Flame
***
"The first thing I would experience would be his last memory?" I asked. The Healers nodded. "Well, the last thing he would remember would be drowning. I, I don't know that I could… cope with that."
My core froze at just the thought.
"You just need to remember it's not real," the Healer said, "It's only a memory. We can block any memory you don't want later."
It wasn't the later I was worried about. It was the during: the drowning part. But I looked at Alex's deathly still face, at Yashie sitting beside him, all of us waiting, waiting, waiting for something, and knew I had to do it. I was so sick of waiting. I couldn't bear to watch Alex not live any longer.
"Ok," I said, and before I knew it, I was lying in a gurney with the anaesthetic spray descending on me, screaming inside that I wasn't ready. But I knew I never would be ready, so what did it matter?
***
The water was so cold I felt it as pain. I gasped involuntarily and water hit my lungs like a wall of lightening. My head felt like it had crystallized instantly, as if, if I flicked it, it would shatter into a thousand pieces. The ice cut out most of the sunlight, and the rays that dug into the water were murky with sediment. I couldn't breathe, my chest expanding and contracting frantically on nothing, and I knew the feeling too, too well; my own memories clouding my experience of this one. I could see the surface, covered in ice, but I was sinking deeper, and trapped in the memory, there was nothing I could do to change events. It was worse than a nightmare, because I could feel thatI was dying, my body shrieking all its painful warnings to the same tune: I was dying…
The vision, the sensations, faded abruptly, and the next thing I knew, I was waking up in my own body.
"You weren't coping," the Healer said, "We pulled you out. Was it the drowning memory?"
I nodded, wrapping my arms around my legs, still shivering.
"There, you're back now," she said, as I rested my head on knees, marvelling at the feel of air flowing easily and speedily, in and out of my lungs.
"Did you see anything that could be pertinent to the case?" the Seeker spoke up.
"There's a case?" I murmured, "You… you suspect foul play?"
"There's … there are inconsistencies. Loose ends, we'd like to tie up. There were similar… events in many Soul-free zones across the globe that day. It seems the humans were having a protest day of their own."
"When you're ready we'll try again."
***
When I woke up the second time, I saw my own body lying on the hospital gurney opposite. Alive. Dry. Far, far away from that lake. It was strange to look upon my body from the outside, like a mirror but back to front, and no glass. But it wasn't as strange as being in Alex's body. I covered my face with my hands, trying to push away the memories, but flinched at the sensation of my big, thick hands on my face. I knew the feel of those hands, intimately, and the feel of that face, but not this way. This way was too, too strange. This was wrong.
"Daddy?"
Yashie propped her palms on my chest and craned to look into my face.
"Daddy!" she gasped and threw herself onto me in the tiniest bear hug.
"Hey, my little malsha," I whispered uncertainly, my voice deep and Alex-like, holding her to me hesitantly with one huge hand. This was incredibly weird.
"Mummy, Daddy's back!"
"Hey, hey, don't wake up Mummy," I said, catching her wrists. She looked at my hands around her wrists. "Mummy's sleeping, right? Just, just let her sleep, ok?" She pulled her hands out of my grasp and sat silently, watching me out of the corner of her eye. Not good.
I sat up carefully as a nurse hurried in.
"I've called for the Healers," she said breathlessly, noting my readings, "how are you feeling?"
"Like I've been underwater for a month," I groaned.
"Well, you should expect to be weak; your muscles haven't moved by themselves for quite some time."
The Healers swept in, closely followed by the Seeker.
"All readings normal so far," the nurse told them, moving away to let them examine me. Yashie was tugging at my sleeve.
"Daddy," she hissed, "wake up Mummy!"
"Yash, leave Mummy alone for a minute, ok?" I said, as the Healers hushed me so they could listen to my chest better. Alex's chest. I did not feel comfortable in his body, the size of it, the way it moved. I did not like the feel of their instruments cold on his skin. I loved his body, but it was a different thing entirely to be seeing from this side. The sooner I could get out of here the better.
"What did you see?" The Seeker asked. I breathed deeply, frowning, going over the painful memories, putting them back in order, starting at the beginning.
"He went into town to pick us up from the plane. He thought we were on the plane…"
His memory unreeled before my eyes. He had dropped into the council a few days before, the guy at reception had wanted to speak to him…
"There was a message for you here somewhere… ah nuts," he shoved at the papers covered the bench, " Your family…"
"They're coming?" Alex asked, two parts trepidation and one part hope.
"Yeah yeah, they coming…"
"On Sunday-"
"Yeah, they said they was coming on the Sunday plane-"
Alex grinned and slapped the counter top, awash with joy.
"Alright!"
He hadn't got my message properly. He thought we were coming up this Sunday, not next Sunday.
"What did he do in town?" the Seeker prompted.
"Ah, he just stopped to pick up some lolly bags… for the kids…" I remembered his blissful anticipation, matched by the beauty of the day, the clear, wide sky, reaching on forever over the frozen land, bathed in light. He loved the way the cold air bit at his chest, the painful diamond sparkle of the sunlight in the unsullied snow… He had thought it fitting that our first day there we would be welcomed with the most glorious autumn day the north had to offer.
