The Amber Columns (The City of Dark Pleasures Book 2) (13 page)

“Everything is all right, O’Mara. Just wake up now.”

The dream Tully puts his arms around me, holding me tightly as the world starts to fade.

“Goodbye, my love,” he says.

The journey back seems to last an hour.

As my eyes flicker open, Tully swims into view, and I feel his cool hand on my scorching forehead. His other hand gently wipes tears from my cheeks.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “You slipped into a deeper dream state because of the fever. Was it a nightmare?”

I shake my head, closing my eyes against the lingering after-images.

“I would never hurt you, O’Mara. I love you. Whatever I become in the dream—”

“It’s not that. It wasn’t that.”

My vision focusses. Tully is wearing sweatpants with an unbuttoned shirt and nothing underneath.  The shirt is neatly pressed and quite formal looking. The sweatpants are frayed, with oil stains on the knees. He looks like he got dressed in the dark.

“It happened fast huh?” I say.

He smiles, relief showing in his eyes. “Suddenly your heart rate went sky high and you were boiling hot. There’s a doctor selling toys on the subway level. She came down straight away with some black market Omnicillen.” He sits back and sighs. “Then you started to scream. You said something about children.”

I take his hand off my forehead and squeeze it reassuringly. “I don’t know why I was screaming. It wasn’t the dream. The dream was kind of beautiful in a way.”

Is it so bad that I glimpsed a life I can’t have? Many people never even get that much. A strange feeling washes over me, like I’ve miss-stepped at the top of a high stairway. And suddenly I know our children’s names. The boys, Austin and Azad, and the girl, Verita. The names are old fashioned, out of line with our long-held fashion to give children surnames from the world before the Climate Wars. Austin, Azad and Verita – three little faces staring back at me. As soon as I process that, the feeling is gone. It’s as though I captured a few particles of another universe before the window closed.

“I’ve lost my citizen status, haven’t I?”

“Don’t worry about that right now.”

“I’m ready to start worrying about things again, Tully. I might not look very strong but I feel strong.”

He shakes his head, ruefully. “You’re an amazing woman, O’Mara. What you did was crazy.”

“It will be worth it if we can use the recording against him. Against all of them.”

“How are we going to do that?”

I close my eyes again for a moment. For all my talk of strength I still feel a bit muddled. I know I had a plan when I went in. Things went off script of course—I certainly didn’t expect for Portero to order me raped and killed—but I got what I needed…

Raped. I shiver despite the lingering fever. But I’m strong. Tully called me amazing. I’m strong and amazing. I exhale slowly.

Tully watches me, frowning. “Do you want to talk about it?”

I shake my head.

“Maybe not with me? I could probably bribe one of the counsellors. They’ve heard just about every kind of story.”

“If I talk to anyone, it will be you. But there’s not much to talk about. I don’t remember anything beyond your brother punching me repeatedly in the face.”

Tully covers his eyes and shakes his head.

I reach out and put my hand on his knee. “Your other brother saved my life.” I don’t mention that he probably raped me too, before he took pity on me. But Tully has heard the recording, so I guess he knows.

“My other brother? Which one?”

“I didn’t get his name. He looked a lot like you and told me you have the same mother too. He was young, only a teenager.”

Tully nods thoughtfully. “That was Driscoll. He’s was a baby when…I saw him last.”

“He must have volunteered to take me to the ruins and finish me off, but he couldn’t do it. I don’t really remember what he said exact—Oh! Oh no…”

“What?”

“Your mother. I’m sorry, Tully. Your mother is dead.”

He doesn’t show much emotion, looking down for a moment, before gazing at me again. “I thought she died years ago. That’s what I was led to believe.” He sighs heavily. “I don’t know what to believe anymore.”

I’d like to tell him everything he needs to believe in. Love. The undefeatable dignity of the human spirit. The
idea
of freedom, if not the reality of it. And the truth that might set us free. But I’m tired again. The fever has released me, but left me exhausted in its wake. My eyes are drifting shut.

