Dinner that night was a subdued affair, despite the fact that it was excellent—I guess living primarily off whatever fish he could catch in the ocean beyond his villa had given Mo plenty of time to practice his piscine-related culinary skills. Tasty fish curry aside, though, the conversation about the Cyn—and the nature of his hate—was fresh in everyone’s minds, which tended to put a damper on their appetites.
Except for Sho. The discovery that our enemy was a member of a long-lost species even more powerful—and more dangerous—than we might have imagined notwithstanding, nobody ate like a Wulf adolescent.
After we’d finished up our meal and night began to fall, Mo went off to pray, Jane went off to prowl the grounds, Sho went . . . somewhere, I’m really not sure, and I stayed right at the big dining room table, having set up an acetylene torch on the fancy inlaid wood in front of me, terribly out of place among the finery and the delicate decorations. I stared into its flame for a moment, the only light source in the room other than the glow of Mo’s monitors and the moonlight falling from the windows.
Regardless of the fact that we had this Cyn trapped on Valkyrie Rock, where there was one zealot, there were more. That sort of focused hate didn’t just spring fully formed from the void; there was a belief out there, a dangerous one, and this particular Cyn was only a . . . a symptom of it. For all we knew, the whole damned race believed like he did. If I was going to learn to take on more of his kind, I was going to have to learn how to manipulate energy, just like they did. That was . . . that was just a fact.
I’d proven I could do it, back on Valkyrie Rock—I’d shifted the angle of his attack, just a little, but enough. Now I just needed to learn to do it without melting my brain. And, as Jane had taught me, the only way to get better at a thing was practice.
I reached out with my telekinesis, and tried to lift the flame free of the torch.
Ouch.
It felt as though I were grasping the fire with my bare hands, thrusting fingers deep into the flame, except it was my mind that was burning, not my palms. I growled soundlessly, snorted—hopefully not smoke—and tried again.
Ouch.
The goddamned fire didn’t even budge before I had to withdraw my “touch.” It might have been wiser to start with something less . . . energetic—a candle flame, rather than a welding torch—but I was afraid that I’d simply crush the wick rather than actually manipulate the fire. Plus, plunge into the deep end and all that. I’d shifted the flight path of a ball of primal energy made up of . . . whatever the hell the Cyn was actually made up of, or summoned to his being, or whatever: I could do this. I could do a simple torch flame if I only—
Ooouchgoddammit.
Dejected, I threw myself back into my chair—I had been leaning over the welding torch, like I was trying to will it into submission with body language—and glared at the hissing finger of flame, completely unaffected by my efforts.
“It is good to try.” I looked up; Mo had returned from his prayers, was watching me fail with something almost like amusement on his craggy face. “But do not try so hard you convince yourself what you are learning to do cannot be done.”
“I know it can be done; I’ve done it,” I growled, putting my hands on either side of the torch as I prepared to try again. “That’s the problem. I know it can be done—I just have no idea how I actually did it.” I tried again, trying to focus on the light from the flame, rather than the flame itself; pictured my teke not as hands, like I usually did, but as a cool wind, lifting the flame up, raising it off the flow of gas and floating it—
Ouch!
At least this time the flame had bobbed off its nozzle, just for a moment. I think.
I stuck my tongue out at the welding torch, then looked back to Mo, giving my “burns” a little time to cool off. “How were your prayers?” I asked politely.
“Good, thank you,” he said, pulling up a bench beside me—the metal creaked under his weight, the furniture designed for several members of the Reetha aristocracy rather than a single, massive Mahren soldier. “I always find it calming, praying whilst looking out at the ocean. Such a large thing, one that makes me feel so small beside it.”
“You said earlier—after we looked at the video, after you saw the . . . thing . . . that we’ve been facing—you said you didn’t believe, not today. But you still pray.”
He nodded. “Just because I may not believe today, little one, does not mean that Allah does not believe in me. I pray for guidance, so that I may help you find your path. If that guidance comes, it will be because I prayed—either through the will of Allah or through my own.” He nodded at the torch flame. “Imagine your mind is coated in something that makes it fireproof—as if the flame is raging in, say, Scheherazade’s interior, where nothing can actually stay on fire for long.”
I tried that; it actually worked, a little. That is, I managed to visibly pull the flame off the nozzle of the torch before—
Ouch ouch ouch ouch—
—I had to drop it, like a match that had burnt down to my fingertips. Mo reached over and shut off the torch for a moment, letting it cool. “You’re trying because you want an end result,” he suggested. “But wanting a thing is not enough to make it so. You need to try because you can, and that is all. In the early days after the pulse, as we realized what was becoming of the next generation—after Jane and I finally returned to the Justified, after our years in the wilderness—training them in their gifts was as much about intuition and guesswork as it was about control.”
“She never talks about that time,” I told him, taking a drink of water so that I could measure my words carefully—if I wanted to know more about Jane’s past, here was a golden opportunity, but I also didn’t want to trick Mo into saying something Jane wouldn’t want him to say, either. “It’s like, in her mind, the Justified have always been what they are today.”
“Jane does not like to think about the past. And for good reason. There are monsters there, for her.”
“There are monsters today, too. We’ve got one locked up on an asteroid.”
“Forgive me; I misspoke. The monsters in the years before and after the pulse—the monsters in Jane’s memory—are not just those that have pursued her. Some of them are her, as well. I was with her, on the mission to set off the weapon that became such a great curse upon our galaxy. I was with her afterward, as well, when we found ourselves stuck on an enemy world, when all advanced technology ground to a halt. A dozen operatives went on that mission. Only Jane and I remained when we were finally able to get off that world, three years later. The things we had to do, to survive that chaos; many of them were not . . . pleasant.”
