Undone Deeds

41

White.

Whiteness filled my vision with nothing to break the relentlessness of it. Above me, the white simply was, as if the air itself was color. Or no color. As if nothing else existed except the white. I hung limp in the air, as if there were no air, no gravity. My head burned, like a cold fire in my mind, blazing against a blanket of night.

Everything is white. I have been here before. This is where it started. Or ended. I don’t remember which. Everything around me is white. I stared into a nothingness of white. I am here again. Around me, I see shadows of light flickering in the depths of the white. They spin and whirl, roll and stop, taunting me with patterns that disintegrate as they take shape.

Bursts of color flare in my vision, fireworks against the white, fading to darkness. More, then more, the darkness is closing on me, like the slow closing of my eyes. My mind, like my eyes, is closing, like my eyes are blinking. Like my mind is blinking.

My mind blinks.

The air begins to haze with white ambient essence, like a fog. Vize has taken out the security and is making his way toward the area where the spent fuel rods are stored. Emergency lights flash bright yellow as I follow him down a long corridor. People in hazmat suits stand frozen along the walls, like statues randomly arranged. They’re not dead, but suspended, caught in an elven binding spell.

The corridor ends at a locked door, a sign flashes the evacuation order and warns of radiation. A keypad beside the door has lights that glow steady red. I don’t have a code. I backtrack to the nearest person in a hazmat suit. The binding spell is not as sophisticated as I assumed. It will degrade within an hour if Vize doesn’t kill us all. I hesitate, expecting a trap, but see none. I hold my breath and call up some essence, hoping it will not trigger something and kill us. I hit the binding spell with a counterspell. The man sways, startled to be aware and alert again.

I steady him and point to the door. “I need to get through. I need you to open that door.”

His glasses behind the mask are crooked on his face. He looks like a family man, maybe fifty years old, not someone who expected to find himself in the middle of a terrorist attack. He straightens his shoulders. “No.”

I wish his family could see him at that moment. The world is crashing down around him, he’s got powerful fey throwing spells around, and he says “no” to me. The defiant glint in his eye is admirable but not convenient. “Look, I’m one of the good guys. Honest. I need to get in there and stop the guy who’s doing this.”

“You don’t have a suit,” he said.

“I’m a druid. I have a body shield that should work the same way,” I said. I’m not sure how long my body shield will work on the other side of the door. It doesn’t matter. Vize matters. Killing him matters more.

He shakes his head, the large hood moving from side to side. “I’m not worried about you. I’m worried that a guy with no suit is on a suicide mission.”

I grin. I like this guy. I wish we were meeting under different circumstances, and I want to hit him for slowing me down. But I like him. “Sir, I can destroy that door with my abilities. If I wanted to hurt anyone but myself, we wouldn’t be talking. You would be waking up to find a gaping hole in the wall. I’m trying to reduce risk, but if I have to sacrifice myself and everyone in this hall to try and stop Vize, I will. Please open the door.”

I can’t see his face as he looks down the hall at the other people bound in the spell. “Can you wake them up?”

I raise my arm and shoot a stream of essence down the center of the hall, tuning its resonance so that it disrupts the binding spells. One by one, people shift and sway on their feet. A few fall. “Satisfied?”

He walks to the door and punches in an access code. The system cycles. “You’re gonna die in the there, you know that, right?”

I pat him on the shoulder. “Not if I can help it. Make sure the door closes behind me and get everyone out.”

The door opens, and I don’t wait for a response from the guy. I’m in the containment area. The air is thick with essence, a cloud I can’t see through. An elven signature runs through, so it’s Vize, but there’s also a high-level resonance I’ve never seen. Vize is tapping into the reactor at a pure essence level. That’s bad.

