Chapter 292: Smoke From Tomorrow.
We stood in the dark room, neither of us able to see a thing. The air was cool and still, the same heavy quiet the room always carried. Boards under our feet gave the softest complaint when either of us shifted weight.
"Do you think it has to be this room?" I asked.
"I don’t know." A small laugh came out of her, close by—soft, almost private. "It’s just what my mother taught me. Bring your hands."
"And why the hands?"
I’d gone into the past without her this morning. She’d been asleep on my chest with her hair across my face and I’d walked into a forest and watched my father lift a newborn. I still hadn’t told her that.
"I don’t know that either." Her voice moved as she found her position. "It’s the only way I’ve ever done it. The first time I went, my mother was holding my hands. I was four. They were small enough that she could hold both in one of hers."
I found her hands in the dark. Our fingers went through each other and locked—warm, slightly damp, the familiar pressure of her grip answering mine.
"I think it’s just contact," I said. "Not hands. Contact."
"Yeah." She didn’t fight it. "You might be right."
Eleanor had used a bathtub. Warm water. Venna used a dark room and a chair. Different buildings, different centuries, the same result.
It isn’t the room. It was never the room. The person is the libra.
"Okay." She let go of my fingers. The loss of contact was sudden. "Let’s try hugging."
We moved into each other and I put my arms all the way around her. Her body fitted against mine the way it had on the counter, the way it had in the bed—familiar now, complete. The clean scent of her skin cut through the dust of the room.
"You smell good."
"Mhm. Hold me tight," she said into my shoulder. "Whatever happens. Don’t let go of me."
I tightened, and she tightened, and I understood the hands then. It wasn’t ceremony. Losing contact was the way out. Her mother had held her small hands because a four-year-old lets go of things.
"Ready?" she asked.
"Yes. You?"
"Close your eyes."
I closed them into a second darkness underneath the first. Absolute. No edges.
And the dizziness came immediately.
My consciousness staggered inside my own skull, tipped, and started sliding somewhere. It hadn’t felt like this with Eleanor. It hadn’t felt like this the first time with Venna, or the second. Both of those had been a shift, a weight moving. This was a fall—long, directionless, the floor disappearing under the idea of standing.
"Bram." Her voice arrived from somewhere close and somewhere very far at the same time. "Hold me tighter."
I felt her slipping. Not her body—her body was against mine in the real room, solid, warm. Something else was coming loose out here in the dark between. A thin, continuous thread of presence beginning to fray.
"Don’t let go. We’re going up."
My arms closed on her in the world we’d left behind, and I felt her arms do the same to me. The pressure was mutual, desperate, the only fixed point either of us had.
"What’s happening?" I said. "Has this ever happened before?"
"No." Her breath was quick against my neck. "It’s taking us. I’m not steering. It’s taking us where it wants."
We rose.
I felt it in my stomach—that long climbing pull, her weight against me the only fixed point in a place with no floor. The dark itself seemed to thin and stretch.
Then my nose caught smoke.
"Do you smell that?"
"Yes."
"I think this thing is a collection of clues." I said it into the dark, into her hair. "Every trip. Pieces we’re supposed to put together ourselves. It isn’t answering questions, it’s handing us fragments—"
Whatever was carrying us stopped.
We came down into smoke.
Thick, black, choking, the whole world reduced to a metre in every direction. The heat of it pressed against my face. Venna’s hand found mine and held it hard enough that the bones of her fingers registered against mine.
She coughed—raw, involuntary.
And then I felt it go into my own throat, hot and gritty, and my chest tried to close around it. The smoke tasted of burning plastic and something sweeter underneath, something organic that shouldn’t have been burning.
No.
That was wrong. That was completely wrong. Nothing in the libra touched us. A butterfly had passed straight through my arm in the forest this morning. Riya’s killer had walked through my body on the stairs and I’d felt nothing at all. This smoke had weight. It had temperature. It wanted inside.
