Chapter Eleven

In my dream, she was standing near the ocean, the hem of her long purple dress fluttering in the wind, her raven hair falling down her bare back.

"Deanna…"

When finally she spun around to look at me, her eyes were dark and full of resentment.

"Did you hear me?"

"Why did you let me go, Beverly?"

I shook my head in bewilderment. "I didn't have a choice."

She shook her head slowly, her eyes searching my very soul. "It's very convenient to say that we didn't have a choice, when really we just want to excuse ourselves for taking the easy way out. Look at you. Look at what you've become."

At first, I didn't understand what she meant, when she lowered her gaze and gestured to me impatiently. Quizzically I looked down, and I saw that I was dressed in an Apocrypha racing uniform, with black racing gloves on my hands. The uniform was stained with deep red blood, sticky and newly shed.

"You're one of them now, Beverly. You're a violent predator, fixated on defending your futile cause, and you'll stop at nothing. I thought I knew you, but I was obviously wrong."

I felt my heart pounding in my chest. "It's not true," I protested. "I'm not one of them, I don't even know how this happened."

"I suppose you're going to say you didn't have a choice. That losing me made you turn to this, and I'm responsible for all of your failings."

"No! No, it's not that at all! I honestly don't know how I got here. You have to believe me. You have to!"

She looked at me pityingly. "There's nothing I can do for you now. You can call for me when you're hurt, when you're dying, but I won't be there. You've got your new family to protect you."

With that she disappeared into the ocean and, true to her word, my cries for mercy did not bring her back. I felt a sudden searing pain in my stomach, and bent down to the ground, realizing, too late, that the blood on my uniform was my own.

I awoke in a panic, tears streaming down my face. I was in my own bed, but I had no idea how I had returned home, and my memories of the past twenty-four hours were limited to a few fleeting images.

I brought my hand up to my lower lip, which still stung from Cassandra's harsh kiss.

I had let her kiss me.

What else had I let her do to me?

My whole body was weak, and my muscles were heavy and sore. I tried to remember, but at the same time, I could not face remembering. Whatever I had done, whatever I had allowed to be done to me, I wanted to remain in blurred and disorderly fragments. That piece of debris, scraping past our hull. Cassandra's mighty arm breaking open the ship's door to in the brilliant sunlight. Her cold metallic hand, caressing my face. The taste of poison on my lips.

And Cassandra's memories that were now inside of me, barely rising to the surface, haunting me all the same. She had left me with so many questions, and so many fears that I couldn't put into words.

I forced my aching body out of bed, and I took a long shower, a real shower with real water that rained over me and filled me, albeit briefly, with relief.

When I looked out my window that night, everything was different. I had the sense of belonging somewhere else, to a hidden margin of society that most people either feared or couldn't understand. I searched once again for the advertisement about Apocrypha, and once again stared into the face of the eager-looking youth who promised fast-paced adventures and cloudless skies. I gazed at him through exhausted eyes, older and wiser from the knowledge of what that place was really like.

I wanted to lie to myself, to tell myself that there was no way I would ever go back there. It was a shop of horrors. There was a destructive force in the people who lived and worked there, and it was let free on the fields and runways of Alpha Walker, seducing everything in its path. Then, the horrid realization dawned on me; that I hadn't left of my own free will. I had wanted to stay. Someone had brought me back, someone who had left me here alone, waiting for the next breath of life, any sign at all that my experiences had some meaning.

Instead, the wind howled outside my door, warning me that danger, just like Apocrypha, was everywhere, inescapable and ephemeral at the same time.