Irresistible Forces

'I'm not sure there's anyone left to call me.'

'The news…?'

'I gave Angliacom that information.'

He slid his hand free and went back to tossing stones into the glassy water. Plop. Plop. Plop. Each stone made a mesmerizingly slow arc, as if the air was denser than it should be.

'What do you mean, no one's left to call?'

'They're all gone.' Plop. 'The staff from Hellbane.' Plop. 'The fixers down south.' Plop.

A chilly emptiness weakened her, and she sat where lawn met the lake's shingled edge.

Dan stopped tossing the stones. 'There's just the ones in the northern and southern settlements. We've decided we might as well have a go, as they used to say.'

It was like listening to nonsense. 'Who used to say?'

He turned to her, and she thought he looked more relaxed than she'd seen him in weeks. But thin. Too thin.

'Men in war stories. It's usually men. I've been checking out books and films about war. Lawrence of Arabia. The Dam Busters. Reach for the Sky. Sirius V. Looking for suggestions.'

'Did you find any?'

'Be brave, don't give up, and have the right weapons.'

Tempting to think him mad, or joking like the old Dan, but he was deadly serious. Bad adjective, Jenny.

'What's going to happen, then?'

'I'm going to die. But,' he added with an almost Dannish smile, 'in the best tradition of English heroism, I'm going to keep a stiff upper lip and take as many with me as I can.'

Jenny wanted to say no, to deny reality, but she knew it was the flat truth. 'We're all going to die, I suppose. Is there anything the rest of us can do?'

'Give us reason to try, perhaps.'

'If you fail, you die. Isn't that reason enough?'

He sat on the grass facing her. 'I'm worn out by the waiting. In a way, I want it over.'

She shivered, recognizing a reflection of her own state.

'Living and dying don't seem particularly important anymore,' he said, 'but Gaia is. I mean us, the people who've made Gaia home. I'm going to fight for that as long as I can. Perhaps I can make a difference.'

She reached out and touched his hand.

'I know what it'll cost, though, Jen. You probably know, too. Why it seems easier to die now. Get it over with.'

It was the ashes in the wind put into words.

Praying she read him right, she moved close and grasped his tense hands, then raised one for the lover's kiss, as he had done to her, so long ago.

His hand flexed slightly against her jaw. 'Are you preparing to sacrifice yourself for the cause?'

'No.' If he could face the blighters, she could face honesty. 'Just hoping.'

He closed his eyes, then drew her hand to his mouth. 'I called you. Tonight. Bad form when you'd not taken up my offer, but… I need you, Jen. You. Now.'

Breathtakingly, she didn't doubt it. There'd been no reason for her wandering search, and in fact she hadn't wandered, but had drifted here like a feather on the wind.

'How. How did you call me?'

He drew her close, and his lips traced her cheek, her ear, her jaw. 'I'm practicing rusty skills. If I'm going to fight, I'm going to fight dirty.'

'I don't understand.'

'You don't need to…'

And she didn't. There was nothing rusty about his lovemaking skills, and she sensed the something extra. It was little to do with her, no matter what he said, but everything to do with magic, with death. With more than death.

It sprang from hovering annihilation. Fear of it surrounded them and played in the magic of their minds. Fear of a void, which he fought with fire.

She let him undress her because he wanted to, and because each incidental brush of his hands on her skin was like liquid pleasure. It flowed over her and into her, and she pushed off his shirt to get to his skin, to give back, to draw more.

When she was naked, she stripped him, stroked him, cradled him. Then he was in her, slow, relentless, eternal, building a dizzying power. She might have been afraid of dying if things like that mattered anymore. All that mattered now was the cauterizing conflagration, and the drifting postapocalyptic dream.

She came back to reality to find that she was lying on her back on soft grass with Dan half over her, his head cradled on her breasts. He seemed relaxed, replete, and she felt the same way. What a fool she'd been — they could have been easing each other's bodies, minds, and souls like this all along.

So much wasted time, and now he was going off to die.

'Rusty skills,' she said, playing with his shoulder-length hair. Longer than he used to wear it.

'Is that a complaint?'

She heard the smile in it so didn't answer.

She'd rather not think at all, but her mind was coming back to life, protesting fate! 'The stones. What were you doing?'

'Controlling matter.' He lazily pulled a handful of grass and tossed it in the air. She watched it hang there, then suddenly shower down on them.

'Sorry,' he said, brushing it off her. 'Still rusty.'

The fire Was in his touch, though, and brushing led to nibbling, nibbling to kissing, and kissing to another apocalypse. An easy way to mindless pleasure, but reality returned. He couldn't die. She had to save him.

'Someone must have sent for help,' she said.

'Weeks ago, but it won't arrive in time. And anyway, what do federal bureaucrats know about blighters?'

But he sat and pulled her up to face him. 'Any response might arrive in time to take some survivors off. Go north tomorrow, Jenny, and keep going north. Try to survive.'

It was good advice, but Jenny doubted she'd take it. She couldn't imagine fleeing north while Dan went south to die. And she didn't want to leave Gaia. Perhaps it was the scrap of magic in her, that mysterious Gaian part, but she felt she'd wither and die away from here.

'I didn't know you could do things like that — the grass. How's that fixing?'

His grimace showed that he'd noticed her lack of promise, but he didn't pursue it. Perhaps he understood too well. 'It isn't.'

He collapsed onto his back, hands beneath his head, beautiful enough to distract. Perhaps that was his purpose. It wasn't going to work.

'So what is it?'

His eyes swiveled to hers. 'Wild magic.'

She knew he was about to tell her something important, but this time she wanted to know. 'What's that?'

'The elemental force, I think. Fixers are born with magic. No one knows why. It doesn't go in families. No amount of effort can create it or increase it.'

Okay, so she was weak. She leaned up on her elbow to trace the contours of his chest. 'What about the training?'

'That's not to teach us how to do things. That's to teach us how not to do things. Here's the truth, Jen. Hellbane U makes such a fuss about finding fixers because they daren't leave a single one unchecked. We can't have wild magic.'

'I don't understand.'