Success On The Spectrum
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“I have a plan,” I told him. “I know it sounds crazy, but you will understand the reason for everything when we get there.”
He nodded. “It’s better than going by ourselves. At least you have an idea now of what to look for.” He sighed and looked up at me, his eyes tired with worry. “What if she doesn’t want us to find her?”
My heart sank a little more inside my chest as we made our way through the woods toward my ship. We were almost out of time. If they had found her then it was too late.
But I knew this place like the back of my hand from all my years on these streets, and I didn’t think anyone could be so stupid as to come into the middle of a forest without someone waiting in an ambush… or maybe I was wrong about that.
It was always possible she had done exactly that. That she thought the best thing to do would be to run away from them. She wasn’t even trying to hide anymore. She might just give herself up to them and let them kill her.
There was no point in being stubborn and defiant when your life was on the line. And yet if this is the last thing she wanted, then I would make sure it ended differently. I would save her; I would fight against the rest of the world with everything I had because she meant something to me.
Because she had changed me and saved my life. My mind raced over my memories of her, of the times we’d shared together since we first met. I tried not to remember those dark days when my mind had been broken by madness, or how close I came to losing my humanity after she died.
Now here I was, a changed man—not only in body but in my head too. In many ways, I felt older than the last time I saw her. And though I still couldn’t forgive myself for how I treated her, or for the things I did while my mind was breaking down, that hadn’t stopped me from falling in love with her again.
I could hear it echoing somewhere deep within my mind: ‘This one, this one who looks so young and innocent…’ Those words echoed in my thoughts as I reached the top of the hill where my ship waited for me. She looked small and fragile sitting there on its rocky perch.
This time when I got off it I was able to climb the steep stairs leading up to the entrance without having to take any breaks along the way. She had become accustomed to my needs. She had learned how much work I needed to do on my frame and my muscles to keep myself moving and fighting.
All that had taken time but now she remembered me every time I went into the cockpit. She had grown so used to my face that it seemed to be everywhere.
But now I was afraid to go into her. Afraid to put me into another person’s mind. To feel what she feels. I feared the pain it would bring back.
We both knew what I was capable of now. What kind of power I wielded. It frightened me to think that if she turned against me now then I wouldn’t be able to stop her. I could see it in the depths of her eyes as she watched me. Her fear was that I would hurt her, or use her. I was terrified that this time she would turn from me and try to escape into a world I could never reach.
“You can’t let this happen,” she warned. She looked so beautiful standing there under the trees, looking at me. The wind blew around her hair like wisps of smoke. But I knew better than to trust anyone’s beauty. Not even her own.
“You’ve got to promise me something,” I said, taking hold of the bars of her cage. There was no sense in asking her not to leave me behind. I was already gone.
She nodded slowly. “Yes.”
“Promise you’ll stay alive until I get back,” I said. “That if we ever meet again, you’ll tell me you’re ready to join the others.”
Her eyes widened slightly but she held my gaze. “I won’t die easily,” she promised. She smiled a little at the end and I realized the truth was simple enough. Even if I did go missing and no one heard her call out for help, she would find some way of calling me back—she would do anything for me. It was written in the depth of her soul that I would return, or that I would die protecting her from harm. And so I believed her.
As soon as I entered the ship she started working on me. It happened before I even lifted my hands from the controls and pressed them against the seat’s armrests.
“What are you doing?” I asked in bewilderment as the sensation of cold metal began to flow through my fingers.
She didn’t reply. Instead, she concentrated on making my body more efficient. Making it stronger. Faster.
I was suddenly aware of a strange feeling inside my brain. A sense that she had just pushed my mind back into its old shape, that it was once again whole. When that happened I often felt the same kind of sensation. As though all the years of damage had been washed away.
For the first time in my life, I felt like an old man. Like I had returned to what I used to be. And yet, the more her work continued, the younger and sharper my mind became.
I could feel every part of it changing as if it were becoming something new and different. It was hard to explain, but it was almost as if a part of me that had long been lost to time and madness now made sense again.
She was trying to make me faster, more alert, more powerful; more dangerous. But she also tried to make me smarter. The changes she worked on my mind made me more aware of everything—the air coming in through the vents, the vibrations of the ground below us, the smell of the wind, and the sound of leaves rustling. Everything was clearer, sharper.
It was frightening. Because she did not want to give me back what I had lost. She wanted me to have it all over again, to remember being who I used to be. That was why she was forcing these things on my mind as if they might somehow be restored to me. As if by force I could become the young man I was once upon a time.
I knew how this would end. If she succeeded, she would kill me.
My only hope was to distract her with the other task, the thing she’d come here for, the reason she thought she needed me alive. We didn’t have long. It was already too late to save me if she really meant to keep up this pace.
There is a type of ship called a destroyer. It has three types of engines—two large ones on either side of the hull, and a smaller one in front, which makes it lighter and harder to detect in flight.