Uncertain in the fog, my body shield shudders around me like nothing I’ve ever experienced. It’s a response to the radiation, a bombardment of neutrinos or some such I had no clear conception of. The air is humid, and beneath the sound of the emergency sirens and the hum of machinery, I hear a low rumble, like water boiling. My sensing ability registers multiple essence signatures and a fierce white light in front of me. It’s the spent–fuel rod pool.

I reach a metal railing and watch rising essence warp and twist around it. It’s water, a fine mist rising in the air. The surface of the containment is low—too low according to warning signs painted on the inner surface of the pool. I jog along the edge, sifting through the signatures for Vize. My senses are all screwed up, and I slam into a wall of solid air. Beyond it, powerful essence shimmers evergreen. It moves closer, resolving into the shape of a man. Vize appears in the mist.

“We need to talk,” he says.

“You can do all your talking in a jail cell,” I say.

He shifts his attention to the pool. “We don’t have much time. You need to speak to Nigel Martin. Maeve is going to try to kill us. We have to stop her.”

Ignoring him, I test the barrier with essence-infused hands, searching for weak points. There are always weak spots, no matter how good you are. “Looks like you’re the one that’s going to kill us if you expose those fuel rods,” I say.

“I need the radiation. No matter what I say, you aren’t going to believe me because you’ve been lied to. I am not going to let Maeve kill me this time.”

Of course, I don’t believe him. The man has killed people in his war against the Seelie Court. I have no idea what he’s saying about Maeve’s killing him. I decide to keep him talking to distract him while I break the barrier. “Maeve isn’t going to kill you. I might, though. Reverse the spell and cover the rods.”

“There’s no one like us in the world, Grey. Only we can stop her if we join together,” he said.

Okay, now he is getting loony. Die-hard anarchists never make sense. “Sure, Vize. Come closer so we can talk.”

He stands before me, a look of fevered hope on his face. His youth surprises me, his almost black hair worn long for an elf, fanning out as though filled with static. I had thought him older. He holds his hands about a foot apart in front of him. A gold ring hovers between them, pulsing with essence, revolving around a shaft of light. “This is how we do it,” he said.

“Do what?” I ask. I find a thin spot in the barrier, a space where radiation from the pool rubs against it, wearing it down.

“Stop Convergence. I need you to drop your body shield,” he says.

I chuckle and return my attention to the weak spot. A few well-placed bursts of essence should propagate through the barrier and destabilize the shield spell. “And why would I do that?”

“Because this will be more painful otherwise,” he says.

I debate whether to humor him and drop the shield. I’d have plenty of time to reengage my shield if he dropped the barrier to attack. I decide against it. I probably wouldn’t like being bombarded with radiation from the pool just to play with his mind. “I guess we’ll have to go the pain route.”

I hit the weak spot with a blast of essence. Vize curses under his breath as he redirects his spell to deflect the hit. It doesn’t work. His ring falls to the floor at his feet. The barrier crumbles, and I leap at him. His eyes lock with mine, and he smiles. “One door opens; another closes,” he says.

I reach for the ring. He anticipates my attack. Even as my feet leave the floor, he is down on one knee, arm raised, and lets fly a bolt of elf-shot. It pierces my shield and slams into my head. Something tears inside me as I fall to the floor. I have never experienced such pain, never imagined it.

Vize grabs the ring and puts it on a finger of his left hand. He holds it up. The essence in my head refuses to dissipate, ricocheting against the inside of my skull. Vize clenches his fist and withdraws the elf-shot from my head. I twist in pain, watching in horror as the green essence jumps free with a brilliant shard of gold essence—my essence. He’s pulled a piece of my body signature, my living essence, my utter soul. Vize grabs the mote of my essence in his ringed hand and fuses his essence into mine.

The floor vibrates with the shock of a concussive force. Vize stumbles back, surprise on his face as he looks up. I turn as a sheet of flaming essence sweeps the air. Great wings swirl with red and golden fire. They descend, and I recognize the body signature. Manus ap Eagan alights on the far side of the pool.