“Believe in
me
, Tully.”

Chapter Thirteen -- Tully

Things grow slowly in the dark, but they
do
grow. O’Mara’s recording, the one she nearly died for, passes from hand to hand amongst people I trust. Culls, mostly, some ferals. One or two uncut men whose citizenships are permanently gone, along with most of their morals. A few women, only a few. The women in the Pleasures are the most likely to return to the controlled city, to their old lives, of a sort. They might never marry, but if they can trick someone into impregnating them, they can have a small existence. Most of them aren’t prepared to risk that.

But there are a few who, like many of us, have no hope of ever being free again. Murderers, they call them, though I’m almost sure the men they killed deserved it. Who could condemn such killing, I mean truly condemn it? The stories I’ve heard don’t bear thinking about. Officially no one believes them. There is never any proof. So much power possessed by fewer and fewer men – soon we will all be nothing but playthings and slaves. Maybe even food.

Unless we act. Unless the time has finally come to act. All these years—cut off from the world, our domed city rigid and contained, our rejected waifs eking out lives on the fringes, in the Pleasures or the ruins—all this time there has been an unbroken thread of resistance. Rebels have arisen and been cut down, shot down in full view of those that might have supported them, or simply disappeared. To be honest, I expected it for myself. Once I learned my father knew I was alive, I expected the guards to come at any moment, to haul me off and simply do away with me, maybe after torturing me for a while, in attempt to elicit information I don’t have.

I hid in the only way possible, cowering and hustling in the dark corners of the Columns, only travelling by the back passages. But later I took things into my own hands, building myself this little refuge deep in the Obsidian Stairway, behind hacked consoles and hot-wired sensors. Eventually gathering courage, I ventured into the monitored areas, and nothing happened. I started my service, built my public monitored workshop and nothing happened. Maybe my father had forgotten all about me. Maybe he didn’t want me dead for what I did.

But now I know he had other goals in leaving me alive. An eye for an eye, a wife for a wife.

In his cruelty, he has revealed that I have never been marked for death. Pain and loss is what he wants for me. Pain I have felt, and loss. But his last attack on me was a failure. More than a failure—he has ensured his own undoing.

Because now we have proof.

Will his people believe it’s him on the recording? They don’t need to believe it. Because it’s not his people on whom we lay our hopes. It’s on other people—ones who already hate him.

The mainland.

One good thing about being a no one is all the time you have on your hands. Even during the busiest seasons in the Pleasures at most I would work four hours a day. In earlier years I used my down time taking drugs, trying to forget everything I’d lost. But the years hardened me to grief and awoke my curiosity. And there are places in the humming ruins where certain types of information can be found, if you look hard enough.

I looked for something to fill the holes left in the tattered version of history they taught us. The Climate Wars tore us from our nearest ally and for decades we were determined that only one would prevail. Then the Expiation began in the crumbled remains of our civilization. And then the mainland attacked again, with bombings and exhortations to stop the carnage.

Then what? How did the violence stop? It was only fourteen years ago, but people discuss it as though the truth is lost in the mists of time. But it wasn’t lost. It was hidden, suppressed, even from the Archiva. No one knew.

Time reveals everything eventually though, like erosion. I found an ancient history book in the ruins one day. It was inconsequential in most ways, but it spoke of a treaty—a treaty with a nation that had committed horrific atrocities. And the terms of the treaty were very specific: any indication of hostility directed at other nations would immediately nullify the terms. And then I knew. There must be a treaty between us and the mainland.

There have been whispers all along, that the mainlanders ache to attack us again. And there are rumors that some who disappear from the Pleasures or the ruins have a found a way through the offshore sentinel posts and into the open ocean. That there are mainland patrols that will collect you and take you to the mainland where you’ll be received like a hero.

