Soulwalker (21 page)

“It’ll be over…”

Tarris didn’t hear the rest of Asher’s sentence.

*   *   *

The sound of Asher’s voice caught Tarris’s attention. Her medicated body woke up before her drug-soaked mind did. She was lying limp in Asher’s arms.

“My mom and dad are gone now.” Asher’s low voice settled over Tarris like a warm friend. “They didn’t get to see me become a mediprac, but I know they would have been proud. I really miss them.” Tarris could hear the wistfulness in Asher’s voice.

“At least you knew them.” Tarris shifted to a more comfortable position before she snuggled her head back in between Asher’s breasts.

“You’re awake.” Asher didn’t seem surprised.

“Yes. Tell me more.”

“I’ll make you a deal. If I tell you my story, you tell me yours.”

“Sure,” Tarris said readily.

“Oh no.” Asher tightened her grip on Tarris’s waist. “You agreed to that too quickly. I want the whole truth, Tarris. No shortcuts or hidden meanings, or no story.”

No one had ever heard the whole story, not even her mother. Rya was the sole possessor of her secrets.

When Tarris didn’t answer, Asher said, “Fine. You don’t want to share? Then no more bedtime stories.”

Tarris felt Asher’s breath across the top of her head, large sweeping exhalations that blew down against her scalp. Asher was not a happy woman.

“No, it’s not that. I’ve never told anyone everything before. It’s just not that easy.”

“Don’t you trust me?”

“I’m trusting you with my life. What more do you want?”

“You know,” Asher said, “these last couple of days have been a revelation to me. I’ve met my very first Shadow Ops assassin, been invaded by her shadow, made love to her, and I’m now on the run with her. And you know what?”

“You want to kick the girl when she’s down?”

“No. I wouldn’t change a minute of it.”

“But I seem to recall you cursing your scientific curiosity,” Tarris said warily.

“It was in the heat of the moment. I didn’t mean it.”

But Tarris didn’t dismiss it as easily as Asher had. She decided to change the subject. “Where’s Jerad?”

“After he got the fire started, he and I ate some of your rations. He’s off trying to find a way out of here.”

Tarris looked into the fire burning a few feet away. Its heat was barely felt from where she was, but it took away the slight chill in the air. She closed her eyes and concentrated on whether she could feel the warmth on her legs. Was it too soon to tell? Her patience was wearing thin at her slow recovery. She had already dismissed the fact that she hadn’t walked for sixteen years. She wanted her miracle, and she wanted it now.

As she contemplated her life and where she was now, she felt something. Had she imagined the sensation? Was she so desperate to feel something that her mind was playing tricks on her?

“What are you thinking about?” Asher’s lips tickled her ear as she spoke.

“I’m wondering whether I felt the warmth on my skin or I’m so damned frustrated and desperate that I’ll believe anything my stupid mind wants to tell me.” The fire flickered as Tarris ranted, as if some errant gust of wind had passed through the tunnel.

“You’ll walk,” Asher said with conviction.

“Are you so sure of that?” Tarris tilted her head to look up into Asher’s eyes.

“Nothing is certain, Tarris, but I believe you will. I wouldn’t be surprised if you bully yourself into making those legs of yours work.” Asher chuckled.

Tarris settled back into Asher’s arms. “You’re probably right.”

“What did your mom and dad think of the accident?”

Tarris thought about it for a moment. “I don’t know. I was pretty well out of it for a long time. Mom was there now and then, but we didn’t really talk much after that.” Tarris let her sight drop to the licking flames. “I never knew my dad.”

“Not even after the accident? He didn’t show up once? That’s pretty cold.”

“Mom was part of a government repopulation program.”

“Was she like… like…” Asher hesitated.

“Like me? No, she was normal like you.”

“Is that what you all are? Part of some government experiment?”

“Hell, no. We were just abominations, that’s all,” Tarris said bitterly.

Asher grabbed Tarris’s chin and pulled so that Tarris had to look at her. “You are not an abomination. Don’t you ever say that again in front of me,” Asher said angrily.

Tarris smiled. “A few days ago you would have agreed with me.”

Asher let go of Tarris’s chin. “I suppose I would have. But now I know better.”

