Harken

21 Desolation

I fell toward the ground like shattered pieces of a clay target. The treetops neared, spinning in circles as I whirled uncontrollably. I tried in vain to catch the air, to bring myself up as the gray concrete rushed to meet my face.

Arms grabbed me around my middle, slamming with me into the ground and rolling in a bout of grass. The momentum carried us until we rammed into the side of a tree and stopped abruptly.

I sprawled beside it to catch my breath, dizzily trying to roll over. I shook my head, clearing my vision of the haze, looking up to find that I was in the middle of a large park. Trees that surrounded the concrete path blocked me from view of the cars I could hear already racing nearby to go about their business, drivers oblivious to my latest almost-demise. Sensing danger was near, I scrambling to my feet—only to have the back of my shirt grabbed and my body slung against the tree.

“Don’t run!” came a sudden, mechanical hiss, like a toy robot whose batteries were dying. I spun, ready to fight, but a hand hit my side, grabbing for something in my pocket, taking it before I could react.

I leapt away as my attacker threw whatever he’d grabbed onto the concrete beside us. With his back to me, he began stabbing at the device with his foot. Before I knew what was happening, his boot had already cracked the screen of my cell phone. The next stab split it into crumbled fragments.

“Hey!” I shouted. He struck it again, glass and plastic going everywhere. My mouth hung open for a moment but then I realized he wasn’t even watching me anymore. Let him keep the stupid phone.

“You…are…an…idiot!” the mechanical voice continued before I could run, the boot stabbing my phone with each word. Finally, satisfied by the dusty pile that remained, the man spun back to me.

He wasn’t any of the people I’d expected, the claws that I’d lifted to slice him hesitating. He was dressed in a sweeping black coat much too heavy for the sun of California, the cloth gathered around his legs and the collar turned up over his neck. He wore gloves on his hands. His face was like a block of stone, middle-aged and entirely hairless.

But that was only for a second. Before my eyes, the face of the bald man suddenly changed. Like they’d turned to putty, his cheeks sank in, the bones shifted out, his eyes became thinner, and the irises faded from brown to gray. Black hair grew from his head like grass, a covering of stubble on his chin.

I wanted to run.

“Don’t you dare, Mr. Asher,” the voice warned from the mouth of the new man. The sound was the same as before: deep and processed, like a computer was speaking the words with incorrect pitches and accents.

“You’re a master of idiocy,” the voice proclaimed. “It’s a wonder you live an entire day without supervision.”

He waved his hand at my destroyed phone. “Did you even think once that maybe you should get rid of your phone? That maybe they’d had time to tinker with it while you were strapped down and immobile in the interrogation room?”

I was at a loss for words. The man was furious and yet wasn’t making any move to attack. I drew back a small step.

“How do you think they’ve been following you, Mr. Asher?” he continued his tirade. “How’d they know you went to that tunnel? Because of your damned phone. Because you’re a damned idiot.”

He kicked the shards and sent pieces skittering down the concrete walk. It hit me all at once: somehow, Wyck had followed me by using my phone as a tracking device.

“W-—who are you…?” I demanded with an unintentional stammer, still ready to fight if I needed. I could feel the blood going cold in the ends of my fingers as I realized that I’d led Wyck right to us without even knowing—and according to who?

The man spun back to face me. He had a new face again. Now, his skin was wrinkled, his eyes and hair a matching gray. He looked like one of the gentle old men I’d sometimes see wandering in the park and feeding the ducks, if not for the fiery rage in his eyes.

“Who do you think I am?” he spat. “Who else would risk everything to save you once again when you’ve just gone and blundered it all up?”

He scoffed distastefully at me. “Your brazen disregard for all the sacrifices made for you only proves you are not prepared for a part in restoring the Grand Design.”

When he said that, I knew exactly who he was.

“Anon!” I gasped, but he sliced a hand through the air to silence me. I was left with my mouth open, fingers that had been fists loosening, feeling my face go pale.

