(Chapter 5)
by
Jocelyn Stewart
Andred Reynard sat in the main room of the Deferment Suite with Elia Edrian ambrov Trin Oren. At any other point in his cycle he would have found her quite attractive. Elia was classic Edrian from her auburn hair and warm brown skin to her greenish brown eyes and rather ample figure. What he did notice about her though was the warmth and power of her nager. He was fighting hard not to zlin her too closely when he found himself suddenly engulf in her field like a warm cloak on a cold winter’s day. Need became something that he had heard about in passing. He was content.
Elia smiled, “Hajene Reynard, I hope that’s better.”
Looking at her with a distant gaze, Andred took a moment to figure out what she’d said. Gently the world around him came back into focus, albeit a very soft focus. “Oh, yes much better. Thank you, Sosu Edrian.”
She smiled at him, “Call me Elia or Lia if you like.”
He looked up as Ydara and Evender entered. He zlinned Evender intently for a moment and got a look from Ydara that could have melted steel. It certainly melted his interest in Evender. Andred watched as Evender crossed to Elia who stood to give him a big hug. This should have caused all manner of pyrotechnics but didn’t. These two Donors were very good.
Ydara also hug Elia which made Andred give Yadar an equally melting look. “Sorry Andred, she’s family you know, Ev’s little sister.”
Andred quelled as Elia gently reassured him of her attention with what felt for all the world like a nageric hug and pat on the back. He could almost hear, There, there. If he could have thought straight he would probably have found the whole thing rather disconcerting.
When he could form coherent thoughts again he looked at Evender and then at Elia there was no family resemblance. Maybe one of them was adopted.
Elia’s chuckle caught him off guard. “I know we don’t look much like siblings do we. Dad says we each found a different ancestor to resemble.”
Andred managed to not mention that Evender looked more like his wife than he did his sister.
It was Ydara who caught him off guard this time, “Most people mistake Ev and me for sibs it’s the eyes they’re a Makepeace trait we both share.”
Evender was now standing with an arm around the shoulders of both Elia and Ydara. “Makes for an interesting conversation starter. You know, who’s what to whom.”
Trying to think of a reply to that, Andred was relieve as Peter Hardin came into the room. His erstwhile escort made no attempt to nagericly displace Elia, to Andred’s great relief. Peter just stood quietly behind Elia, Evender and Ydara towering over them and making Evender suddenly appear small.
Rielle chose that moment to stick her head out of the bedroom door and motion them in.
The instant Andred entered the room Joyanne’s nager washed over him. It filled the room like water. Andred settled quickly into a chair next to Elia. He looked at the desperately ill woman in the bed trying not to zlin her. He wouldn’t have recognized her if he hadn’t known who she was. She had changed so much in a few short weeks. Even her nager was different, a mass of swirling chaos that would have pulled him in if Elia hadn’t been shielding him.
His gaze fell upon the hand Rielle held. Even without zlinning, the affection Rielle felt was obvious.
“Hello, Joyanne long time no zlin.” Andred watched as recognition dawned in her drawn face and swept through her nager. He winced.
“Too close to need to blink I see.” She smiled weakly at him.
“Well, I would if I could.” Even with Elia’s very excellent shielding Joyanne’s field was pressing against every nerve in his body.
“Sorry, I can’t do a lot with my nager right now. It seems to have taken on a will of its own.”
“So I’ve noticed.” Andred did the next best thing to blinking, he slipped quickly into channel’s functional mode. He heaved an internal sigh of relief as the effect of Joyanne’s nager switched from direct contact to something approximating a less direct, though no less intense, problem to be solved.
Joyanne looked at Rielle and then at Andred. Rielle had not let go of her hand since she had returned with everybody. Andred on the other hand was sitting on the edge of his chair like a nervous cat. So this was what Rielle had been leading up to. Joyanne’s attention focused on the channel. She watched him come close to squirming. He was showing all the signs of need and her body was betraying her, again. Ydara touching her was one thing but Andred?
