Chapter Two—The Second Sleep

“Why, Ms. Ingram,” I flatly intoned, “we simply have to stop meeting this way.”

“It took you guys a lot longer to navigate the old mining tunnels than I thought it would,” she quipped from her perch atop the hood of her jeep. She plucked a pair of gloves from her delicate hands and shoved them into the pockets of her heavy, winter coat. What I would have given to take those gloves. “Really, I thought we’d freeze out here waiting for you. Fortunately, we have the heat blasting in the jeep.” She canted her head to the side and smiled a saccharine smile at us. “Are you cold?”

She was clad in a heavy winter coat, earmuffs, a scarf and sunglasses. Me, I was in a tee shirt and jeans, and if I’m honest, surrendering sounded a whole hell of a lot better than freezing to death. “I’ll manage,” I said, teeth chattering, body trembling. “I’m just glad to see that you’re running an operation that can apprehend two escapees,” I said, trying to sound self-assured like she did, but my words were coming out all choppy due to the nature of my shaking. “It was a rather obvious mistake, sending one guard down. Even someone like me could overpower just one guy, Blanche, come on.”

“Lesson learned,” she said, sliding off the hood of the jeep, her boots crunching in the snow as he walked toward me. The wind whipped up behind her, tossing a flurry of snowflakes into the clear air. “We could have been friends, you and me,” she said. “I wanted to be your friend, Jane. But you never trusted me.”

“Gee, I wonder why.” I was going for snarky, cool, and confident. But I think I just came off as nervous and freezing. Blanche had more than enough men to take both Riley and me: there were easily two dozen, some in vehicles of their own, some lurking in a most intimidating fashion with batons in their hands or guns clearly holstered, spotting the side of the mount like a spray of acne across a teenager’s T-Zone.

“And Riley,” she said, turning her eyes on him. He managed, somehow, not to tremble. “What on earth are we going to do with you?” She stared at him a moment, and he remained silent, stoic, the very image of quiet strength and resistance. And it was in this silent standoff that Blanche seemed to make her decision. “Kill him.”

“What?” I shouted, and I could feel the adrenaline coursing through my system as my fight or flight response kicked in. The wind picked up once more, sending my curls to whip about my face, obscuring my vision.

Blanche’s goons took a few steps forward, in horrible unison. But I didn’t have to think very long before I knew what to do. I darted forward, putting myself bodily in between Riley and the people who would murder him. As soon as I did, Blanche held her fist in the air, the universal signal for I’m in charge, and I say freeze where you stand. And they froze.

“I won’t let you sacrifice yourself for me, Jane,” Riley said, only loud enough for me to hear. But I didn’t move. I didn’t even turn to look at him. I just kept my eyes locked on Blanche Ingram, beautiful Blanche with the blond hair and the dark soul.

“Get out of the way, Jane,” She shouted, her voice carried to me on the wings of the wind. “He made his choice—I can’t have him helping you anymore. It’s too important.” She turned her eyes on Riley then, sighing through prettily flared nostrils. “I’m sorry—I don’t know what else to do.”

My eyes darted around, but his sisters were nowhere to be seen, and I realized now that this was a strategic move on Blanche’s part: of course she risked losing their allegiance if she decided to single-handedly order the cold-blooded execution of their one and only brother. So the evil genius had told them to stay behind, and she could easily manufacture some kind of lie to assuage them. I had to stand my ground.

“You need me, Blanche,” I shouted to her. “I’m the bait, remember?”

“Get out of the way, Jane.”

“You want Riley?” I said, hoping I sounded at least marginally braver than I felt. “You’ll have to go through me.”

A few of her goons lifted their weapons, and there was a smattering of guns in the front row. They raised them, and some of them didn’t seem terribly confident in the prospect of firing, while others stared coolly down the barrel at their target. Riley. Me. Us.

“This doesn’t have to escalate, Jane,” Blanche said, one hand held out in front of her. “Just step aside, surrender, and I promise you won’t be hurt.”

“You want me?” I said at last, “Then you have to take Riley with me. He doesn’t leave my side—”

“Jane, what are you doing?” he hissed. “When Kain gets here, they’ll just kill us both.”