“So is that . . .” I sighed, and threw caution to the winds. “That’s one of the things she doesn’t talk about. She does what she does now, finding kids like Sho, kids like me. But obviously that’s not what she did before the pulse, because that wasn’t a thing that needed doing—there were no kids like us, not back then. Setting off the weapon, infiltrating enemy territory to do so—is that what you guys did?”
He nodded. “That’s what we did, for the most part; that’s even how Jane and I met. I was a different man back then. Angrier, more . . . assertive in my beliefs of right and wrong. I ran counter-ops for the Justified, small squads with a great deal of latitude, put together to neutralize threats before they could fully coalesce against us. I recruited Jane right out of one of those threats, one of the sects preparing to harm us, though they themselves did not know that’s what they were doing. I used her to destroy them. More accurately, to make them destroy themselves. I turned her against her own people, for the greater good. What I thought was the greater good.” He had been staring into the middle distance as he spoke; now he shifted his gaze to me and lifted a rocky eyebrow. “I take it you did not know any of this.”
Mutely, I shook my head.
“What we did, what I did, was necessary—I still believe that—but it was also . . . very cruel.” He reached over and triggered the torch again, stared into the flame. “That was part of why I left your sect, despite my belief that they remain the best hope for saving this galaxy. After the pulse, I knew they needed to exist, that if anyone could respond to the threat that had been unleashed, it would be those who unleashed it: but I also knew that I was no longer the man to ensure that existence.
“Jane felt similarly, I believe, but she still thought she owed something, despite what joining the Justified had cost her, initially. So rather than leave when her mentor did, she soothed her conscience by taking on a different duty instead: rescuing children, many of them in even worse situations than she had been when I found her. Penance, penitence, protecting the innocent from the harsh galaxy around them.”
“Well,” I shrugged, turning back to the candle flame, “that explains why someone who doesn’t actually seem to like children very much volunteers to work with them.” I closed my eyes—felt with the edges of my teke instead, until I surrounded the candle flame. Lifted. I could feel it come up, blissfully pain-free for a moment, then—
Ouch.
I opened my eyes again, glared at the flame. Mo laughed, softly; I transferred the glare to him. “If this galaxy is so harsh,” I asked him, “why do you believe at all? Why even try? Why look for God, if He’s the one responsible for this mess we’re in in the first place?”
“I do not have to try to believe in order to have faith, Esa,” he told me. “Living beings—even beings like the Cyn that hunts you—are hardwired to believe in something, whether that might be religion, reason, an ideology. Belief is simply what we do. Yet that same need for faith—that same desire to have our beliefs proven out, to have others share them—is what created the sect wars in the first place.”
“ ‘For me to be right, that means someone else must be wrong.’ ”
“ ‘And I must convert that person to my way of thinking, by the sword, if necessary, because believing differently than me makes them a threat, somehow.’ Exactly. I think there must be another way; there must be a reason we want to believe so badly, a reason we were given this . . . blessing that we turned into an excuse to indulge our baser instincts. Something other than our reach exceeding our grasp. Jane thinks it’s all just nonsense, an indulgence—that thinking creatures invented belief purely as a way to justify our deep-seated need to dominate, to kill. I have to believe in better angels than that.”
“You don’t think we need to fight?”
“Doesn’t the mere existence of the Golden Age prove that we do not?”
“Yet you still think we should fight, against those who would harm others.”
He nodded again. “Because there are those who, whether because of who they are or what they have done, will never give up their cause to dominate and control others. Whether they are doing so because of belief or something else—does it really matter, in the end? Does faith allow evil people to do evil without fearing retribution, because if their god is with them, their every action must be right? Or would evil people always have done evil, and merely use faith to condone their actions simply because it is near at hand?”
He shook his head. “I say a killer will always kill, no matter if they do it for a flag or a coin or a benediction from a distant god. Evil will always be evil; it is those who would do good that must constantly examine their actions, to make sure that what they are doing is truly taking the nobler path.”
Still listening to Mo’s words, I reached out fast to the flame; tried to trick it into thinking I wasn’t going to grab it again. Yes, I was that desperate. I managed to tear it off the nozzle of the torch, but the motion was too much for the dancing flame, and it snuffed out. I sighed, and relit the damn thing. “So that’s why you left the Justified. Because you were no longer walking a noble path.”
He nodded. “Their cause was still noble. But I was not.”
“And now you . . . what? Seek isolation, seek atonement? How can you atone if there’s no one around for you to help?”
He smiled. “You found me, didn’t you?”
“Because Jane knew where to look.”
“I seek the voice of Allah, little one. I believe when I can truly hear Him in my heart, then He will tell me what I am meant to do next.”
“And if you never hear from him again?”
“Then that, also, is His will, and I will be called to judgment to account for all that I have done, right or wrong, good or bad.”
“And in the meantime, you just . . . wait?”
“I hunt, and I fish, and I think. I spend my evenings on the balconies or out on the deck”—he nodded at the windows—“talking to old friends.”
“But . . . you’re all alone here.”
He shrugged. “Well, most of my friends are dead. Don’t worry—they don’t usually talk back.” He tapped the side of his head. “Just up here. Also, Esa?”
“Yes?”
He nodded, at the flame of the torch. Which was hovering just a few inches from the nozzle.
I’d done it.
As soon as I realized I’d done it, of course, it scorched the shit out of me.
Ouch. Fuck!