Her temperature was rising with the excess of selyn she was carrying and the constant production of even more. Joyanne had expected Ydara to take her field down when she had been in earlier, but she hadn’t. Now the sick dizziness was returning with a vengeance. At this point Joyanne would have been happy to give up her selyn to a bright green baboon with tentacles, but a First?
“What are you all up to?” Joyanne had her suspicions.
“Trying to save your life.” Peter looked down on her from where he stood behind Ydara and Evender on the left side of the bed. “Little girl, little girl, don’t you dare die on me!” Joyanne watched as tears trickled slowly down his gentle face.
“Peter...” Joyanne closed her eyes tight as she fought down the returning vertigo. She wanted to reached out to him she wanted to hide in his arms She wanted a lot of things she couldn’t have. “Peter, I...” She had opened her eyes in an attempt to look at him but the room had immediately begun to spiral. Closing her eyes she lay there panting and trying to put her walls in place. She couldn’t.
She fell off the face of the earth into a dark emptiness. Was this why the others had died screaming? It didn’t hurt. But she could see a child finding this feeling terrifying. In a way it was something of a relief. She had expected mind destroying pain. This was just – nothing. No not nothing, this was a welcomed darkness, a soft velvety coolness against her overheated skin, a hug, a deep black hug. This death thing wasn’t all that scary.
On the very heels of her relief and resignation to the inevitable a nerve frying whiteness replaced the gentle darkness. She screamed! Not in pain – in fury!! “No!! No!! Not again! I won’t go back. I won’t go back!” For an endless moment she struggled against the white pain of life. She kicked and scratched and bit like a desperate animal. And she nearly got free of it. But in the end the velvet darkness receded to leave her in the world of the living.
Joyanne opened her eyes to find Ydara in full five point contact. As Ydara released her grip, Joyanne could hear sobbing deep heart broken sobs. The bed tilted alarmingly to the left as Peter landed on it and grabbed her up and held her tight. He felt so wonderfully cool. “Don’t cry Peter. It’s not a bad thing. It’s cool and quiet there. Let me go. Please, let me go.” Peter’s grip tightened. Joyanne didn’t have the strength or breath to tell him she couldn’t breathe. It really didn’t matter anyway.
“Peter, she can’t breathe.” Ydara’s warning made Peter eased up on his grip to let Joyanne breathe. He hadn’t stopped crying. He held her as if not even death could force him to let go.
“Little girl, little girl, little girl! What have I done to deserve your hate?” Peters voice was a deep anguished vibration in his massive chest. Joyanne listened as his heart beat began to slow to normal and his sobs subsided but the tears did not.
“I don’t hate you Peter. I love you and Jorden and Anisia and Devon.”
“No, you hate me. You hate us all. You keep trying to leave us.” He pulled back to look into her eyes. She could see herself reflected in his dark brown eyes. The reflection was haggard and near death but not quiet dead yet.
“How can I go home and tell Jorden our daughter is dead? Why would you make me do that?”
“Daughter?” Joyanne’s world stood still for one heart beat, then another and another. Daughter? The question echoed into the cool darkness that still beckoned. Daughter? broke into the silent place where she kept her scant memories of her mother and the shadow of her father and forced her to look at them. Forced her to look at the face of the woman who was her mother a face she couldn’t recognize a face that transformed before her eyes. The face was not Getha Hallenbek’s the face was Jorden Amslin-Hardin’s. She stood and stared in an amazement broken only by the looming shadow of her father expanding becoming not the Sime she knew him to be but a Gen, a giant of a Gen, who opened his arms to her and enfolded her in a place that was safe until she could call him what she had always called him in her heart. “Papa?”
“Right here, little girl, always right here.”
She clung to him with her waning strength as the flood of all the emotions she had shut away swept over her, crashed into her, engulfed her to leave her gasping for breath and crying tears – not of pain but of joy.
“Little girl, please try, try to live. There are so many of us who’ll grieve if you don’t.”