All they need is a threat and they will liberate us. That’s the dream anyway. Not much of a dream, but it’s the only dream we have. And we have the threat of hostility now: Trenoweth Portero’s own son speaking of plans to invade. We only need to get the recording through the sentinel firewall somehow. No small task, but what else do I have to do with my spare time?

All this swirls in my mind as I watch O’Mara sleep. Her bruises are faded and yellow, she limps around my boudoir when she has the energy.  But I encourage her to sleep, to regain her strength. And I know if I connect her to my machine, that she’s carrying on an affair with a version of me in her dreams. There are children, she says, which breaks my heart, but I don’t let that show.

I’m jealous of the other me, but I want her to be happy.

She rolls over with a tiny whimper and the sheet slips off her hip, revealing her naked ass. She climbed into bed, exhausted from the exertion of having a shower and didn’t bother to get dressed. This is natural sleep, no electrical field. She says sometimes she dreams of the other me anyway, though the dreams are less intense.

“Tully…” her eyes flutter open. “Come and lie with me.”

I hesitate. Since the attack I have barely touched her, not wanting to hurt her further. But her naked body on the clean sheet makes me ache all over. I ache to feel her skin against mine, to taste her lips, her breasts, her beautiful pink pussy. But I’m scared. Maybe in the awake world her body is too violated to ever open up to me again. I don’t want to find out.

“Please. I miss you.”

I stand and step over to the bed, sitting carefully beside her.

“Take your clothes off,” she murmurs. Heart thumping in my chest, I pull my sweater over my head. Her fingers curl over the waistband of my jeans. My hands shake as I undo the buttons, stand and let my jeans fall to the floor. I step out of them and sit back down in my boxers. She pulls at the cotton material, her hand sliding around my hip to…

“No.” I grasp her fingers. “There’s…I don’t…”

“It’s okay,” she says, moving her hand up to my hair, tugging gently. “Lie down.”

She edges back as I join her, and rolls into me, pressing her breasts against my bare chest, sliding her leg between my thighs.

For all my courage as I planned our salvation while she slept, this terrifies me. Skin to skin, her naked body wrapping around my…insufficiency. This is the reason I built my machine, so I could hide behind other people’s dreams, so I could conceal the emptiness that probably shouldn’t matter as much as it does. O’Mara has said it doesn’t matter.

“You’ve hardly touched me since…” Her voice trails off as she gazes into me. And I realize she might have been thinking the worst—that I’m disgusted by what happened to her. That’s she’s tarnished somehow.

“You were so bruised, that’s all. I didn’t want to hurt you.”

“I feel fine now. Tired, but fine.” She takes one of my hands and cups it around her soft round breast. I bend down and kiss her, gently at first but then deeper as she opens her mouth against mine. She nudges me onto my back and clambers on top of me, sitting astride my hips. Our lips part and she sits up, looking down on me.

The beauty of her naked body makes me gasp. Her legs spread around me tugs her pussy lips apart revealing the tantalizing pink and glistening arousal between them, framed by the curls of her dark pubic hair. Her warmth presses down on me, right where my cock would be, if I had one. The thought makes me flinch involuntarily.

“What is it?” she asks, huskily.

“I…nothing.” But she deserves the truth. “I don’t like to be touched. There.”

She looks down at the place our bodies join. “Not even like this?”

“No. It’s fine.” Saying makes it so. I start to relax under her. “It’s just that it makes me think you want…you know…a cock or something.”

She gives me a crooked smile, her head tilting to the side. “Or something?” She bends down, speaking into my lips. “I only want you.”

We make love in the way that we can—lips, fingers, tongues, hands and she comes gloriously, her naked body flushing with rosy heat. When it’s over I feel both spent and wound up like a spring, wanting to either devour her, or crawl inside her somehow. She lies back on the tumbled bed, breathing deeply, staring at the ceiling.

My missing parts twinge with phantom pain, but it doesn’t blossom into anything more than that before receding. I’ll explain it to her one day I guess. With the modification I’ve made to my implant I can zonk myself out if it happens anyway. Then there’s the other thing….