As if to prove just how anonymous he still remained, his face had continued to change as we spoke. He was old then he was young again, then in the seconds of dumbfounded silence, I watched his skin sink into bags and hang off flabby cheeks. No matter how many new people he became or how many times the irises changed colors, his eyes continued to glare at me with distaste. I noticed that around his neck, nearly hidden by the collar of his jacket, was a black circle, almost like a thin, mechanical scarf—some device of Guardian technology, no doubt.

“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling wretched inside. Even the ever-changing disguises could not mask the urgency and importance I felt radiating from this man.

He showed me no sympathy. He shook his head sharply, changing form again, growing hair that was parted over his forehead.

“Do you have any idea how much you’ve ruined?” he went on. “Searching the Internet on a phone they already knew was yours? Carrying it with you everywhere you went, so they could trace your exact location any second of the day or night?”

“I—I thought I’d led Wyck to go north…”

Anon would hear none of it.

“Because of you, they now have the Blade,” he hissed. “They’ll do anything to get you to open its case. They’ll pry bits of your skin away piece by piece until you can’t tell your screams from the sounds of their tools. They’ll get you to open that case.”

He threw both of his hands apart in exasperation. “But I’ve been the stupid one. I’m to blame for helping you, when I should have let you die long ago when you first started doing things wrong.”

All of his horrible words were bullets. It was all sinking in at once what had just transpired. How could I have been so stupid?! I hadn’t even taken a second to think of all these things that now looked so obvious, and with every word Anon’s rasping voice said, I only felt all the more dejected, all the more a failure.

And Callista and Thad…were they still left behind? Were they even still alive?

“I…tried,” I said, voice cracking. I was not going to tear up. I was not going to let Anon see me even weaker than he already thought I was. Because I had tried. I had put everything I could into getting the Blade, to finishing what I hadn’t managed to do two lives ago. I’d lost everything for this stupid plan, and yet Anon, in all his forms, only looked at me like I was the worst disappointment of a person he’d ever met.

“When has trying ever been good enough for you, Mr. Asher?” he said. “You are not a try-er. You make things happen. You live when you should die and you fight when you should give up. So don’t tell me that you ‘tried’.”

He shook his head again. “I should blame myself. Perhaps I haven’t instilled in you how important you are. Perhaps you still have no idea that the entire world rests on your shoulders.”

His voice was getting lower, shoulders falling in resignation. I didn’t want to see him giving up like that because it meant that he was giving up on me. But what could I say in my defense? He had a reply for everything.

“What do I do?” I asked him.

“Nothing,” he said. “You do nothing.”

“But what about Callista and Thad?” I said. “And the Blade?”

“The Guardians have it now,” he replied. “There’s nothing you can do.”

He shoved his gloved hands into his pockets. “It’s over, Mr. Asher. It’s time for you to let this go.”

“But where do I go?” I couldn’t get my voice much higher than a whisper. What little I’d built up from the ashes of my lost life was now crashing around me again, like it’d been made of sand all along. I didn’t have anywhere to run even if I wanted to.

“It doesn’t matter,” Anon said, now with pale, bald skin again. “I can’t risk helping you anymore.”

He gave the already-destroyed phone a final crunch under his boot. “They won’t find you for a while. Stay away from phones and don’t check your email. Use the cash.”

As he said this, he was already starting to turn away from me. But his departure was all too soon. I still had no answers, no direction.

“I—I can’t do anything?” I said, desperate to hear something from him. If he was giving up on me, I knew I didn’t have any hope. I was like a ship approaching a harbor without a lighthouse, a pilot with no ground control.

He shrugged with a reluctant surrender.

“You can die,” he said, empty of any malice but still edged with ice. It was spoken just as simply as he might have told me the time.

“Come back in seventeen years,” he told me. “You’ll have a better chance then. I’ll be waiting.”

And with that, Anon pushed from the ground with the tips of his shoes and was carried over the trees.

He disappeared from view. I was left in the hush of the park. Empty. Alone.

I found a park bench, and sat.

Early morning walkers strolled by, but didn’t acknowledge me.

Pigeons fluttered down to the grass around my feet as if I wasn’t even there.

I was a statue bent over with my head resting in my palm, as the sun rose like a golden coin and threw my ever-shrinking shadow across the dewy grass.

