For a long moment the helicopter rose up into the enveloping blueness of the sky, untethered from the harsh realities of the world below and open to every offered freely by an infinite heaven.
Then the bomb went off. A fistful of smoke punched upwards, it's roiling clouds leeching the brightness from the day and blanketing every window with greasy smudges of ash like ugly handprints. Rattling darkness held them in quivering hands, sending the occupants jolting into each other, anonymous hands slapping at faces and shoulders in misguided attempts at support. Shrapnel hailed back down to earth like shattering applause. Then, there was silence, soft and ruinous.
Mia curled over Rose's tiny body, wishing she could somehow reverse it all, put the little life back inside herself where it was safe.
Nothing was so violent, so oppressive, so absolutely damning as the sudden hush that fell within the helicopter. The noise of the rotors, the slush of destruction, and the staticky chatter rattling out of the agent's radios, all little signifiers of life, bustling and vibrant, were drained and empty. It was as though the smoke had done more than simply mute the world, but had created a new one, one where she didn't have to listen, didn't have to think.
Maybe if she moved to a world where Ethan hadn't existed it would hurt less. How was she expected to stay in this one, now, where the dark hole of his absence gaped like a wound into which all her fond memories fell and were fished out, sodden with tears?
Rose mewled, patting clumsily at her mother's face, smearing tears over her chin and lips. She wasn't crying; her little, pink face was smooth like a rose-quartz egg, her glistening rosebud mouth stretching in the occasional smile, gurgles of babyish laughter rippling over the silent occupants even as her mother's grief fell over her. Everything that befell her in the village, all that should have traumatised her, had already been rinsed away leaving her thoughts clean of the pain sluicing through everyone with a grounded understanding of what had just happened.
She had no idea—none at all—that she had just lost her father. Mia looked at her daughter and tried to wrap her thoughts around the enormity of that; Rose's world had changed utterly, broken apart like something made of class, and she knew nothing. If Mia stayed silent, the little girl in her arms would never know about the man who went through hell to save her—had been through hell to save both of them—and the world her child lived in could be stuck back together. She never had to know the shape her world should have had.
Ethan's bones were shadows on the wind. Shutting her eyes, Mia imagined those ashes following her, dust in her lungs, becoming part of her. It was a thought both sickening and comforting.
Mia stared down at her daughter, throat aching with the horror of this choice. The shattered bits of her world bit into her hands through her daughter's pink cardigan, and blood ran in rivulets down her forearms.
Chris sat down beside her. His hand weighed a thousand tons on her shoulder, and yet she hardly felt it.
"I'm sorry Mia," he whispered in a voice like gravel and dry autumn leaves. Mia turned the words over in her mind, fiddling apathetically with the crystal edges of his apology wondering if such stilted words could stretch out over the gap in her life without cracking. They were tarnished silver coins cast into the deep well opening at the centre of her heart, scraping desolately along the sides on their way to the bottom, to be later retrieved whenever she gathered the strength to look into it. Chris was sorry. Her baby would never know the man who loved her more than life.
She had lost her husband.
Ethan was gone.
Mia's sternum cracked open in a gaping chasm, her ribs splitting apart like the petals of a flower and exposing all her soft insides to the needling whims of a heaven who's blueness she could now understand was faithless and cruel. Nothing in the world would pull her back together.
Mia closed her eyes, crumpled inwards, and wept. Rose, with infantile unconcern, laughed.
-X-
In the thin wheedling beams of light that filtered through the billowing greasy cloud, one could faintly see the outline of what little remained of the village, the jagged, knifing shards of brick and slate. Hot ash rasped across the ruined landscape, razing stone into sand, timber into splinters. Soot blackened things into premature night, turning the remains into an impressionist ink-sketch. Heat cracked its merciless whip, splitting the air apart and boiling the world down to its most basic form; blackened skies, black grounds, black streaks of a broken world.
None of this bothered Duke.
Serene as a man at the seaside, Duke picked his way through the boiling rock and fire. Mould, still moving like a living, dying thing, oozed up from the scarred soil; it was largely directionless, mindless without its Mother, but occasionally made forays towards the man strolling through their midst. With every attitude of cheer, Duke batted the tendrils away with an amber-topped cane.
Duke wasn't certain what he was looking for, but he was convinced he would notice when he found it. Until then, he was quite content to wander
Crystals quarrelled in his bag, their high-pitched voices glass-sharp. It was, he reflected, quite fortunate that Ethan had sold him the Lords' remains before heading out for the final time; he didn't much fancy his chances finding them in the rubble, and such valuable things could not afford to be lost.
Such dangerous things; already, Duke could feel the mutant Lords reforming within their crystal shells, like fresh skin under scabs. Soon they would reemerge, in all their eminent power, though they would likely be too disorientated by the rigours of death to cause trouble which was something of a relief. The prospect of all four being revived at full strength would have been endlessly irritating, and Duke had better things occupying his concerns.
Namely, the whereabouts of dear Ethan.
Another ripple of ruined earth rose up under Duke's feet, a penumbrous crest rising climatically to greet a horizon the colour of pumpkin-peel. Something in Duke's senses twitched like a hare's nose; over this rise was the centre, he was certain of it.