“Can I ask you a weird question?” O’Mara says, still staring upwards.

“How do I pee?” I laugh. “I sit like a girl.”

She frowns at me. “That wasn’t what I was going to ask, but thank you.”

“I’m sorry. I get that question a lot. What were you going to ask?”

She takes a breath and presses her lips together before speaking. “Can you come?”

Well. I’ve had that question a lot too, but usually meanly, teasingly, from people who are amused by my deficiencies. O’Mara doesn’t ask it meanly. She wants to know me, inside and out. And maybe she was reading my mind, because I was just thinking about the
other
modification I made to my implant.

“I can. I do in my sleep sometimes, even without the dream machine.” Now I feel a bit embarrassed to tell her, as though I’m a teenage boy who has invented a new way to masturbate. On the other hand I really really want to do it next to her, with her arms around me, with my hands cupped around her beautiful tits. “And there’s…this other thing.”

She leans up on one elbow. “What thing?”

“I got a new implant a little while ago, and I hacked into it and discovered by modulating the activation frequencies I can make myself come.”

She stares at me, dumbstruck. “What?”

I grin nervously. “I made a remote control. It’s in the other room.”

She shoves me out of bed with surprising strength. “GO GET IT!”

I roll onto the floor and trip over my jeans on the way through the door to my workshop. O’Mara’s laughter rings behind me, like the prettiest of bells.

When I come back, she’s leaning up on the pillows, playfully swinging her legs open and closed, giving me little glimpses of her recently sated pussy. She holds out her hand, a stern expression on her face.

“Hand it over, you naughty boy.”

I drop the remote into her hand and make to sit down. She stops me.

“No. You can stand there. I want to watch.”

“Oh, fuck.” I’ll probably fall and crack my head open but at this point I don’t really care.

“It’s so small,” she says, inspecting the narrow cylinder, which I built to fit inside a lipstick case.

“I wanted something that would fit in your pocket.” I feel myself blush saying this, because I realize how that sounds. Like maybe we could go for a walk on the promenade and she could just light me up in front of the popcorn vendor. Now I’m giggling nervously.

“How do I use it?”

“There’s a dial on the top. You just grasp it and turn the dial with your thumb. Both the pressure of the grasp and the dial have an effect. Sort of like speed and pressure I guess. I mean from what I remember about…it. Start…oh fuck…slowly. Slowly!”  I lean forward onto my knees to keep from pitching onto my face as a wash of pleasure cascades down my body.

“Holy shit,” O’Mara says. She climbs to the side of the bed and sits there with her legs open, beckoning me forward. I stagger and fall down between her knees.

O’Mara lifts my chin and bends her face down to kiss me. “I like this toy,” she says on my lips.

I can only moan in reply. My body is burning and tingling as I close my lips on her mouth again, wrapping my tongue around hers. My hands slide up and squeeze her breasts, pinching the nipples between my fingers and thumbs. That causes O’Mara to clench her fist around the remote, which sends a spasm of agonizing desire through me and without even thinking about it I take one hand off her breast and shove two fingers deep into her pussy. She lets out a startled yelp.

“Sorry,” I say as she breathes into me. But she presses on my hand and pulses it in and out. I bend my thumb up and circle her clit as my fingers fuck her. Then suddenly I’m lifting her with my other hand under her ass and throwing her back on the bed with me on top of her, between her legs as though we’re fucking like two normal people.

She reaches around and slides one hand into the back of my boxers, gripping my bare ass, her fingernails digging into my skin. And with her other hand I guess she dials me up because everything just erupts in me, all my muscles tensing and releasing at once in a cataclysm of almost unbearable pleasure which doesn’t seem to end. My fingers piston in and out, my thumb swirling because all I can think is that if I can’t make her come again then she’ll never let me
stop
coming and I’ll die like this, in between her legs, covered in sweat and her essence.