The Destroyer of Light was a small one, with a single set of weapons: two plasma cannons mounted on its sides, and a third in the middle. They were capable of burning anything down to ash if it came close. The shields surrounding them could withstand a lot of heat, but there wasn’t much point in using them when you could melt a ship to slag in one hit.
And so, as soon as I saw what I knew must be hers, I took control of the vessel and guided it toward it, while she kept me occupied. In moments, we were in the range of the guns. One blast after another ripped apart our pursuers’ ships, sending pieces of hull flying in every direction. It was a slaughter.
But still, we couldn’t get near enough to engage with the Destroyer. She kept us moving at high speed, and we had already destroyed so many vessels that she could use their fragments to build herself up a protective barrier. My only hope was that she would eventually tire or get bored.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked. “This can’t be your plan.”
She didn’t answer. Her concentration was total. She had never spoken directly about her past with me before, and it seemed impossible that she would speak now, but perhaps she hadn’t considered that she might need to.
“You know how I am,” she said. “We both know what I’m capable of doing. And you know why I have done those things. You’ve seen how I lived. So don’t pretend this isn’t true.”
A few days earlier I could have argued with her, but not anymore. Not since she’d forced me back to the old ways of thinking. Now I was beginning to doubt everything. I was beginning to wonder if she was right. After all, what else was there left for me?
For the last year, ever since I’d met her, all she had done was remind me of my former self. The man who’d been lost to madness and madness alone for far too long. Who had spent his time in the dark reaching out with every part of him to find a spark of light?
But she had taken care of that. Taken away from me my fear of the darkness. All that remained was a void, an emptiness where a voice had been, a place where a mind should have been. Just emptiness and shadows.
And even in that emptiness, I knew myself—all of me, not just my old self—was slowly falling apart. The way a house is torn apart if one wall crumbles down after another. She had done this to me, but now she had done it to herself too. There was no longer any balance between the two. There was only her, and I was the empty shell she’d found inside her.
So why try and bring me back? What possible purpose could there be in that? Why not take advantage of her own ability to survive? If she had the same strength in mind and body, then she might have a chance. But if not, I would die quickly.
If she wanted me to live, she must have known this was how it would turn out. And yet, despite all this, she kept pushing. Perhaps because there was nothing left to do.
“I’m tired,” she said after a moment’s silence. “I can feel myself running out of energy. We’re not going to make it to the Destroyer. I will fail here.”
That was when she turned her attention to the Destroyer I’d steered toward us. The ship that was now closing in on ours at incredible speed. A second later it was among us, tearing into the enemy fleet like a spear through butter.
It smashed through a dozen vessels until it reached mine—the Destroyer of Light, I realized now—and rammed the front shield, knocking it down. The next blast caught me full in the face and I flew backward, slamming hard against the wall behind me. Everything spun around and I lost sight of everything. For a moment, there was nothing. Then I felt a wave of dizziness wash over me.
I regained my senses and looked up to see her standing above me—a vision, beautiful and terrible, a goddess from some ancient world. She smiled down at me, but her eyes were cold. Cold, and sad.
“There’s one way to save you,” she whispered. “If you want to.”
I stared up at her, wondering if I had heard her correctly. But I hadn’t. I knew that.
“What did you say?” I asked quietly.
She nodded once. “I’m giving you a choice.”
It was a strange thing to hear her say, that she was going to give me something that could only ever be taken away by others. That I had to choose between living or dying. In the end, it was just as she’d claimed: I could only be free by choosing the opposite of what she had given me.
And so I said yes.
***
The Destroyer of Light had survived the first attack, but it wasn’t able to stand against the other ships that had surrounded it. When they finally broke through its shield, they were ready. They came at it from every direction, cutting straight through the rear shields and ripping the hull to shreds.
I saw the crew running in panic, screaming their terror into the air. Some of them even tried to flee, but I held tight onto my control, unwilling to let myself go with them. The destroyer crashed to the floor and I watched as it split into three sections. It was over now. We were finished.
But suddenly, the Destroyer exploded. The blast sent debris flying everywhere, including me. I hit the deck hard and felt a sharp pain in my side and leg. Blood seeped out from my wounds. Even worse, I couldn’t move.
The blast had pushed me farther back than I could have imagined and there was nothing I could do about it. The Destroyer had been destroyed, but now I was trapped. And while it was clear I didn’t have long before my blood loss became severe, neither did my captors.
I needed to get out of here now; this place had become more dangerous than ever before. As I crawled forward, trying to pull myself along, I felt the first signs of weakness in my arms and legs. My skin grew paler.
Suddenly, a light flared nearby—one far brighter than anything else I’d seen since leaving this place. I lifted my head to look and saw that it was coming from a device in my pocket. It had always been there, but I’d never used it again, afraid of what might happen when I did. Now was different. If I didn’t use it quickly, it might be too late.