He was right, of course. But I couldn’t think of anything else. We couldn’t turn tail and run; we’d freeze on the side of this mountain. And if I stepped away from Riley, he’d be shot on sight. At least if I persuaded them to take him with me, it would buy us some extra time to think of something else.

“Both of us!” I repeated. “You take both of us, or you shoot us both. That’s it. That’s the deal.”

“This is really the hill you want to die on, Jane?” She said, her smile contorting into a twisted grimace. “You want to save Riley Sinjin? You don’t even like him!”

I ventured a glance over my shoulder at Riley, and his jaw was a set, unwavering line, his eyes boring holes into Blanche Ingram’s forehead. I did like Riley; I liked him very much indeed. And he adored me, or so he said. No, he did—he’d risked everything to get me out of the stronghold. And he was prepared to lose everything for me. Some friend I’d be if I let him die here on this mountain.

“It’s not a negotiation,” I said, fear creeping up along my spine as the men with guns inched ever toward me. “We both go with you, or you kill your bait to get to Riley.”

That was the tableau in which we were frozen: Blanche with her hand up, ready to give the signal to take us out, men with pistols staring nervously through the sight, lining up the shot, breathing low and steady; and me. There I stood, hands on hips, shaking in the snow, when suddenly everyone around me began dropping to the ground.

It happened all at once: they were all there, standing their ground, and then they hit the snow in one expertly choreographed moment. It was like someone had turned off the light in a too-bright room, and now everything was dark.

I stood in the detritus of bodies, blinking, not immediately understanding what I was seeing. Were they dead? And why had I been spared?

When it was clear that my enemies would not immediately rise to my feet, I turned around to see that Riley had also been rendered unconscious. I moved swiftly to his side and dropped to my knees in the snow beside him. “Riley?” I said, gently lifting his head into my lap and administering a few sharp slaps to his cheek in an attempt to rouse him. “Riley, wake up!”

But it was to no avail—he was out cold. I pressed my hand to his chest and felt the steady rhythm of his pulse, heard the quiet hum of his breathing. But I knew I had to get him out of the snow so that he didn’t get frostbite.

I carefully lowered his head to the ground before getting up and advancing slowly on Blanche, nudging her gently with the toe of my shoe to make sure that she was, in fact, unconscious: she was. Then I opened the back seat to the jeep and was hit by a pleasant blast of warm air.

I returned quickly to Riley’s side, and crouched down, hooking my hands underneath his armpits, and I dragged him toward the jeep.

I had severely underestimated how heavy he would be and soon found myself panting and grunting with the struggle of getting him to the jeep. I was sweating, steam rose from my skin, by the time I got him to the front tires of the jeep. But I hadn’t considered what I would do to actually get him comfortably up onto the back seat. I paused, letting him lay there while I braced myself with my hands on my knees, breathing deeply. I wasn’t confident I could get him in there at all, and then he would freeze there in the snow, and it would be all my fault. I felt the sting of tears around the edges of my eyes, and I sniffled, standing upright and refusing to let myself be so weak as to cry in this moment. “Get it together, Jane,” I muttered to myself, and hooked my hands under his arms once more.

I stood up slowly, and up he came with me. I never in my life imagined any single human being could weigh so much, and I found myself wondering—as I tried to maneuver poor Riley into the back seat of the jeep—how much more Kaz weighed.

And it was as though my mind caught his in that moment, because I heard him clear as day, singing inside my skull: Jane.

“Kaz?” I said aloud.

Jane. I’m coming.

I hoisted Riley up with all my might, turned, and laid him face first on the back seat. Then I put his feet up one at a time, and thought it was rather a job well done. I lingered near the open door to the back seat in order to make sure that Riley continued to breathe and paid very little mind to the people who had, only minutes earlier, been ready to kill me and my friend—they could freeze in the snow, for all I cared.

And after about a half hour or so, I hear the hum of engines in the distance, and Kaz’s voice in my mind, growing louder, louder. Jane. I’m coming. Stay where you are, Jane. As though I knew of anywhere else I could go.

