that close to me. It is the ultimate closeness, isn't it, when it is done for the right reasons?” I was quiet for a moment but he did not speak to fill the space. He wanted me to contin
ue. “With you, it's
right
. I have never been so sure of anything. We might be a strange pairing but the feeling that this is the way it was supposed to happen is so strong, I could not deny it if I tried. I am so happy that it was you. I do not
care about
anything else. I just know that this was right. I would not have done it otherwise.”

             
He kissed me softly again; a delightfully sensuous shudder passed through me when I felt his tongue moving gently against mine.

             
“I am so glad to hear you say all of that
and I am truly honored to have been the one you let that wall down with. I mean that when I say it, baby. I really do. And I will make sure you never regret it. That's a promise.”

             
I wrapped my arms around his neck and buried my face in them. His smell wa
s so intoxicating and his body was so firm and strong against mine that I wanted make love to him again. Once we got up, we were back to fighting the faceless forces in pursuit of us. I wanted to lay there with him, warm under the blanket and safe in his a
rms until the end of my life. The moment we pulled apart, the world would come barging back to the forefront of our consciousness. The fall from the heavenly space we were currently occupying would be as abrupt and painful as being jerked from a pleasant d
ream by the screaming cry of an alarm clock.

             
But alas, reality was shriller than any man-made annoyance. We dressed quickly to avoid becoming too cold. We packed up his tent and rations before setting off in pursuit of Elijah, Violet and Penny, hand in
hand.

Quinn

             
“Alice!”

             
I had been shouting for hours and my voice was getting hoarse. As the time passed from the last moment I had seen her, my worry grew into downright terror. I didn't even know for sure that she had made it out of the campsite. The o
nly way I would know if the worst had happened was if I doubled back and returned but I had been wandering for so long that finding my way back would be nearly impossible.

             
It was midday. The sun was high in the sky and casting through the trees to create
an oddly calming green glaze on everything I saw. If only I was able to embrace the tranquility that my eyes were drinking in. It seemed so out of place and yet I wished for nothing more than to sit and wallow in it.

             
We were in enemy territory. The native
s lived in the woods and could converge on me at any second. I would be dead before I even saw them. I was unable to move as quickly as they did even with my new strength and power. They were blurs of death; swift, lethal and utterly inescapable.

             
“Alice!”

             
Now my voice had gone. I wouldn't be able to call her to me. The harsh sun was weakening me; I was sweating profusely and wiping my face on the back of my hands. I had to sit and rest for a minute.

             
We hadn't planned our escape nearly as well as we thoug
ht. We should have packed a bag with water and food. Instead, we took off into the woods with nothing but the clothes on our backs. Now, we were going to be forced to find a source of water. It took three days to dehydrate. The human body could survive wit
hout food but would crumple in no time without that precious liquid revitalizing us.

             
Maybe our evolution would allow us to go for longer periods of time without water. Somehow, I doubted that was true. As I tried to focus on anything other than the scratc
hy dryness of my tongue, my mind ran through images of lakes, streams, dripping faucets and ice cubes one right after the other like a screen-saver meant to torment me.

             
My Anthropology teacher had told us that our war for oil was pointless and only tempor
ary. Soon, the war for water would erupt. It was far more pressing. The consequences were far more severe. Maybe the apocalypse we had experienced was a more favorable one than what would have occurred otherwise.

             
My mind drifted to Brynna Olivier and her
family. In Government, Alice and I had learned about her mother and the “Starting Five.”

             
“Corruption!” My slightly unhinged Government teacher had exclaimed as he slammed his fist on his desk for emphasis. Beside me, Alice had snorted through her nose and
covered her mouth as she tried to suppress a giggle. Watching him lecture on those public officials that he deemed morally corrupt was entertaining, to say the least. Well, it was only entertaining when we, his students, disregarded the fact that his bloo
d pressure was visibly rising and he could fall over from a heart attack at any given moment.

             
“You might find this funny, Alice, but this is your future! The
'Starting Five,'
” He drew out the name to emphasize his disdain and disgust for those involved in
the group, “They have driven us so deep into debt that you, your children, and your children's children will be paying it off! They have stepped on every foreign leader's toes that they could. They started this conflict we’re in and they made every countr
y choose a side! We thought we had it made. We thought we had finally reached a new golden age in this country but now, we teeter on the brink of total chaos!”

Yes. This was all coming from a man hired to mold impressionable young minds.

“Another world war
is just around the corner and you're
laughing
!”

             
“I'm not laughing,” Alice had replied but she was still covering her face to hide her smile, “I'm taking this very seriously.”

             
“They're stepping on those other governments because they're afraid of them ca
lling our debt! We’re all indebted to each other after the Expansion and yet here we are, ordering them to pay us back when we have so much to pay ourselves! If it were me, I would be down on bended knee, trying to please them.”

             
“This is America, Mr. Fran
k,” Alice grinned, “We don't get down on bended knee for anyone.”

             
Our like-minded classmates had clapped after she said that. But I had known that despite his flair for dramatics, he was right.

             
It's amazing how the things I had learned in school, while s
eeming so tedious and pointless in the broad outline of our young lives and our futures, made so much sense now when it meant nothing. At the time, even though I knew that what my teachers had said about things had varying degrees of truth, I still wasn't
worried. But now, my knowledge yielded to understanding. My understanding yielded to anger. They had done this to us. To speak broadly, we had fled our earth for Pangea to avoid a disaster they had created. To narrow it down, if Alice was dead now, it was
their fault.

             
It's so easy to pass the blame sometimes.

             
I forced myself to push away my insight into the deeper meaning of all that was happening to focus on the task at hand. I needed to find Alice. Together, we would find the Oliviers. First and foremos
t, I was afraid for my girlfriend. But I also couldn't stand the idea of Elijah and Brynna's younger sisters out in the woods, alone.

             
“You're going to dehydrate if you keep walking briskly that way.” A voice said behind me. I whipped around abruptly, pull
ing a thick branch from the tree closest to me without realizing I was doing it. I turned and held my makeshift weapon out in front of me, ready for the fight.

             
My impulse to attack was stopped dead by the sight of Brynna and the man who had accompanied he
r out of the ship standing before me.

             
“Put it down, honey.” She said softly after turning back to the man with her. When he did not lower the large knife he was outstretching, she pushed his hand down gently. I was thankful that she was there to stop him
because I knew that if I had encountered him myself, he would have killed me. Looking into his eyes, I was sure of that.