“It’s too soon. You aren’t strong enough,” he shouts. He releases a volley of essence, white strikes of lightning burning with power. The essence tangles in the radiation vapor, splinters, and hits Vize. It leaps along his arm like wild static and burns out through the ring.

Vize and I scream as something blossoms in the white haze, something dark and hot, something wrong. The darkness flares out like a claw, knocking me on my back, throwing Vize off his feet, tossing Eagan away into the mist. Vize thrusts his hand in the air, into the darkness, and releases another burst of elf-shot. The darkness swallows it in silence, then descends onto Vize’s hand. A piece of it fractures and hits me in the face. Darkness descends across my vision, then across my mind, like the slow descent of a falling curtain, like the closing of my eye, like my mind blinking.

My mind blinked.

Everything is white. I am running. Everything is white. He looks over his shoulder at me. He looks determined…. or crazed…. I can’t tell. Everything is white. One minute we were facing each other, and now everything is white. He stops. He looks surprised. There is someone lying on the ground. Something about him is familiar. Everything is white, and there is no ground. There is someone lying in the white. Everything….

My mind blinked.

I stand on a plain, white grass waving against a white sky. It’s not winter, pray, what is this new madness? Where have I come? I turn in place, searching, searching across the plain, searching about the standing stones, but Maeve is not there. Was she? What is this place?

The stones shimmer and glow with essence. It is more than Maeve expected, more than she could have suspected. It is too much. She has overstepped.

“Stand aside,” she says.

I face her in the stone circle. Its radiance grows as the essence of the source is released. “It’s too much, Maeve. We can’t do this. It will destroy everything,” I say.

“Everything but Faerie—our Faerie, m’love—the rest matters not,” she says, and raises her arms.

“It matters, my queen. All the realms matter. The Wheel of the World cannot turn without all its creation. You will destroy what you seek to save,” I said.

The stone circle becomes light. Maeve becomes light. “I will not fail my people,” she said.

I raise my own arms, feel the power begin to course through me. “Nor shall I,” I say.

She sings in a high, clear voice. I answer in my own.

My mind blinked.

I burn and fall, tearing through the Wheel of the World, bodiless but not broken. I stopped her, stopped Maeve, but fear I started something more.

I burn with essence, my true essence, my soul. I burn across the Ways, doors flashing by, places and times in the Wheel of the World.

I burn and fall through one of the Ways, caught up in the wake of the Wheel of the World. I burn across the landscape of a new place, a new world beyond the old.

I burn and pull things in my wake, people and places, fragments of minds and realms.

I burn upon the earth, my passage burning through a forest of cold. I burn and the trees lie down and the sky goes white.

I am not in Faerie.

I burn with exhaustion and pain and cannot become myself. I am my own essence, burning white without a body in the dark forest. I pause and rest and prepare to return, to being, to a body.

I burn and they approach, men burning with power, burning with their own essence. I feel their hunger, two men hungry for power. I see their faces and know them. I see their faces and remember them, one a druid, one a shaman. They strive over me, strive for my essence, strive for my power, my soul.

I am weak, too weak, borne along the tide of their struggle, tossed to first one, then the other. They tear at each other, tear at me. They are matched and cannot overcome. They are tearing me apart; they are pulling apart my soul.

I tear and am undone. I feel myself tear away from my self, one part to the druid, one part to the shaman. I am no longer whole.

The druid takes me away, takes his portion of me away with him. I am fading without the missing part of me; part of my soul has gone. I feel it out there, feel it receding in the shaman’s hands.

I reach out for my missing half, feel my missing half reach out for me. We drift apart, the druid and the shaman take us away, away from being whole. The shaman is gone. I am gone.

I am losing myself, losing myself, losing myself. My memory slips away, my mind with it, myself. I am becoming not myself, a blank slate, an empty vessel.

I feel my thoughts fade to nothing, to something new, to something with no memory. Changed.

Like a newborn. And