I caught the sight of a few vehicles approaching in the Jeep’s side view mirror, and I took a few tentative steps away from Riley and the relative warmth of the back seat bubble. And I recognized them—the silver self-driving cars that had first taken me to Thornfield. Three of them sped toward me and drew to a halt some fifty feet off.

The door to one opened, and a broad figure emerged. Never before had any of the aliens looked so, well, alien. He was wearing a legitimate space suit that snugly fit his finely muscled body and ended in gloves, boots, and a helmet with a reflective visor that obscured his face. But I didn’t need to see his face to know it was him.

Jane.

And I ran toward him. “Kaz!” I shouted, and my legs couldn’t close the distance between us fast enough. He began to run to me as well, and when we met, he caught me clumsily in his arms and gripped me tight.

He parted from me for only a moment to remove his helmet, and the sight of him startled me. For the skin across his forehead was badly disfigured, and those beautiful, limpid blue eyes were milky and dim. “Kaz,” I whispered, holding his face between my hands, trying to get him to look me in the eye, but his gaze never caught. He could not see.

“Are you all right, my love?” he asked, holding me steadily by the shoulders.

“Yes, I’m fine,” I assured him. “But what happened to you?”

“We haven’t got time,” he said, “we have to get you out of here before they wake up.”

“Wait, we need to get Riley,” I said, and I could feel a flash of jealousy in the air between us. “He helped me,” I added. “He’s my friend.”

“He’s one of them,” Kaz countered, and I could barely tear my eyes away from the angry red scar that fanned across his beautiful face like flames.

Yes—it had been flames. These were burns.

“Please,” I begged, “if we don’t take him with us, they’ll kill him.”

“Very well,” he acquiesced. “Lead me to him.” I took Kaz by the hand and led him toward the jeep.

“Watch your step,” I said as we navigated over a little snowbank caused by the dig of the jeep’s tires. I led Kaz forward and placed his hand on Riley’s leg. And of course, Kaz simply turned toward Riley and foisted him easily over one of his shoulders.

I took him by the hand, and he carried Riley like a pack mule. Together, the three of us wended our way back to Kaz’s self-driving car. I had a million questions, but they could wait, because when I glanced over my shoulder, I saw the first of the guards get groggily to his feet.

~ * ~

The interior of the car was spacious and comfortable, even larger than the one that had originally brought me to Thornfield. It boasted dark velveteen seats in an enticing shade of crimson; the carpet at our feet was black, and so was the material overhead, save for the rectangle that was carved out for a moon roof. There was a mini bar on one side of the compartment, with decanters full of warm brown liquid, and I had to wonder if this particular self-driving car wasn’t designed by an aging mafioso. Kaz put Riley on the back seat, and I chose to sit next to Riley, to keep him steady, so that his head didn’t flop painfully to the side when we hit a bump in the road.

“I’m sorry,” Kaz said after a long stretch of silence. I looked out the window and saw the other 2 self-driving cars driving in tandem with this one. Of course Kaz hadn’t come alone. “I’m sorry it took me so long to get to you.”

“You don’t have to be sorry,” I murmured, head bent. I felt the heat of shame rise into my cheeks—what had happened since we had parted? And is it possible that I could have prevented it? “I left you, after all.”

“And with good reason,” Kaz insisted. It was difficult to look at him—not because of the angry scar that marred his skin like a blight. No, he was still so beautiful. But because I wondered if I couldn’t have changed things for him somehow. But I forced myself to look up at him, look into those eyes I so loved that had gone dim, to face it.

“I should be the one apologizing to you,” I said. “I never should have left. I should have stayed—listened—”

“No, don’t do that,” Kaz said with a shake of his head. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

I felt a swell of emotion rise from my gut, up into my throat, and I tried to swallow it down, but everything started to go fuzzy around the edges. I blinked, and a few rogue tears dripped down and slid to my jaw. “What happened to you, Kaz?”

He leaned back in his seat and allowed his eyes to come to a close, his hands folded neatly in his lap. He was such an exquisite creature, the dark onyx of his horns shining in the afternoon light that seeped in through the car windows. We were sitting across from one another, like we were in a fancy limousine. Me, I had my hand on Riley’s shoulder to steady him as the car skipped and jumped along the unpaved mountain road, but I had my eyes locked on Kaz. My heart fluttered a little in my chest; how I’d missed him.