Joyanne became aware of another presence. A small hand was wrapped around one of her fingers. She was in that silent place of infantile memory again. She looked down to see a little face with slightly slanted green eyes looking up at her. The little face smiled as the child let go of her hand to climb into her mother’s lap to go contentedly to sleep. Jorden smiled at Joyanne who stood staring, bewildered at her and the child. “Is that me?”
“No, she’s Trust.” Jorden smiled at the sleeping child.
A few moments passed as Joyanne considered this. She had to laugh at herself. Of course, she’d only trusted Thirds.
In the space of a breath Jorden was gone and Ydara stood holding the child who continued to sleep contented. “Only Thirds?” Ydara favored her with that annoying, knowing smile.
Just as Joyanne was about to comment the real world intruded upon her again.
“You have got to stop scaring your father like this.” Ydara had replaced Peter. Joyanne lay looking up at her.
“I wasn’t trying to. Just happened.” Joyanne’s voice was a raspy whisper.
Ydara propped her up and held a cup of cool water to Joyanne’s lips. “Sip.”
Joyanne sipped, just a mouthful, and swallowed around the dry lump in her throat.
“Joy, it’s crunch time. We have to get your field down now or the next time you go you stay gone and I won’t be able to drag you back.” Ydara was dead earnest about this.
Ydara had laid her back down on the bed so gently Joyanne almost hadn’t noticed the change of position. She tried to lift her arms to Ydara.
“Not me Joy,” she pointed at Andred with a tentacle.
Joyanne was about to say no until she looked into Peter’s face. Her rippling vision steadied long enough to let her see another tear tracked quietly down his cheek as he looked sadly down at her.
She looked at Andred. He still looked like a nervous cat. What to do, what to do?
“I don’t trust you.” She watched as Andred accepted her statement nodding.
“I don’t trust you either.” This was more than evident in his posture.
This didn’t shock her as much as it might have.
Joyanne looked at Rielle again. Her old friend was being steadfastly quiet, but she had reclaimed Joyanne’s hand.
Joyanne tried to look into Andred’s eyes but her vision had begun to ripple again and he was near the foot of the bed. She could just barely make him out. “Has Ydara told you what I am?”
This time Andred did squirm a bit. “Yes.”
Joyanne nodded. “Are you afraid?”
“No. Fear is the path to the kill.”
“Well, you’re braver than Ydara then.” She would have laughed but her head hurt too much. “I don’t believe you.”
Joyanne watched Andred as closely as her wavering sight would allow. Her sense of fields was gone with the overload of selyn she carried. She wouldn’t trust a liar. And she couldn’t trust a First. Again Joyanne came up against the obvious falsehood. She had and did trust one First. Then she looked at Rielle and realize that she already trusted two. The question now was could she trust Andred.
She asked him again, “Are you afraid?”
Andred was bombarded by the intensity of her attention upon him. This Gen could kill him with a thought. Technically that was true of any First Order Donor but they didn’t want to. He had never worked with a discontented Donor before. Joyanne had been a real revelation to him. It had never occurred to him that any Donor would not find joy in serving. It actually struck him as fundamentally wrong not to find joy in serving. He certainly lived to serve. He also loved to serve. His life was service. Yes, this Donor could kill him, not in the sense that she was merely capable of the act physically, but that she might be capable of the act psychologically. Did this frighten him? SHEN, YES!
“Yes. Yes, I am afraid.”
He watched as she closed her eyes and nodded. This did incredibly interesting things to her field as the incipient vertigo that she had been trying to stave off managed to get a firm hold on her. Interesting as the fireworks were they were also very uncomfortable. The physician in him took over for an instant as he found himself zlinning her rather thoroughly. The diagnosis was obvious. Underdraw complicated by steadily increasing selyn production.