Outside the smoke I could hear it now. Metal on metal, something like blades. Gunfire, sustained, in bursts that rolled across the distance and came back thinner.
I got an arm around Venna and forced us both forward, one hand out, until the smoke thinned and let us through.
And I knew where we were standing.
The CGI building rose ahead of us with half its face gone. The upper floors had collapsed inward. Black smoke poured from the wounds in continuous columns. Glass and stone littered the road in every direction. Fires burned in isolated pockets, throwing hard orange light across bodies and debris.
The two of us went down onto our knees on the road, both of us coughing, and I looked up at a capital that was burning end to end. The sky itself was the wrong colour—bruised, heavy, lit from below by a hundred separate fires.
"What is this?" I got out. The words scraped.
People were down in the street. Not lying still, most of them. Struggling, dragging themselves, fighting something with everything they had left, and I couldn’t see what any of them were fighting. There was nothing there. They were being torn apart by nothing at all—limbs jerking, bodies folding in on themselves, blood appearing on skin that nothing visible had touched.
When is this. How does this connect to us.
My eyes started sorting shapes out of the smoke and the bodies.
Carrise. Down and lifeless, her dark hair spread across the asphalt like spilled ink.
Sophia Vale, ten metres from her. Lifeless. One arm flung out toward nothing.
Monica Veyron. Lifeless. The elegant line of her body broken in two places.
Mercury, on her side beside a burning car, one arm thrown out, the flames already reaching the edge of her coat.
Venna. Lifeless. My hand was locked around hers and she was fifteen metres away from me on the ground with her eyes open, blue hair fanned across the dirt, staring at a sky that no longer existed.
Celestine was still moving. Barely. Dragging herself with one arm through the debris with the other one wrong, the joint bent in a direction joints were never meant to bend. Her face was blood and determination and nothing else.
What is this. Where has it brought us.
I dragged in another breath that did nothing for me at all. Beside me Venna had gone down onto her elbow, the smoke taking her faster than it was taking me. Her coughs were shorter now, wetter.
And then I found Sherry.
She was in the middle of the road. Not moving. Her body lay at an angle that looked almost peaceful until you saw the way her head rested.
And beside her, on his hands and knees, coughing hard enough to break something, was me. Same face. Same build. Blood at the corner of the mouth. The double of me looked up once, eyes streaming, and I watched myself fail to stand.
Who does this. Who inside these walls has the power to do all of this at once.
My eyes were failing. The smoke was winning. I kept them moving anyway.
"Bram, let go." Venna’s voice, thin, right beside me. "Let go. Please."
I couldn’t.
I was sick of visions that closed the door one second before the answer. My father’s house had done it. Riya’s staircase had done it. Not this time.
I pushed my eyes through the smoke and found somebody standing.
One figure, upright in all of it, unhurried, not fighting and not fleeing. The fires threw his shadow long across the bodies. He walked between them as if the street belonged to him and always had.
I made my way up to the face.
A face I knew. The same face I’d stood in front of in an elevator with no heartbeat in his chest.
Only the hair was different.
Dyed purple. Bright, deliberate, completely out of place in the ruin.
Mute.
"BRAM."
I opened my eyes into the dark room and folded over coughing, real smoke coming out of real lungs. The taste of it was still in my mouth—hot, gritty, wrong. My chest heaved. Tears streamed from the smoke and from the effort of clearing it.
We were still holding each other. Her arms locked around my back, mine locked around hers. The dark room was cool and quiet and completely unchanged. The boards under our feet hadn’t moved.
"What was that?" I got it out between coughs. "Venna. Why did the libra take us there?"
She was breathing hard against my chest, and it took her a moment. Her whole body was shaking in small, continuous tremors.
"That was the future." Her hands hadn’t loosened on my back. The fingers dug in as if the only way to stay was to hold harder. "And I don’t think the libra took us anywhere."
She lifted her head. In the complete dark I couldn’t see her face, but I felt the angle of it, the way her forehead found my jaw.
"You took me there, Bram."
What?