“She came into my room one night,” and he didn’t have to say her name to let me know that he meant his wretched wife who had, poor thing, gone mad in the cold of this foreign planet. “I don’t know who was supposed to be with her, but she’d been left unattended, and she was…she was cold.” He proffered a sad smile, lifting and dropping his shoulders in a shrug. “I could hear her in my mind, even before I awakened. Before…everything. She was calling out to me, begging me to hold her, to keep her warm. It was late, so late it was almost early—the time of night where the twilight starts to shine a royal blue with the coming of the morning sun. I don’t know why I remember that…” Another shrug. The car hit a divot and it jostled me to attention as I tried to keep Riley sitting in his place I reached across the expanse of his torso and fastened him in with a seat belt, but still felt obliged to make sure that he didn’t hurt his neck, what with all the unconsciousness.

“Anyway, she climbed into my bed with me, and I had been dreaming…” he hesitated, rubbing his eyes with his thumb and index finger. “I had been dreaming of you, Jane. And I turned toward her in the night and let my arm come across her, and I held her close, and everything got so warm, Jane. Everything was finally so warm.” He swallowed hard, listened for a time to the sounds of the road, and exhaled a sharp sigh through his nose. “When I finally realized what was going on, the entire room was engulfed in flames. And she was just lying there, contentedly beside me. When I got up in a panic and tried to get us both safely out of the house, she held on, she fought me. She wanted us to stay.” His expression was pained, and I could only guess at what a horrible memory this was to recount. “She wanted us to stay where it was warm.”

“Kaz,” I urged gently after a time, “it’s ok.”

“And then…she held onto me. I wanted to get out, we fought, we wrestled. I got her out into the hallway, to the landing, and she ran off, she got away. With all the smoke, I didn’t see which way she’d gone. So I…I ran toward the staircase to the nursery. I needed to get to the boys, I needed to get them out—”

He cracked wide open then, leaning forward in his seat so that his elbows rested on his knees, and he buried his face in his hands, his shoulders shaking with the force of the sobs that wracked him to the core. I abandoned Riley then, crawled across the space between us and sat by Kaz’s side, sliding my hands across the slope of his back.

But he had to tell the story; he’d held it in him so long, he needed to give it to someone who could shoulder some of the burden of it with him. “I lost them, Jane,” he wailed. “My sons, my beautiful sons…” I kissed his shoulder through the strange fabric of the suit he wore. He caught his breath, and I felt more hot salt tears on my own skin now. But this was not my time to mourn those precious children; now was his time to speak.

“I tried to go to them, but…There was a beam that fell from the ceiling, and struck me, here.” He gestured vaguely to the scar that had deprived him of his sight. “And it knocked me unconscious for a moment, I think. And I think I would have just let myself die there, except that I heard your voice in my mind, Jane.” He turned as though he would look at me, but his gaze landed softly somewhere around my forehead. “You were calling out to me for help. Your heart was pulsing with an ache in the shape of my name, and I got up and got myself out of that house.”

“What about Sarah?” I asked. “And Alice? What about the rest of the staff?”

“Sarah and Alice are fine. We lost a few members of the staff, and the house is a ruin. Completely unsalvageable.” He swallowed hard and leaned back again. “But I never heard their voices—the boys.” He pursed his lips like he was unable to say their names. “If they had been in pain, I would have been able to feel it. But they must have…must have died from the…smoke.” He squeezed his eyes shut again, and it broke my heart to see such agony. The profound loss of a father; I wished I could give my life to bring those two boys back.

“I’m so, so sorry for this unspeakable loss,” I whispered, and he slid an arm around my shoulders and held me close. “When you lose a spouse, you are a widow; when you lose your parents, you’re an orphan. But there isn’t a word for when you lose your children. I guess that’s just too terrible to even get a word.”

He squeezed me with one strong hand. “We have a word for it,” he said, his tone low, contemplative. “But we never use it, because we are afraid to invoke it, like a curse.”