With great effort, I managed to reach in and grab it. I flipped the switch and the light flickered for a moment, then brightened. I blinked several times until I understood where I was and what I saw, and when I did I nearly dropped the damned thing.
There was no reason for me to be looking up at a screen in my bedroom. This wasn’t a dream. No one who loved me had died. It was real. I was somewhere else…
“Ary!” The voice came from right beside me. I looked up to find Nona staring down at me—her hair mussed, her cheeks red and puffy from crying. I felt her hand brush across my cheek as she bent down, reaching into my open mouth with her fingers and wiping away my blood. “You’re awake! You really are alive!”
I looked around wildly. “Where am I? What happened?”
Nona sat down beside me. “I don’t know. Your ship got hit by an enemy blast and—” Her words cut off when she noticed how badly I’d been burned. She grabbed my wrist and brought it close to her face.
“This is your arm,” she muttered to herself. She pressed closer and looked at the rest of me.
“What…what has happened to me?” I asked, feeling like a fool asking after all these years.
“You’re burnt bad, Ary,” she said, “but there’s no point in hiding the truth from yourself, you’ve lost so much.”
She looked at me for a long time, and I wondered if I would see anger or disappointment in her eyes, but instead, she just nodded sadly.
“Yes,” I said quietly, not meeting her gaze. “I have.”
“We need to get you some help,” she said. “Now, we can figure out the rest later.”
“How did you escape?” I asked.
Nona took another breath to calm herself. “That’s the thing…” She paused and frowned, shaking her head as though deciding whether to say something. “My mother told me about a way that she had escaped the Destroyer before.
One day when she was in the middle of battle, there had been one last ship left that still had enough power remaining to fly. It was headed back to the Mother City, but my mother stole it and flew it out of here before anyone knew what had happened.”
I stared at the floor. “I understand. I should have tried harder, I know that. But why didn’t I try to find you once I realized what happened?”
Nona turned back to look at me. “Because you thought I was dead, Ary. For the longest time, you couldn’t bring yourself to think about anything but death, so I understood—but it’s time now.” She put both hands on my shoulders and forced me to look at her. “Look at me. It’s all over now.”
For a second, I almost believed her. I could feel myself starting to believe, but then I remembered what I’d done: killing Nona’s parents, stealing their ship, abandoning them…
The truth is that I had betrayed Nona again, just as I had betrayed my own family. And she deserved better than that.
“No. It isn’t,” I said harshly.
“You’re wrong,” she said. “You’ve done nothing wrong. I was the one who abandoned you—not the other way around. Don’t you remember what I told you?”
“I do.”
“Then listen up,” she said. “When you were dying, in my home, and I begged you to stay alive, I promised you that if you did, I’d find a way back to you. I’ve kept my promise. Now, let’s go.”
She helped me to my feet, and suddenly I was walking again. I stumbled along behind her, barely able to walk with any sort of speed at first; but slowly my muscles began to recover, until they finally worked smoothly enough that I was able to run after Nona.
We ran through a series of corridors and halls, all of which I had never seen before. They seemed familiar somehow, as though I knew these places from somewhere else in the past.
It wasn’t until we reached a lift of sorts that I recognized them as a part of the ship itself.
“I can’t believe this…” I breathed, watching as our ship descended slowly toward its destination. I was surprised to find myself smiling as I watched the lights pass by us; for a moment I thought I might actually be happy.
“Are you okay?” Nona asked.
“Better than I ever hoped.”
Nona laughed a little and squeezed my shoulder. “I’ll explain everything, I swear. But it’s all been hard for me too—it feels good just to be near you, to have you back.”
A sense of dread settled deep into my gut, making me feel ill. “There’s no ‘back’ for either of us, Ary. You have to understand.”
“I understand. I really do.” I leaned against the wall and looked away from her. “But I don’t want to talk about it now. The most important thing is that we survive this together.”
“I know.”
“So…” I pushed away from the wall. “Why don’t you tell me what happened? What you’ve been doing for the past six years.”
Nona looked down. “I’ve been searching.”
“Searching…for me?”
She shrugged uncomfortably, as though embarrassed. “I guess I’m selfish, and maybe a little stupid, but yes. I needed to find someone, and I couldn’t imagine that you’d be dead. So I figured if I found another person who knew you, we might be able to figure things out and meet in the middle somehow, even if only briefly.”
I smiled at that. “Well, you certainly found a place to hide your ship well enough.”
“It’s where I always dreamed we’d be someday,” she said. “Here, on the other side of the world. Somewhere far enough away to avoid detection, but close enough that we could return quickly if anything happened.” Her voice was full of longing, and I suddenly felt very uncomfortable being so near her. “But it hasn’t been easy,” she added.
“No, I imagine not.”
We stood there looking at each other, and suddenly Nona’s expression changed, and a smile spread across her face, like light shining on something new and beautiful.
“‘Bye, Ary.” She gave my shoulder a squeeze. Then she turned and left, disappearing into the depths of the ship.
The End