A fountain trickled nearby, water splashing in a static noise.

A driver slammed on the brakes, tires squealing against pavement.

I lifted my hand to stare at it. What have I become? I thought.

With no one around—not that I truly cared anymore—I allowed my scales to slide out from under my skin, each poking forth slowly before overlapping with those beneath. They were like tiny panels, mirroring slightly so that I could see a misty reflection of my face, as if my hand was a shattered mirror. Would seeing those scales enmeshed with my own skin ever become natural? Would they ever allow me to go back to just being Michael Asher again?

My eyes shifted and I saw the only answer I needed in the irremovable silver ring around my finger. Even the birthmark I’d had all my life had been blotted away by a new one.

Such a fitting metaphor for who I was now. The old Michael had transformed. The snake had shed its skin for a new one.

But not entirely, I countered. Most of my real skin still remained just as most of my identity did. But I couldn’t deny it: enough of me had changed. My old life had withered away and fallen off just as my birthmark had. I was bound like a slave to this ring: a slave to the silver. This was my reality now.

As time wore on and the brightness of day began to shine against my face, I managed to lift myself from the bench and take to the air again. I could have turned in any direction and it would have been just as good as any other, because there was no real destination anymore. I didn’t have a family to rush and save. I didn’t have a Blade to go hunting for, or a letter from Anon to track down, or anything left at all for that matter.

But habits had a strange way of working in me, so I chose to fly toward the cliff where our trio had taken refuge so many times. To my surprise, as I neared it, my eyes caught the form of someone who’d already gotten there before me. I saw her hair flying from the heavy wind: Callista! I swooped down and landed hard on my feet.

“You made it!” I gasped, dashing over to her in disbelief. She dropped the sleeping bag and ran for me too, standing on the ends of her toes so I could wrap my arms around her. I crushed her to me so tightly that she was lifted from her feet, and I didn’t even try to hold back my tears of relief as they dried against the shoulder of her shirt.

“I thought for sure you were caught,” I said, still not letting her free. It wasn’t like I’d be able to, anyway—her arms were wrapped around my neck just as tightly.

“I knew you were alive or else I wouldn’t be here,” she said, voice muffled. But she was gasping small sounds of relief with tears at the same time. We both trembled, the terror of the ambush still racing through us. Her arms were scraped from the scuffle in the crypt, both of us covered with gashes that showed through lines of dried blood. But at least having her there made things better in a tiny increment.

Something was missing, though. I let her slide down to her feet, holding her by the sides of her arms, glancing around the precipice in case I was mistaken.

“Thad?” I said, not wanting to hear the answer. I felt Callista’s arms loosen.

“I—I saw him…taken away.” She had to force herself to say it. I wanted to disbelieve her but a single look at her face told me how certain she was. Her eyes were bloodshot, cheeks red and lower lip shaking.

My hands dropped from her sides. Not Thad.

She looked like she wanted to say something else but instead she turned and went back to the work she’d been doing. Two of the black sleeping bags were sitting near the end of the cliff, and she seized one of them and ripped it apart, shaking the stuffing out over the edge before tossing the material away. She continued with this on the other, as I sank to lean against the rocky wall. Not Thad. We needed Thad. He should have been there trying to regroup us, trying to convince Callista and I that things weren’t nearly as bad as they looked. How could he have been left behind? He was the strongest of all of us!

I guess I knew the answer to that. After all, he was Thad. He probably tried to take on our attackers at once so we could get away. It was just the type selfless thing Thad would do without hesitating.

Callista tossed the last sleeping bag over the edge, a strong wind sending the stuffing whirling like snow, the last of any evidence we’d been there. The air hit us in gusts like a storm was approaching, sending waves through my hair as I sat in the corner. Callista walked over to join me and we pressed close beside each other.

When the quiet became too heavy, she slid her hand across the distance to touch mine. I grasped hers like it could keep me from being swept away. We became each other’s anchor.

“What will they do to him?” I asked her.

“They’ll want the box opened,” she told me. “They’ll do things to him until he tells them where you are.”

I looked down, feeling my heart sink.

“If he dies before I do,” I asked, “what happens?”

