40
Black.
I drifted in a sea of black, a thick sluggish current that neither warmed nor cooled, a neutral texture that clung to my skin. I moved, my sense of balance registering a slow tumble through the black. It was black, then black, then black.
I didn’t know how long I drifted before I realized I was painless. I had lived with pain for so long, I no longer felt like it. It felt like me. Numbness had replaced feeling; indifference to pain had replaced reaction to it.
Dazed, I tumbled, my mind blank, my thoughts disconnected. Black was black. It was a thing, confronting me with a nothingness of nothingness, relentless and infinite. I tumbled, and it was black, then black, then black.
“Focus.”
The word cut across the black like the thrum of the deep. A curiosity surged through me at the break of the monotony, but only for a moment. The black returned, black and silent. Even as I considered I had imagined it, I lost the sense of it and faded away into the black.
“Grey.”
The word cut across the black like the thrum of the deep. I had heard a sound that formed a word that formed a meaning. I was the sound that was the word that was the meaning. I was Grey. I knew this and remembered this and held on to this as the idea faded away into the black.
I remembered then the other word. I had a memory of another word. My name was not the first word, the first sound. It had been another word with a sound and a meaning, and I knew that, too.
“Focus, Grey.”
I heard the words, pausing as I heard them, wondering whether I heard the words in my memory or heard them again in the black. It mattered not in the black. It felt the same. I heard the words and the memory and held them in my mind and remembered who I was.
A pinpoint of light stirred in the black. I saw it, then black, then black. I was tumbling again. I saw it, then saw it, then black. I saw it. The pinpoint of light stayed in my vision. It stayed, no longer shifting to black. I was still. The pinpoint of light in the dark moved, and I saw it and knew it for what it was: essence in the black.
There was light.
Light floated in the distance, essence light that soared toward me. Bursts of color flared, fireworks against the black, fading to darkness. I wondered if the colors were essence or simply a physiological reaction to the enveloping darkness. I wondered if they were the afterimages of essence I had seen, memory images of the colors of essence or levels of essence I couldn’t normally sense with light. The colors flashed and flared, then faded, and always the darkness returned, except the pinpoint of light remained, growing in the black
The pinpoint changed, became shape, first a circle, then an oval, then a line. The light became what it was: essence in the black, essence moving toward me, essence I recognized, the shape of a body signature, shifting from white to blue to evergreen. The body signature arrived at last or in an instant. I wasn’t sure which. I was sure of the body signature, though, and of the face that belonged to that signature and floated in front of me.
“Am I dead?” I asked Bergin Vize.
I had spent years as a Guild agent chasing Vize, elf terrorist and chronic adversary. I remembered that now. I had lost my abilities because of him—and he had lost his. He returned to Boston again and again, and each time I faced him and lost, until the last time. The last time he showed his face, he died in the destruction of a building. I watched him fall. I did not see him rise. No one found him. He was buried under tons of concrete and stone, the building he helped destroy, his tomb.
The face before me—Bergin Vize’s face—did not smile. “Not quite. Not yet.”
“I watched you die,” I said.
“It’s not important,” he said.
My mind cleared, a lifting of fog and confusion. I was floating in darkness with Bergin Vize. “I think it is. If you are dead, I’m hallucinating. If you’re alive, I need to kill you.”
He did smile then. “After all this time, you still see only two alternatives? This has always been about us but never between you and me.”
“Here we go again, Vize. Tell me how you want to save the world by destroying it,” I said.
He shook his head. “Not me. Maeve.”
Maeve. Of course, Maeve. She wanted to destroy the world. Vize did, too. Everybody wanted to destroy the world to make it something else. “I think she killed me. I think I’m dead. TirNaNog is gone, and I’m left with looking at you in the dark for eternity,” I said.
Vize stared, serene and patient. In the black, his body shimmering, essence forming the shape of him except his right side. Where his arm should have been was nothingness, the stain of the same darkness in my head manifesting itself on his arm. Something glittered in the darkness, though, down where his hand should have been. Something familiar. “Maeve has made a fatal error, Grey. She does not know I am here. She doesn’t know about this place. Even better, she does not believe it exists. There lies my final chance.”
“All right. I’ll play, Vize. Where am I then?” I asked.
His face shifted, the essence of him flickering and re-forming. “You know where we are. It’s a place and a thing and an idea. It is the same thing that’s been consuming us for the last three years. We are in the Gap. We are in the darkness that is nothing. We are here and not here.”
I reached up and grabbed him by the neck, felt his pulse beneath my grip. “How about this? Does this feel here? Want to rethink that nothing and not-here crap?”
He smiled, his face fading in and out of darkness. “Like to like, Grey. You are essence here, as am I. It matters not whether we are physical or ethereal. How many times have you tried to kill me, Grey? How many times have I tried to kill you?”
I shoved him. He drifted a few feet away. “What the hell are you talking about?”
Vize lifted his dark hand, the hand that wore the gold ring that had ended our fight and caused us to lose our abilities. His hand and arm had been consumed with the dark mass like my mind had been. The ring burned in the darkness that was his hand, a mote that glowed bright with life in the black. “Do you remember?” he asked.
“I remember enough. I lost my abilities because of that ring,” I said.
“Focus, Grey. Remember,” he said.
I had been trying to remember for three years what had happened the night I fought Vize. I had tracked him down to a nuclear power plant he was planning to blow up. We fought. He lost control of his ring, and we lost our abilities. “Stop saying that.”
“Do you know what a soul stone is?” he asked.
People made soul stones as safety measures. Split a piece of your body essence—or even a significant amount—bond it to a static object to create an essence ward, and, well, don’t die. Without the destruction of someone’s life force— what some called the soul—and its container—a body or a ward—a person could receive a fatal wound and live. All that needed to be done to save them was the uniting of the soul stone with the body. “Of course I do.”
“We made a soul stone, Grey. We made a soul stone together. We saved the world,” he said.
I frowned. “You and me? We made a soul stone? Not likely.”
Vize held his hand out, a glitter of essence in the darkness. “The ring, Grey. We remade the ring with a piece of our souls. It was the only way to stop her from killing us because we are the only ones who can stop her from killing everyone.”
I closed my eyes, but it didn’t matter. Vize registered in my sensing ability, his body signature adrift in the dark. If I was dead and the Christian hell existed, this would be it. I was going to pay for everything I had done by being taunted by Vize forever. That was what I got for destroying TirNaNog.
“TirNaNog is not gone. It is here, and it is not here,” he said.
I opened my eyes. “You can read minds. Great.”
“Focus, Grey. You can do the same with me,” he said.
I sighed, or at least thought I did, alone there in the dark with my nemesis gnawing at my mind. I didn’t want to focus. I didn’t want to think or remember. I wanted to be left alone. Drifting was a decent option for a change, especially if I was dead.