I heard a groan emanate from Riley in the seat opposite; he was beginning to lift his head where he sat, instead of letting it flop to the side. He grimaced, like he had a headache, and blinked himself back into consciousness for the second time that day.

“Where am I?” he demanded, groggy, like he was just coming out of an anesthetic haze. He brought his hands to his face and gave it a vigorous rub, sucking air in through his fingers. That done, he blinked the sleep away.

“We’re on the road,” I said vaguely, realizing I had no idea as to where we were going. Not to Thornfield, obviously; it was a burnt ruin full of horrible memories. “Where are we going?” I asked Kaz.

Riley looked to Kaz for the answer too, and I could read the double-take expression of shock as plainly as if he’d made an exclamation aloud. Apparently, Kaz could read it to. “Don’t worry, Mr. Sinjin,” Kaz said, lifting a hand to wipe away any remaining tears with his knuckles. “I’m quite all right, though I appreciate your concern.”

Suddenly aware of my closeness to Kaz in front of Riley, I consciously uncoiled myself, but all that did was entice Kaz to take my hand; and I let him. It felt so good, so natural and easy, and I felt myself relax a little in the sturdy echo of his presence. “We’re going to a small Ivaldan enclave a few hours from here.”

“An enclave?” Riley asked.

“Yes,” said Kaz. “The human resistance is making itself known to us and our leadership, and we have begun to shift gears.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“We don’t know what to expect,” Kaz directed his dim gaze over to Riley. “But perhaps you can help us with that.”

“Enough people have turned traitor in this little story,” Riley grumbled. “I don’t need to add my name to the list.”

“It’s a little late for that, Riley,” I asserted, my tone a little sharper than I’d intended. I sighed. “Look, I appreciate you helping me. I’ll never forget that. But you know you can’t go back to the resistance. You knew that as soon as you walked me out of that shoddy excuse for a prison.” I paused, canting my head to the side as I tried to read Riley’s nonplussed expression. “Didn’t you?”

“I wasn’t thinking,” he said, tugging at the seat belt as he leaned back, trying to get comfortable in Kazimir Kain’s presence. I saw Riley do that odd body negotiation where he wanted to take up as much space as he was allotted without encroaching on Kaz. Kaz didn’t seem to care; he had closed his eyes again, though his body was full of tension at my side.

“Well, either way,” I said after an awkward lull, “You’re here, now. You want us to just let you out by the side of the road, or do you maybe want to help stop a war?”

Riley couldn’t help but hook up the corner of his mouth in a grin. “Well, when you put it that way…”

“Good,” I said, and turned to look at Kaz. The compartment of the car was sweltering hot, and I realized that the strange looking space suit had been primarily about regulating Kazimir’s body temperature, which may not have functioned adequately at those freezing temperatures on the mountain side.

“We’ll discuss it further when we get to the house.”

Kaz had said the last word, so Riley and I both turned to peer out at the shifting landscape outside the car windows. I knew that he had questions—so did I—but he kept his lips pursed tight as he craned his neck to look at the other cars in our coterie.

“What is it like?” I said, my tone low as I gave Kaz’s hand a squeeze. “Your eyes, I mean. What is it like?”

“To be blind?” He said, smiling without mirth. “It’s…” He lifted his free hand to brush his fingertips over the peaks and valleys of his marred flesh. “It isn’t what I would have expected. Everything is a dim grey, as though I’m constantly trying to navigate my way out of an intense fog. I thought it would be…black, like when my eyes were closed. But it isn’t like that at all.” He turned, his eyes searching for mine but not finding them. “But my mind…The same power that allows me to speak telepathically with my own kind—and with you a little, Jane—this also helps me to navigate.”

“What,” I said, “like sonar?”

Kaz full-body laughed then, jerking Riley’s attention to us. “Sonar? No, not like that. More that I have a vague impression of where you because I can sense the output of your mind even from great distances.” Kaz canted his chin in Riley’s general direction. “Now, this one, I cannot read. He may as well be part of the decor.”

Riley seemed contented to be overlooked and stayed silent. So did Kaz and I, as we drove toward an unknown future, the mountain landscapes receding and flattening out as we sped past.