"Then he heard the news…" I went on, my smile fading. I could see group of men edging towards him. Law enforcement and that Jim from council. Approaching hesitantly, avoiding his gaze. He waited for them, listening to crunch of their footsteps in the grit encrusted snow of the town roads, unnaturally loud in the winter Sunday stillness. He knew already something was up.
"They told him the plane had crashed in the lake, that there wouldn't be any survivors. He… he thought we were on that plane. He thought we were dead." I could feel the horrific gaping loss from the memory, the sense that my chest was entirely empty, my blood running backwards. "They wanted him to ID the bodies when the divers got them out."
"Did they think it was an accident?"
"Uh… they used the word accident… but they said it funny, like they weren't sure. Then someone else said, later, someone else said, they didn't think it was…"
I remembered the emergency services shed, where the glaring rays of the arctic sun were severed by the grimy glass, people running through the dimness, phones ringing constantly. Alex was staring at a map showing the lake where the plane had crashed, a long narrow tongue of water, water filling a line in the rock. I'd seen this map before. It was in my kitchen, with his boots and clothes, and a lolly bag. Alex hadn't been able to look away from the empty space on the paper where he thought our lives had been erased, sucked into the icy blankness of the lake.
"Hey Hawkmoth. You heard, then."
Stu, from the mechanics. Alex recognized him but couldn't move to acknowledge him. Stu didn't seem to mind.
"He flew that route 30 years, give or take. He knew that plane better than his wife. Nah, something's not right. This weren't no accident."
"Where was it when it started to go down?" Alex had asked, his thoughts grim with understanding.
"What? Uh…" Stu traced the flight path back up the lake. "About here I reckon. What are you thinking?"
His finger had rested near an inlet where a river fed the lake. Alex knew it, the river fell down a drop, and the water wasn't frozen yet. The black water and the waterfall's spray could disguise anyone waiting there with weaponery.
"Nothing." Alex had pulled the map out of the roll and push out of the overcrowded room.
"Hawkmoth?" I'd heard Stu call faintly as the doors swung shut, disconnecting the silent white world without from the chaos within.
"What did they think happened, then?" The Seeker asked.
"To the plane? He, uh, he didn't say. But Alex… Alex thought he knew." A conversation with a trapper, far out on a barren plain…
"We trade stuff all over the arctic. Dog sled in the winter, boat in the summer. Quicker to do trade with Siberia than you southerners. People trust each other more, you know? Neighbours, we are, all across the north. Closest Soul- free zone too."
At the time he hadn't thought about it, but now it bothered him, ringing in his mind. What would you trade from Siberia? Nothing that you could get here; deer, seals, fish… the answer finally got his blood running the right way, refilling his empty veins. Weapons. Surface to air missiles. The kind that could take down a plane.
"He thought the humans were trading weapons between Soul-free zones. He'd seen them in Siberia, and he knew people were trading across the Arctic. He thought maybe someone had brought over something that could take down a plane." He didn't think maybe, though; he thought he knew.
"He went to check to see if he was right…" I said, struggling to relive the memory.
"Where did he go?"
The pain of the glaring light reflecting from all directions off the snow before sunglasses cut the ends off the sharper rays. The shattering noise as he threw the lolly bags onto the back seat and they burst their brown paper skins, scattering sweets like a severed string of pearls. The skid of the wheels on the hard packed snow, the truck gripping and bursting forward, heading for the lake road.
"The lake road…"
His fists gripping the steering wheel bloodless tight, the all encompassing need to keep everything taut, rigid; holding on because inside everything was in a thousand pieces.
"He kept seeing us in his head, our bodies, in the water."
Ayasha, hanging in the underwater world, limp and white. Below, in the darker water, me; face down, unmoving, a swirl in the current lifting my blue hand upwards, towards him. Bhask, deeper still where the light was dying, his hair swaying in the dark blue water.
"Where did he go?"
"A waterfall… it's on the map. It's one of the feeder rivers into the lake."
The Seeker nodded.
"That's where they found him," he said quietly. "He drove straight there? Nothing happened on the way?"
"No, uh… no, there was a car…" A car speeding from the opposite direction wrenching him out of his visions and back into the moment. "A four wheel drive, white…"
"Did you get a number plate?"
I stared at him mutely. Alex had just been told his entire family was dead, and he expected him to notice a number plate?
"Colours, anything?" he pressed.
I shook my head.
"It was sort of, shiny? Like a rental car…?"
I recognized the suppressed frustration in the set of the Seekers jaw from countless interviews I'd done in the past.
"What happened at the waterfall?" he said.
"There was no one there."
I remembered Alex jumping out of the truck, staring at the empty lake shore. They were gone. He'd walked up to the rocky edge, the spray from the falling water spitting on his face, the water black and lifeless at the shore line, carved deep by the falls, shut around by the lake ice. There'd been nothing. Nothing but tracks in the snow.