Andred hadn’t realized how ill Joyanne was until he’d entered the room. Underdraw wasn’t a common occurrence but it did happen in the higher order Donors more frequently than the lower order ones. The usual treatment was a good transfer with a channel of a higher rating. Joyanne was higher than any Donor he had ever zlinned, except, he amended, Elia. But then he wasn’t sure that she was really higher but she did zlin very powerful. Yes that was it more power but not necessarily more selyn. He shook himself out of his digression.
“Joyanne, I have to take your field down. I can just siphon it off slowly and you won’t even feel it.”
“I am a Donor! The sensation of selyn movement isn’t a problem! He watched Joyanne close her eyes as if to keep from having to look at him.
Andred sensed something that she was leaving unsaid. Ydara had been very candid and detailed with him about Joyanne, including the pain caused by the too slow and too shallow draw of a Third.
“You have two choices, either I siphon at general order speed or I draw you down at full transfer speed. My speed. Ydara tells me that anything less would cause you pain and only make your condition worse.
“No!” Her denial ripped through the ambient like a lightening strike and managed to get at him even pass Elia’s best efforts to shield him. It was all he could do not to scream.
Panting Andred struggled to regain his equilibrium. When finally he had his balance again he realized that it was Joyanne’s not Elia’s nager he was leaning on. Andred beat a hasty nageric retreat placing his left hand on Elia’s right wrist for a better contact and reassurance. As he replayed the incident in his mind he zlinned Joyanne’s nager literally shove Elia’s out of the way to grab for him.
“Don’t do that!” Andred eyed her with a scowl. “Joyanne you are a menace. You’re a danger to every Sime within zlinning range and to yourself as well! I can’t help you against your will and I sure as shen won’t risk my life for someone who would just as soon kill me as look at me!”
Joyanne drew in a ragged breath and stared, as best she could, at the channel. As she replayed the incident in her mind she realized that she had shove Elia’s out of the way to grab for Andred. What, in shen, was happening to her? She didn’t work with Firsts she didn’t want to work with Firsts. Her body was betraying her again!
She looked up to see Rielle smiling gently at her. That Rielle knew what had just happened embarrassed Joyanne no end. Joyanne’s color immediately improved as a blush spread across her face. Joyanne watched Rielle’s smile grow into grin. It was annoying to say the least. “You people have no respect for the dying!”
Rielle’s grin disappeared instantly, “You’re dying by your own hand Joya. I can’t respect that.”
“At least I didn’t try to poison myself.” The instant the word were out of her mouth she regretted them.
“No, but you are trying to murder yourself none the less.” Rielle’s gaze never wavered.
Joyanne, however, couldn’t look at her friend. The truth of the words stung. This amazed her. Why should she care what anyone thought of her? Why should it matter that this woman, who had lied to her by omission for nearly two decades, thought less of her because she wanted to die? Rielle had tried to die, who the shen was she to sit in judgment? Shouldn’t she, of all people, understand?
Joyanne prepared to say what she thought of Rielle’s holier-than-thou attitude only to be stopped by the tears running quietly down Rielle’s face.
“Don’t separate us again, Joya. Don’t leave me to fight this alone. Don’t extinguish the light in those green eyes!” Rielle laid her cheek against Joyanne’s hand and cried.
Andred watched the tableau with some consternation and amazement. Elia never wavered in her protection of him and yet Joyanne's overwhelming nager made it nearly impossible to zlin anything of the obviously powerful emotions Rielle was experiencing. It was more than obvious to him that Rielle was carrying around some very deep emotional scars of her own. This did not increase his comfort level. In point of fact he was convinced that it was time to get the shen out of there! And he would have too if Elia had let go of him for even an instant.
Being immobilized by a Donor’s nager was a new experience for him. Nothing had been normal since the day he had met Joyanne.
Joyanne stroked the spun gold of Rielle’s hair. “Don’t cry Ree.” The words echoed in her mind. Don’t cry Ree – Don’t cry Ree – Don’t cry... Seventeen years and Rielle was still crying. Seventeen years and the sadness had not abated for either of them. Seventeen years and they both still mourned the loss.