Silence. Her breathing was sporadic, heavy, labored.

“He’ll be gone,” she said. “If one of your Chosens dies before you, they don’t come back the next time. Wyck made sure we knew…one of us was always dispensable.”

Her hand quivered in mine. I couldn’t lift my eyes from the expanse of rock around my feet, the grass that brushed up and down my leg like fingers.

“You know he won’t give us up,” I said, choking. “He’d die before.”

And at that, Callista’s tears began to fall. She leaned over and laid her head against my shoulder, and I held her up as best I could, a tiny cry escaping before she forced it back down. I couldn’t bring myself to wrap my other arm around her because I was just as heartbroken as she was.

“I’m sorry,” she said into my shoulder. “I did all this.”

She sounded so guilty—more than she should have. I wanted to counter her remorse, to say that she’d had no choice at all: that really, this was on my conscience, that I was to blame for all our lives being lost. But there was something different than that behind her voice, something that went much deeper than her hurt. She sniffed and tried to regain control of herself but only ended up pushing from me, wiping her eyes with her wrist.

“There’s stuff you don’t know,” she said. “I didn’t tell you and Thad because I knew you’d hate me. But all of this is my fault.”

“Why would we hate you?” I said in disbelief. My first meeting with Callista had been after she’d taken down a plane to keep me safe. Of all of us, she’d been the safest, done the most planning, held Thad and I back when we were going to do something stupid. What could she possibly be talking about—hating her? That was impossible.

She shook her head.

“I—I was caught by the Guardians before you or Thad,” she blurted. “I didn’t know what was going on. They just…they just killed my whole family.”

Her shoulders slumped even further. “And I couldn’t take it. So I just told them where you and Thad were. That’s how they found you in the first place. I told them.”

The guilt she’d been feeling and hiding all this time was finally out in the open, but it burned like a splinter being drawn from a deep wound. What was I supposed to say? I wanted to comfort her, to tell her that it was alright, that she’d just made a mistake, that it wasn’t that bad after all. But to say those things would have been an insult to everything we’d lost. That it was alright that Thad had lost Sophia, that I had lost my family, that we had lost the Blade, and now that we’d lost our friend.

So I said nothing. She said nothing. The silence meshed with our grief, with Callista’s guilt, with my failure. We were empty, hollow, and futureless.

“Kiss me,” Callista said suddenly. She hadn’t turned, hadn’t looked at me, just continued to stare ahead at the edge far away through her glassy eyes. I didn’t move.

“Please,” she said, voice cracking. “Make me feel happy again.”

So I turned and kissed her.

All at once, every other thought and fear and melancholy misery that had been around me vanished. She moved closer, leaning in so that the back of my head was pushed against the heavy stone, my hands sliding to keep myself supported, hers running through my hair. She moved my lips for me, and my conscious mind—whatever part of it still existed—was swept away.

Everything around us—the net of trees, the tornado of wind, and the people who wanted us dead—disappeared. I could feel her warmth radiating against my skin. This was what I’d wanted without knowing. This was the dream I’d wished I could have had all those nights ago, when instead I’d been fed nightmares about Callista instead.

It crushed the pain out of me like there was no room for the both of them. Callista or the sadness. Callista or the horrors. I chose Callista.

She breathed sharply, her hair a canopy over my face as she leaned over me on an incline, blocking everything out save for her now-opened eyes. It was a rare second when both of our gazes met, when I was able to stare into hers without feeling like we should have been running, or planning, or saving someone else. For a moment, it was just us. I couldn’t have said my own name if someone had asked.

Callista pulled away.

Tears had come up in the edges of her eyes again, running down her face. She looked at me, and then her face fell with regret, with shame, with absolute remorse.

“I’m sorry,” she said, pushing away from me, curling back into her ball.

“No,” I whispered without meaning to say it aloud, my tone hoarse from having not spoken in so long. She shook her head.

“I’m sorry,” she said again. “I shouldn’t have done that. It was selfish. I broke our promise.”

How could she think that I even cared about the stupid promise anymore? I shook my head. I wanted to tell her all the things that I’d been wanting to say. With her, I had someone else. With her, I had something left to live for that before, I hadn’t even realized was worth it.