"But then someone came. The car that he'd passed-"
"White four-wheel drive? He was sure it was the same?"
I nodded, seeing the car swing off the road, skidding to a stop beside the truck. Two men got out, clothed entirely in black, the car doors slamming loud in the silence. They were tense, poised to strike, and they move towards Alex carefully.
"Two guys got out. There might have been more inside, I don't know… They were, defensive, I mean aggressive, trying to encircle him or something. Alex was shouting at them. He thought they'd killed us, they'd shot down the plane…" I could feel Alex's rage, his need to meet their threat with his violence.
"Did they say anything?"
"I don't, I don't think so…" I shivered. Their faces were masked, I couldn't see lips moving, and blood roared in Alex's head; the only thing that mattered in whole world was that they would come close enough for him to hurt them. Badly. He waited, muscles itching to snap.
"What happened?"
"They came at him, rushed him, and he went for them, but, but they caught him somehow, and they, they threw him into the water."
The water was so cold he felt it as pain. He gasped involuntarily and water hit his lungs like a wall of lightening, solid and burning throughout his chest. He couldn't breathe, his lungs expanding and contracting frantically, heaving away on nothing. The water was gloomy under the covering ice, darker as he sank, desperately trying to draw breath so he could think. The world became darker still and the pain of the cold became distant. Then he saw them, below: Ayasha, hanging in the icy water, limp and white. Some metres beneath her; me, a swirl in the current lifting my blue hand upwards, towards him. Bhask, deeper still where the light was gloomy, his hair swaying in the dark blue water.
Dead. All dead. The burning in his chest ate him from the inside out.
Flame… Ayahsa… Bhask…
He kicked down towards them, into the darkness.
The Seeker called me back to the present. I pulled Yashie close, trying to stop the shivering.
"Is that all?" the Seeker asked, and I filled in him with what other little details I could remember. Then the Healers claimed my full attention with their tests.
When they'd finally finished with me, I sat up waiting for Bhask to get off work. There was no snow tonight, but the street lights shone reflected from the clouds that blanketed the city, giving the sky a strange, fluffy, grey-pink glow. It was dark, but not yet late, the short winter's days consumed too quickly, as if the sun didn't have the strength to keep the night at bay. Yashie lay beside me, not talking to me, but I was too exhausted and too uncertain in this body to draw her out.
I was supposed to be looking for Alex, but I was so used to living in a body without a mind, I didn't know where to start. I kept myself to the surface of his mind, away from his painful memories, and away from his equally painful hopes and dreams. Maybe tomorrow I would looker deeper for him. Maybe seeing Bhask would give me the strength… but I fell asleep before he came.
I was woken by an absence, and it took me a moment to put it into thought. Yashie's familiar weight at my side had vanished.
"Mummy! Mummy, wake up!" I heard her saying, and replied before I could think about it.
"Yashie, I'm here-" I called to her, sitting up.
Ayasha had pulled the chair up to the other bed, and was leaning over my inert body.
"Yashie?" I said. She gave me a dark look and turned all her attention back on my body.
"Mummy, Ayassie needs you back now, please, now. You said only a little sleep, you said-"
"Yashie, it's ok baby," I whispered, slowly forcing Alex's hideously weak body to take the few steps over to her. Yashie ignored me, her fists balling up.
"Mummy, come back!" she shouted, and something within me slid in horror as I saw her start to pummel the inert body as hard as she could.
The nurses had crowded into the doorway at her shouts and looked on appalled, and I grabbed her fists and pulled her down to the floor.
"Yashie, No! You do not punch Hungry Flame! You hear me?" but she was out of control, slamming the back of her head into anything she could reach; me, the bed, the floor…
"You are not my Daddy!" she was shrieking, "Mummy! Mummy!"
"Get me out of here now! Get me out!" I yelled to the Healers, Alex's voice frighteningly loud, and they scurried to respond. The anesthetic was sprayed liberally over Ayasha and me, and her body finally began to calm as I lost consciousness.
***
I woke up in my own body with Ayasha in my arms, her face tear stained and her head still bruised where she'd bashed it on the floor. I looked over at Alex, lying the same as always, like a pharaoh waiting to be entombed. I caressed Ayasha's head as softly as I could, and she opened her eyes.
"Mummy," she whispered, voice heavy with sedative, and I held her close, rocking her. My poor confused baby.
"Yes, Yashie baby, I'm back. I said I'd be back, and I'm back."
Her arms curled around my arms and held me tight. She pressed her cheek against my neck, turning to glare at Alex with all the force of a furnace. I'd never seen her glare with such hatred at anyone, let alone her beloved Daddy.
"Oh, baby, don't be mad at Daddy-"
"Is not Daddy," she slurred malevolently, burying her face away from the sight of him.
"Oh baby…"
What could I say? She adored her father. I hated to see her hating and fearing him now. But she thought her father was possessed. How could I explain it was me? I was the last solid thing she was clinging to.
"Don't go away again please Mummy," she whispered.
I couldn't bring myself to lie to her.