Joyanne watched Rielle raise her head to look at her. Some of the color had washed out to the brilliant blue and the shadow was more evident. “Then promise me you won’t leave me.”
Promise? Could she make such a promise? Joyanne closed her eyes against the rippling motions of the room. How could she make such a promise? How could she let those lives go unanswered. How could she rid her memory of the screams of dying children? And yet... And yet, here was Rielle. Alive. Alive and well and mother of a bright happy child of her own.
Rielle’s existence had made so much of Joyanne’s life an exercise in futility. Joyanne had loved unconditionally when she had loved. She had set her heart on those whom she deemed to be the most productive part of society. She had given to them all that she had because she had counted them worthy above all others. Joyanne had borne the pain that her choices had inflicted upon her flesh with the conviction that is was a small price to pay. And she had waited to die. Her death was to be the last in a long line of deaths. Her death was to seal forever the pit of destruction that had been opened all those years ago. And now because Rielle existed Joyanne’s death would only be a meaningless gesture.
Her reverie was broken by Andred moving cautiously to sit on the side of the bed near Rielle. She watched him as best she could through the rippling plunging vertigo. She would have shielded him from the effect if she could. Andred wasn’t a bad sort and it was not his fault he was a First. Joyanne’s eyes blinked reflexively as if someone had suddenly hit her in the face with a board. What?!? She winced away from her own thoughts. Not his fault? NOT his fault? The sound of Andred’s indrawn breath as it whistled between his clinched teeth stopped her mid thought.
“What’s wrong now!?” gritted out through his still clenched teeth.
“I seem to be having impure thoughts.” Smiling weakly in apology she tried to look into the eyes of Elia whom she assumed was now shielding Andred completely. “Can you keep him safe?”
“You are rather overpowering Joyanne but I will do my best.” Joyanne heard the smile in Elia’s voice. Her sight was too blurry to make out the details of the Donor’s face.
“Andred, I won’t resist you. Please, take my field down.” Joyanne tried not to think of how many of her lifelong treasured beliefs and assumptions had just turned to worthless powder with that one request.
Ydara did her best to suppress her knowing smile. Her little ploy seemed to be working quite well. However they were cutting it pretty close. Andred was due for transfer in less than an hour. Ydara raised a questioning eyebrow at Evender who made a “shaky” gesture with his right hand while looking pointedly at Andred. If Evender didn’t like Andred’s chances in this little face off she’d arranged maybe she should rethink it. Evender had an unerring instinct for the condition of Simes, it was a talent of Edrian Gens.
She zlinned Andred again then she stopped zlinning and listened to the exchange that was going on between Andred and Joyanne. The two were circling each other like a couple of feral cats, hackles up and making warning sounds deep in their throats. Well, not literally of course. She zlinned Elia next. High-field she might be but it wasn’t anywhere near as overcharged as the field Joyanne was currently producing. In a real contest Joyanne had more muscle but not the finesse of Elia. Of course, Elia was used to using her very powerful First Order nager. Joyanne had never allowed herself to reach full-field before.
Watching them closely Ydara nodded as Andred made full contact with Joyanne. As soon as their lips met Ydara zlinned for any resistance from Joyanne. To Ydara’s surprise Joyanne had gone totally passive as Andred had begun to draw her down. She smiled this was going to work.
Andred held his draw just short of his normal transfer speed. It was going to be a real stretch to take that much selyn into his Secondary system but he had come in completely empty. Things were going well enough that he began to relax. So when Joyanne reared up to take him he was totally unprepared. She had ripped the field right out of his grasp and was attempting to flip him out of functional mode to full primary transfer mode. His body couldn’t react fast enough to stop her. But he could abort and he did. Just as he set the abort in motion Elia grabbed him with her own powerful nager and supported him with her earth solid strength. She also terminated the transfer without a hint of backlash and relaxed his abort reflex in midstream.
Disengaging he leaped across the room to the door, swung it open, bolted through it and slammed it behind him.
~*~*~*~*~*~
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