“And what about now?” Tarris probably should leave the question alone, but she wanted to hear the answer.

“And now? You’re a unique person, Tarris Waite. You’re part of a covert unit that strikes terror in the citizens of this metropolis, and yet you”—Asher touched a finger to Tarris’s nose —“and your spirit, have shown me that you are a contradiction to everything I believed you to be.”

“Does that mean I’m not a maniac?” Tarris asked. “Everything you heard about us is true. Every blood-soaked word of it. They want all opposition dead, and given the chance, they’ll try to achieve that.”

“You said ‘they.’”

“The Council. I just want to live a normal life, Asher. I want my legs back and to be left alone.”

“And what about love, Tarris? Don’t you want to know love?” Asher asked gently.

“Love?” Tarris rubbed her head against Asher’s chest. “I haven’t needed it so far. Why would I need it now?” She felt Asher’s heartbeat pick up.

“So, you’ll be quite happy to live the rest of your life alone,” Asher said, more as a statement than a question.

“I have so far.”

“But that was out of necessity, not choice.”

“Oh no. It was by choice.”

“What made you this bitter?”

“I never had friends, at least not long enough for them to become long-time friends. I was removed from my home when I was three and placed in a school. Actually, it was an institution. An institution for freaks like me.” Tarris felt Asher’s reaction to her harsh words. “It’s true. The school only housed albinos.”

“Did you see your mom?”

“Only on holidays. She was never the same after I started school. She was…” Tarris searched for a word. “Distant.”

“That’s sad,” Asher murmured.

“No, that’s pathetic. The school had alienated me from my mother and got what they wanted. They had me reliant on them to look after me.” Tarris could feel the bitterness as she talked. Some things she had kept bottled up inside were coming out, and verbalizing them was helping her come to terms with them. It was her past and she needed to know that. “Oh, we learned stuff about ABCs, but the crux of our training was preparing us for our shadow.”

“I thought that happened naturally.”

“It does, but they wanted us to harness it, use it, and control it. None of us saw it for what it was back then. But being different cost me. A young boy died because he was my friend, and the school wouldn’t do anything about it. I was angry. I wanted to kill the boy who did it. Rya was eager to be out and take my revenge.” Tarris’s voice grew harder.

“So what happened? Did you—”

“No, I told my teacher I was leaving the school. Then I had my accident and fell down a flight of stairs.” Oddly, this time the thought of the terrifying journey down the stairs didn’t upset her.

“You don’t think…” Asher stopped.

“Think what?”

“Never mind.”

“No, what were you going to say?”

“It was just a silly thought, that’s all.”

Tarris forced Asher to continue when she stared at her. “What if they were scared of losing control over you, and they staged the accident?”

“You mentioned that before. Why would they do that?”

“You’re a very valuable commodity, Tarris.”

“Come to think of it, my teacher did say I was one of the strongest he had ever met.”

“Strongest? How?”

“They had a telepath who could sense our shadows. I suppose he graded each of us.”

“Nothing like favoritism. One of the best, huh?”

Tarris heard the amusement in Asher’s voice. “No, he said one of the strongest. There’s a difference.”

“Did your mother look after you when you came out of the hospital?”

“She made some sort of deal with them. The school would look after my needs, and she would give up her visiting rights.”

“Certainly sounds like they wanted you, and bad,” Asher said.

“Despite the color of my eyes.”

“What’s wrong with your eyes?”

“They’re not pure white. You see, I’m a bastard albino, with tainted blood. That’s why my eyes are blue.” It had always been a bone of contention to her kind. While they saw it as a genetic weakness, she saw it as her touch of humanity. “They said it was because of my twin, that she died because of me.”

“A twin?”

“She died at birth. When Rya made herself known to me, I always thought she was my twin, returned to join me in life.”

“That’s sweet.” Asher smiled. “What about the others?”

“I’m the only one who ever came from twins. Maybe that’s what made me so special.” Tarris closed her hand around a pebble lying next to her. She threw it at the fire. “Well, I don’t want to be special. I want to be nobody.”

“Tarris, honey,” Asher soothingly replied, “you could look as ugly as one of the actors in those films you’re so fond of, and you’d still be special.”