I just couldn’t say any of the things I wanted to. Her kiss had taken all my words.

She wiped her eyes. “I didn’t mean that. I just did it to make me feel better.”

Her tears had stopped. She was hardening again. So I sat on one side of her wall and she sat building and mortaring it on the other, until we were safely separated again. Merely allies. I pushed my legs in front of me and took a deep breath.

“You know I have to go back for Thad,” I said.

She drew a breath sharply: the reaction I’d expected but hoped to not hear.

“That’s suicide,” she said callously.

“I know,” I replied. “But Thad already did the same for me. Twice.”

It didn’t seem to make a difference to her. She pushed her teeth together, squeezing herself even tighter. My mind was already made up though. To leave Thad behind would mean that I was unfaithful, a coward, a failure—to be everything that Anon believed of me.

The end wasn’t a fear of mine anymore. I could live with dying.

Even though I hoped she would, Callista never relented. So with no other choice, I stood.

She lashed out, scaled hands catching me like a net and slinging me back into the corner. The rocks bruised the skin against my spine painfully but I sprang back. In the next second I was standing across from Callista, claws out, facing her as she growled at me viciously.

“You’re not leaving!” she shouted, ready to knock me again if I tried. I tested her with a mad dash in the other direction, only to have her claws slice through the air in front of me, slamming so hard into the stones that they tore deep chips away. My hand flew up to push hers out of my way. My fist was met with the back of her hand, scales colliding so powerfully that I was thrown off my feet.

“I have to go!” I yelled just as loudly. “You want me to leave Thad to them? You know what they’ll do!”

“If you go, everything he’s done will be worth nothing,” she told me, sliding to corner me again, spreading her fingers and claws menacingly.

“So you want me to leave him there?” I said. “You’re just giving up on him?”

“He wouldn’t want you to save him!” she said in a near scream. I jumped into the air, trying to rise over the rocky wall only to find that she was faster, raising to bat me back down again. I crashed to the ground, instinctively swinging to catch my claws against hers. They clashed and I tried to push her over, but she managed to shove back against me with a matching strength. I was caught off guard and fell again, her blades slipping down and slicing the unprotected inside of my hand before she could stop herself.

She tumbled to the side but was back up instantly, gritting her teeth.

“You can’t die,” she said, sobbing again through her fury. “I was weak before, but I can’t be now. I can’t let you die.”

I bent over, out of breath. I was bleeding from my hand. I looked up to her and saw that her face was covered in alarm at the blood she’d drawn, her claws pulling back quickly.

“You’d rather let him die instead?” I said through my teeth. I wiped my hands down my jeans, trying to clear them of the red, to wipe away the sting.

“You’re the only hope left,” she begged me. “You can’t. You have to let him go.”

“I won’t,” I said with resolve. “You can’t keep me here. I won’t let him die alone.”

Finally, she broke down. She spun, throwing her hands down so that the end of the cliff was open in front of me.

“Fine!” she shouted. “Go, if you want. But I’m not going to die fighting again. I’ll just die here when you do.”

She backed away, gesturing toward the open edge in bitter insistence. The whole of the San Fernando Valley spread beyond her, painted over by the sun’s rays, calling to me to go out. My urge to fight her vanished the moment she gave up. I could see behind her insistence was a longing to hold me back—a duty, even, because she knew exactly what would happen to me when I left.

I knew what I would face. It took all of my strength to tear myself from against the rocky wall, to walk past Callista who still remained hopeful that I would change my mind. I got to the edge and stopped.

Callista stayed behind me, refusing to follow.

“Will you look for me in our next life again?” I asked her. I should have wished she wouldn’t, that somehow she could be disconnected from me so in our next life she could live as a human and never face any of this again. But I didn’t want to leave her. Deep inside, I hoped that if I died, she would be there again in seventeen years, and somehow we would rediscover everything again, and pick up where we left off.

She didn’t say anything back. Maybe she had finally hardened her heart enough to be strong, to keep our promise. So without another word, I pushed myself from the cliff and left to save my friend.