The question drifted to her but she could not be sure if it were her thought, or Trevor’s. The bridge had opened completely. She felt herself inside of him. She felt him, inside of her.
The waves came. The waves implanted in his mind during his imprisonment. Hard peeks and deep valleys. Instants of happiness followed by horrific drops into sorrow and fear. One after another without end. A torture of unbelievable malice.
Tears of joy warped into tears of sad. Relief into shock. Peace into turmoil.
Nina grabbed hold of her consciousness. This storm had to be broken.
She concentrated as best she could amidst the disturbing sea, searching her soul for the confidence and strength that had allowed her to stay true to herself even in the days when she felt so disconnected from the world.
This is who I am.
She found it. And gave it to him. Dropping it into him as if it were a boulder cast into a raging stream.
Take what you need from me. Hold on…follow me back to where you belong.
She felt the desperation as he grasped at what she gave. He struggled to gain hold of it. And Nina knew she had yet more to do. That giving would not be enough.
Nina released the dam. The sea surged into her.
The torment of his broken heart; of his loneliness. The guilt for all the blood on his hands, for the cold decisions that sacrificed many to save more; for what he nearly became in another world. He had lived it time and time again in the belly of The Order’s sinister machine. So much, that it played over and over even with the machine gone. Now she lived it with him. Now she took it from him. Now it became a part of her heart.
His torment…hers.
His guilt…hers.
Her body jolted. Her mind scrambled. Her mouth stretched open with a gasp that turned into a cry that changed into a forlorn wail. The cabin shook. Images played once more. Images of…Nina in his mind. Images of Ashley. Images of Trevor’s son. Images of the other Nina. Trevor, trembling on the sofa, opened his eyes wide. His lips quivered and he gasped for air. The weight of the deluge crushed Nina. Her heart broke a thousand times. She lost everything again and again. She felt herself drowning… — The Eagle transport appeared over the treetops, glinted in the dawn sun, and then descended into the clearing at the front of the cabin.
Nina Forest stood by the porch door with Odin lying nearby. She held the radio in her hand. She gave only passing thought to how the radio miraculously worked that morning after having failed during the night.
She stood there, a blank expression covering her face. An expression not unlike a shell-shocked disaster survivor.
The door on the transport slid open; a ramp descended. Ashley stepped out followed by the two medics who hurried inside the cabin.
Ashley approached Nina whose eyes remained fixed on some distant point but she did speak. 'He’s inside. He’s awake, but very tired. I think…I think he will be okay.' Ashley studied Nina’s face as if searching for clues but her blank stare offered no answers. 'What about you? Are you okay?' Nina told her, 'No. But I will survive.' Ashley asked, 'What happened?'
Nina did not answer. Instead, she pulled her eyes from the horizon and looked at the other woman. 'I want to go home now. I need to see my daughter.'
Ashley nodded.
The door to the cabin swung open with a creak and bang. The medics steadied Trevor as their Emperor walked with a wobble, the quilt still around his shoulders. He paused midway to the shuttle and focused on the two women standing several paces away.
His eyes sported deep bags, his hair ruffled, his clothes still tattered and bloody from rampaging through the forest. But it was Trevor; no longer a wild thing.
He did not speak. He had not the strength for speaking. But that strength would return now. Nina knew this to be so because some of that strength came from her.
Ashley looked to the ground in mild embarrassment as if she interrupted a private, silent conversation.
Nina saw herself in Trevor’s eyes. And felt him in hers.
29. Infection
Ashley sat across from Trevor at the otherwise empty conference table, but his lack of speech, movement, or even blinking made her wonder if she might actually be alone.
Whatever had happened between Trevor and Nina in the wilderness had chased the chaos from his mind. Yet shadows of the demons The Order placed in her husband's head remained.
Nonetheless, Trevor had issued orders to Jon and the others. The skeleton crew onboard the Excalibur hurried to repair hull plates, damaged weapons, and the over-stressed gravity generators as if they meant to push through the Philipan and fly to Washington D.C.
Ashley knew different.
All of Trevor's ships and soldiers could not save him from the nightmares The Order had constructed, just as the Excalibur could not now save The Empire from those who tore it apart. Salvation needed to come from Trevor himself.
Ashley knew that after failing Trevor so badly following the assassination, Jon Brewer would gladly fall on a sword or die in battle against the traitors. But such a fight-regardless of victor-could only serve Voggoth's end.
Ashley Trump had been many things to Richard and Trevor Stone over the years, and since Armageddon there were many things she could not be for him. But at this moment she understood the role she needed to play, if even for the last time. She would speak on behalf of mankind and be the voice he needed to hear.
'Trevor, I know you never wanted to be an Emperor. Maybe that's why it had to be you. I know about the other world, where you saw another version of you to be a brutal dictator. I know you're worried that maybe there is some of that in you. Ever since you came back three years ago, you've been afraid of yourself. Afraid of what you might do.'
He did not respond but she felt confident he heard.
'You've kept that dark part locked away, bringing it out only when you fought the most desperate battles; only when you had to make the most difficult decisions. And every time you unleashed that part of you, you regretted it. I think it killed you, a little, each time. But you did it, because you have always stayed focused on the mission…because you know that when the survival of our species is at stake, then maybe the ends might justify the means.'
He raised his eyes and stared out the stern observation windows. Far away the first light of Wednesday, July 16 ^ th crept toward the horizon. Soon a new day would dawn. Soon Nina Forest would board an Eagle transport and fly to Annapolis to see her daughter again. Ashley remembered she owed that woman a debt; a debt that would be paid before the day ended.
More important, she knew Trevor had a debt to pay on behalf of humanity. And while it might kill another piece of him, it was his fate-or curse-to bear the burden.
'Trevor, you have to find that darkness again, for just a little while. It is there for a purpose. It is there to allow you to do what you have to do today.'
His expression remained stoic even as tears pooled in his eyes.
'Trevor, you have to go. You have to go and take back your Empire.'
– The villages that once lived east of the Volga no longer existed, their buildings ground to dust and their populaces devoured by the worst of Armageddon's nightmares; the same nightmares that had turned the steppes into charred wasteland. No animal, no human, no plant lived for thousands of square miles under a perpetually dark sky filled with angry clouds, lightening, and a chorus of rolling thunder, as if nature protested the presence of such vileness.
Above the forlorn landscape traveled a machine that could not possibly fly, but did. A floating blob that seemed to breath as it glided over the dead plains.
Its destination; a sickening hall of green and red infecting the land. Its massive size was dwarfed by the
