It's All In Your Head: Part Seventeen

by sevenall

The spell wasn't finished. She stood by the waters edge. The strength and magic she had drawn from the lake flowed through her, bridging the gap between the earth and the sky. She heard her Other voice chanting in the Other language and the stars formed new patterns on the sky. The rune for fire. The rune for storm. Last of all, the rune for death. She screamed at them with her human voice, begging them to stop, she raged and wept, but the stars did not care.

There were two women working in the reception of the research center. One had a date for the night. She didn't really like him, but he was nice, he was funny and it was better than nothing. The other woman had three children. She had yelled at them in the morning. She thought she'd pick them up earlier this afternoon and they'd get pancakes or spaghetti.

One word and they were gone.

The guard at the parking lot had joined the Weight Watchers. Mostly he had done it to please his girlfriend. He didn't think she understood how much he liked eating.

Another word and he was gone.

The man in the middle of the second squad going down to secure the basement had gotten a gun slapped into his hand. He had no idea how to use it. He was a scientist.

The stars moved across the sky and the whole squad was gone.

There were so many of them. The majority wasn't armed, couldn't have used a gun if they'd had one. They were in the offices, passing through the lobby, going up and down in elevators. Some of them had no bodies and were submerged in liquid nitrogen.

She touched their minds and they were all gone.

It had to stop. She waded out into the lake. It was a fool's choice, but then she was a fool and had always been. The surface of the lake rippled in her wake, skewing the moon's reflection. Strong currents and undertows threatened her balance, but she kept walking. The water closed above her head and she kept walking.

Bridge. Connection. Hank had told her they needed another engineer and she hadn't listened. Hadn't listened while he told her about energy transfer; how Remy transferred kinetic charge to his cards, how Bishop absorbed and reflected energy pulses. She remembered Alison turning sound to light, phonons to photons, which no mathemathical formula could explain, and Brian in his lab in the basement of Braddock Manor. She had ruined his experiment, the psi-pulse of her greeting sending his delicate instruments off the limits.

Through murky water, Elizabeth saw her hands tear at a power point set in the wall. She saw, rather than felt, her nails break, but she had her treasure, a thickly insulated cable. She stripped off the insulation with her teeth and remaining nails. Then she closed her hand over the exposed wires and released the power contained in her.

Lightning struck. Her head exploded. The connection broke, a white magnesium flare, as the bridge burned itself out. She sank through the dark waters, a trail of air bubbles escaping from her nose and mouth.

--

It had slept. There had been such a tiny space to live in, lately, and there was no food. It had waited a long time for food. Now, there was water, at least. It drank, tried to stretch. There was more room than there had been.

--

The power was gone. The stars were just stars and she could feel her hands, she could feel her whole aching body, but she couldn't see. Not until Bishop switched on his Mag-Lite right in her face.

"Ouch!"

He wiped her face with something that had better not be his own hankie. She swatted at his hand, but it came back.

"You're hurt," he said.

"Not my blood," she said, at the same moment realising that it indeed was her own blood, running from her nose. She snuffled and the taste and smell of blood mixed with an acrid stench of ozone.

"We need to leave."

Bishop had a gift for pointing out the obvious.

"Up or down?"

"The fire alarms have gone off upstairs," he said, passing her the com unit. "Electrical fire, apparently."

"Oh."

"But the laser source has short-circuited. I've put a few shots into the machinery to make sure it is disabled. Can you walk?"

A body tried.

--

It wasn't possible to die of a nosebleed. Elizabeth had tried to tell Bishop so for the last hour. Contrary to her words, she had managed to bleed all over one of his borrowed shirts and one of Remy's. She was currently wearing Bishops' sweatpants and his t-shirt and he had wrapped both his anorak and a blanket around her, because she wouldn't stop shivering. It was chilly in the car. The heater was turned up as far as it would go, but Bishop was cold too, and taking all the heat out of the surrounding air. Not that he would admit to doing it.

They were both exhausted. He had had to carry her through the sewers, wading waist-deep through water and muck, while the building exploded over their heads. Fortunately, their car was on the part of the parking lot that was still standing and they had extracted cleanly. There was an aircraft hidden a few miles outside the town, but Bishop had driven around for a while to check if they were being tailed. During all that time, he hadn't said a word about what she had done.

She knew she ought to feel terrible, but all she could feel was heaviness and a dull ache. Her heart seemed to have shrunk and hardened, like a lump of dross that had been burnt out and discarded. Only small things got through to her; the wet stains on the cloth she pressed to her nose, the odour of rotten water from her own body and his, the smooth hum of the engine as Bishop speeded up.

"Was it real?" he asked her, suddenly.

Tough question, when he phrased it that way.

"She is dead, if that's what you're asking. I don't know if it was real. If the Age of Apocalypse was real, maybe this was, too."

He chewed on that for a while, staring at the road.

"It was good to see her again," he said at last. " Thank you, woman."

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