“To you?” Tarris asked.

At that moment, Jerad returned. He stopped before the fire and added some tinder he had collected to it. “You finished all this lovey-dovey stuff yet?”

“There was no, as you say, ‘lovey-dovey’ stuff going on,” Tarris said. “I only just woke up.”

“Uh-huh.” He tossed in the last piece of tinder.

“What did you find?”

“There’s stairs over there,” he said and pointed to the far corner of the platform, “but they’re blocked off. The light’s coming from a series of grates in the ceiling. The tunnel continues on to another place like this.”

Tarris looked toward the other end of the platform and noticed a sign on the tunnel wall, partially obscured by graffiti and posters. Jerad saw where she had looked and ran off toward it. “It says Jame—ee—son Street,” he yelled.

“Is it a name?” Tarris shouted.

Jerad studied the wall. “That’s all it says.” He ran back. “It’s in the wall, not something stuck over it.”

“Maybe this was a meeting place of some sort.” Tarris thought about it. Despite the stairs to the surface, there was a tunnel at either end. Jerad said that the new tunnel led to another platform. She searched her memories, trying to match where they were to something she had seen. A movie came to mind— not one of her favorites, but she did enjoy it. Toward the end of the movie, the police officer chased someone down into something like this and jumped into some sort of conveyance that moved along the tracks. “This was a transportation network… underground,” she announced triumphantly.

“How do you know that?” Asher asked.

“Never doubt the power of the motion picture, Asher.”

“Huh?” Jerad’s confused face nearly made Tarris laugh.

As she thought about their next move, they heard a distant rumbling. Asher went to the edge of the platform and looked one way then the other for the source of the noise. Tarris noticed that the light from the grates had steadily darkened.

“Jerad, can you gather more tinder for the fire? I think we’re going to be here for a while.”

Asher returned and knelt next to Tarris. “What’s going on?”

“A storm’s coming. We’ll have to stay here until it passes.”

“Why? The storm’s up there.” Asher pointed to the roof.

“Exactly, and the grates are open to the surface. In a little while, there’s going to be water… a lot of water. It will run off down to the rails, and we don’t want to get caught if it floods.”

“And what about food? We don’t have a lot left.”

“Then we ration it. We don’t have a choice here.” Tarris was annoyed. Not that Asher was asking all the logical questions she herself would ask. It bothered her that she couldn’t give her the right answers. “Can you help Jerad with tinder? It’s going to get cold down here.”

Asher grabbed her backpack and pulled out a couple of blankets that resembled foil. Tarris remembered the nickname of the emergency blankets from back in the nineteen eighties. Space blankets. The stupid name had always made her laugh. Were they called ‘space’ blankets because they didn’t take up any space?

“You might want to make use of one while I’m away,” Asher said.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Ma’am?” Asher’s eyebrows rose. “Who are you calling ‘ma’am’?”

Tarris looked around pointedly. “Hmmm, I must be talking about you.” There was another clap of thunder, a little louder than the one before. “We’re running out of time, Asher,” Tarris said.

Jerad passed Asher as he trotted back with rubbish and wood. He dumped it unceremoniously on the ground next to the fire and left to scrounge for more. He lowered himself off the platform and disappeared into the darkness of the tunnel. Tarris prayed that he would return before the flood began.

She found herself on the platform alone, and it gave her a chance to take stock of her physical health. She lifted her hands to eye level. They looked how she imagined they would look. Red, raw, and inflamed, and yet she didn’t feel a thing. Her hands had a sheen on them, as if they were covered with something. She rubbed her fingertips together, trying to make sense of the contradictory sensations she was feeling. The contact caused a tinge of pain, but it was cushioned by whatever Asher had put on them.

Tarris tried to close her hand into a fist, but she couldn’t do it. The pain gradually increased to the point that she stopped the exercise. She opened her hand up slowly and stared intently at it. Once she relaxed the hand, the pain ceased. So she was okay as long as she didn’t use her hands.

Asher returned with her hands full. Another clap of thunder preceded the gentle patter of rain that hit the overhead grates. The water fell a drip at a time, at first, and gathered in small puddles under the holes in the roof.

“Are we okay here?” Asher asked.