Once summited, the ground veered swiftly down again as though it had remembered it belonged to the world below. Shards of calcified mould reached upwards like cathedral spires, paper-thing but stronger than steel, their jet contours creating voids in the turbulent sky. In the centre there was a raised structure. It looked like the outline of a man, standing prone, surrounded by mould like an idol in a temple.
The Duke clapped his hands thrice. Elsewhere, his horse whickered and began the laborious process of dragging his wagon to him.
Here it was, Ethan Winter's final resting place, undeserved, uncelebrated, and, unlike its restless surroundings, unmoving. His remains stood upright and rigid, still engraved with his features, the lines of his clothes still pronounced. Every detail of his upraised hand was impeccable in its illustration, perfectly rendered down to the ridges in its short nails.
Duke studied the immobile face; despair and resignation were etched into the calcified mould.
A brisk wind flung itself down into the valley and swung itself about in ballroom eddies, kicking up sand that had super-heated into glass and been ground back down to biting dust. Duke blinked his eyes clear—Ethan stared ever-outward, grim, monolithic, and unyielding. The crystals rattled like gnashing teeth.
Humming pleasantly to himself, Duke settled on the ground and set to work.
-X-
"We're concerned she could be another Eveline."
Those were the first words Mia heard upon returning from her tearful reverie. It slid through the haze if her grief like a thin, ice-cold needle. Chris' hand was still on her shoulder—had he moved it at all? How long had it been?—and it's warm weight was the only firm thing amid the breathless turbulence, firmer than the steel against her back or her daughter in her hands. Such a simple phrase, but it could have brought her back from the dead with the electric chill it shot through her. Her voice was cobweb frail: "What?"
"We looked through Miranda's files on Rose," Chris explained gently. "If she's correct, then your daughter is far more powerful than initially assumed." The hand on her shoulder tightened gently. "She was strong enough to hold that witch off during the fight. She survived being separated into jars. We know she's made of the mould; now that it hasn't got a host...we don't have a precedent for this. We're worried it'll take her over."
His voice was so gentle. They fell on her like snow, blanketing her, covering her. They'd kill her.
Deep inside Mia's heart, in a shady corner maternal love couldn't touch, there had always lingered the suspicion, the nagging paranoia that Rose was something new, and strange, and terrible. It was a fear she had kept from Ethan, folded tightly and tucked up under her ribs, but now it was spreading angular wings and knifing her lungs.
"What does this mean?" Mia could hardly hear her own voice. Chris was speaking, but he sounded so very far away.
Mia looked down at her daughter, and Rose squinted up at her, gnawing thoughtfully on a chubby knuckle. In the darkness of her child's pupil, she thought she could see the silhouette of her former ward, deceptively innocent, watchful. Mia could still feel darkness of mould wriggling its way into the nodules of her brain, with its foreign compulsions utterly undeniable, and it made sickness crawl up the grooves in her spine.
Grey smears decorated Rose; they curved about her eyes, covered her whole cheek and part of her lip, and wrapped about her body in a phantom embrace. They were Ethan's handprints, the world's memory of his arms around their daughter, and yet they made Mia feel sick. His mould speckled soul was still holding her. Each stain was deathly grey and, though only ash, seemed to possess the permanence of something far more final.
Under all that satin-soft pink, was there the rotted black taint of mould, waiting to break through her skin in those insidiously writhing tentacles? Would she have to watch that little scrunched up face wither in to an old woman's before its time?
Please don't do this, Mia begged silently, don't leave me too.
What would she do if her baby grew in to that?
"...secure facility...under constant observation...will require further testing..."
That wasn't Chris' voice. Mia looked up into a face as unsmiling as city pavement, with stern, administrative eyes more used to looking at paperwork than people.
"I'm not leaving her." It was so fundamental a thought, and yet so important to say.
"You won't have to," came the reply. The voice was carefully woven, with compassion and reassurance over-laced with fresh-spun sorrow as though it were this and not Ethan's death that left her bereaved. Mia imagined that it was this voice, and not the deep-throated bull-roar of disaster, that gave her the news, and found it made it no better. "We need to detain both of you."
"Mia...please don't make this difficult. We want to help you. Both of you."
There was a threat in there somewhere, though she was too badly devastated to parse precisely what it was, but she smelt it like smoke on the wind. All around Mia things swayed. There would be such pleasure in the surrender, the loss of responsibility. Such a terrifying relief, that absolution.
"Ok." She no longer had a voice. It was a cavernous echo from some hollow place inside her. "Ok, I'm ready."
She was ready to leave this world. She was ready to disappear into the ether with her daughter and stay there, to sink, unfeeling, in to protocols and routines and the corporate bureaucracy of the BSAA and let them carry her along in their uneludible grip. They would toss her about on the waves of their all-encompassing agendas, swallow her up, drown her, and she would let them fill her up and wash away the remains of that pretty domestic fantasy that had sustained her for three years.
She was prepared to feel nothing forever.
-X-
In a small camp at the epicentre of disaster, with calamity making a premature sunset of a once blue sky, for the thousandth time that day, Ethan Winters achieved the impossible.
He woke up.