I Am Not Junco Omnibus: Books Four - Six (64 page)

Jasus fucking Christ. Enough with the mind-reading shit.

Fucking aliens. I hate that mind-reading shit. It’s so fucking unfair. And that farsight shit is just as bad. I mean, what the fuck? How unjust is it that some people—aliens—can see the fucking future? It’s not right. It’s not right and it really pisses me off, actually. Especially Rikan. That bastard knew everything. Shit, he probably knew about this little side trip of mine.

Side trip? Is that what you call this?

Hey, whose fucking mind is this anyway? Get the hell out.

And Lucan. He knows everything too, I feel that to be true. He says he doesn’t, but I don’t believe him. And Tier just went picking through my mind like it was a goldmine of information.

Hehe, but they never saw this coming. Nope, this was a total surprise.

You just keep telling yourself that, Junco.

All right. What the fuck? Who’s there?

This is my fucked-up life, OK? Go get your own.

Oh my God. What if that’s Inanna?

I swear, bitch, I’ll kill you again if that’s you!

Nothing.

That’s what I thought.

I’m the fucking queen up here… in… the nothingness of… Pillar Seven.

Oh. Motherfucking. Fuck.

Now we’re getting somewhere.

I’m not floating on a galactic wind… I’m in the fucking Pillar!

Oh my God. I fucked it up! I can’t even dissipate myself correctly! I scattered myself inside a giant fucking container!

Suddenly the pull on me is stronger, like a current pulling me downstream. I paddle my arms and kick my feet, desperately trying to swim back upstream. I fight it. It pulls, I resist. The new current calls to me, it goes from light and nudging to strong and persuading.

And then it’s a force.

It consumes me. It’s gravity and I’m mass.

I’m pulled backwards by my feet, spinning as I fall though the nothing, the black preventing me from spatially aligning myself to anything other than the wind I create with my backwards motion. My hair is flying up, the air that should not be possible in a vacuum whipping against my cheeks. Drying out my eyes and lips.

And then the spiral intensifies. I pick up speed, like I’m being sucked inward instead of shooting out and away.

“No!”

I scream it in my head and it comes out as words. This surprises me so much I do it again.

“No!”

I paddle my arms and legs more frantically now, desperately trying to get back to the dark. But it’s no use. The black turns a dark gray, then less dark, and less.

And then it’s not black, it’s red.

And the red recedes to allow yellow to leak into my new world.

Maybe I’m being changed into light?

Oh, for fuck’s sake, Junco! Wake the fuck up!

I’m just about to say
I’m not asleep
when water enters my mouth and slides down my throat.

I choke, desperately gasping for air, but more and more water floods into my mouth.

And then my eyes fly open and I can see again.

I’m not in the black or the yellow, but the green. The green of brightly lit lake water. There are plants waving in the currents I create with my thrashing, and small fish with brightly colored scales float by along with the bits of organic filth.

My survival instincts kick in and I tip my head back and point it at the sunlight above the water.

I shoot forward like a bullet and breach the surface of the water, my mouth open, choking, coughing and spilling water out as my lungs ache for the liquid to be replaced by air.

My arms flail around, desperate to prevent my body from sinking back under again, and then it enters me in a rush. Oxygen. I inhale, I suck in air like an intake fan and heat radiates up from my toes, spreads into my ankles, up my calves, into my torso, down my arms and then finally… my mind.

My mind is back.

You can’t ever trust the mind-reading skills of these aliens.

All the locks are unlocked.

All the closets are open.

All the trunks are empty.

All the secrets are known.

I am in my lake. And standing in front of me, on the edge of a dock, is HOUSE.

She’s scowling at me, her arms crossed over her little chest, her flip-flopped foot tapping out an impatient rhythm on the unpainted gray wood, and all around me are brightly scaled fish that reflect sunlight.

I spit out some water and laugh. “Ha!”

“Ha, yourself, Junco. I’ve been waiting for you!”

I dunk my body under the water again to flatten out my long hair, then pop back up and spit out another gulp of disgusting lake water. “I didn’t know, HOUSE. I was sorta incapacitated.”

And then I look past her and see two things. My cabin. And my twine.

I burst into tears and start to sink.

But there’s a splash and some waves and then his strong hands grab me and pull me back up. We break the surface together and he hugs me tight around the chest as he swims to shore, dragging me behind him. Then I’m in his arms and he’s walking up the beach to the cabin.

“Just relax, Junco. I’ve got you.”

But I cry instead. “Isten!”

“Shhh,” he whispers into my neck.

“Isten,” I whisper back. “Why? Why did you leave me? You promised. You promised it would be forever. You’d never give me away. You promised.”

He carries us through the door and sits down on the couch with me in his lap. And he just holds me as I cry.

All that hurt. All that sadness. All that insanity. It pours out of me in a stream of misery and pain.

“Please, Isten. Can we stay here?”

“Junco…”

“Please, Isten. Don’t make me go back.” He sighs underneath me and I start to beg. “Please, please, please… don’t make me go back!”

He strokes my wet hair, then my cheeks, also wet, but with tears as well as lake water. “We have a little bit of time, Junco, so stop crying, please. We have a little bit of time. Let’s enjoy it.”

“No! That’s not fair!” I struggle to right myself, but he holds me tight.

“Listen, Junco,” he says softly as he pulls my mouth into his neck and leans over my ear. “OK? Just listen. Calm down, and hear what I have to say, please.”

Everything hurts in this instant. Everything. My head, my arms, my legs. My heart.

My heart hurts so fucking bad I might split right down the middle. How can being with him feel so good and hurt so bad at the same time?

Because I know. He’s not really here. Isten is dead.

I’m not really here. This is fake. It’s just another way to trick me into believing in them.

“I’m real, Junco. I swear, I’m real. And I promise you, after we leave here, you
will
see me again.”

I shake my head. “You’re lying.”

“No, Junco. I swear. It’s a gift. It’s a gift from someone who loves you very much.”

“Who?” I ask, swiping my hand across my eyes to wipe the tears.

“He’ll tell you himself when it’s time.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Yes, you do,” he says with Isten boldness. “You believe everyone.” And then he laughs. Like that was funny.

“That’s not fucking funny!”

“We don’t lie to you, Junco. You’ll see. We’re not lying. We just can’t tell you everything, that’s all. It only works if you act on your own free will.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Your Destiny, Junco. Your Destiny is to save us all. So please, forgive us if we keep our secrets close. Every living thing in the Solar System depends on our discretion.”

“Why me, Isten? Why me? I don’t want to do this! I don’t want to do any of this!”

“But you will do it, Junco. Because you’ve been trained your whole life to follow orders. And your commander is going to give you one final order. All you have to do is complete the mission. One final mission, then you’re free. Do you understand? Complete this last job and you’re free.”

I don’t even want to know what this mission is, but my mouth betrays me, because it’s already asking the question.

“Kill, Junco. Just do exactly what you were trained to do. Just. Kill.”

Chapter Eight—JUNCO

I wake in a soft bed and immediately reach back to feel the residual bone left over from when Inanna amputated my wings. The skin is smooth and taut, but the bumps are still there.

Sometimes I feel like my wings were a dream. Everything is a dream. Of course, when you’re insane, that’s pretty easy to believe. You just let things slip a little and if you’re me, the crazy wiggles right in to take the place of sanity. It’s almost a perfect fit in my case.

The crazy, I mean. Not the sanity. Sanity and I are not friends. We’re like Ashur and Braun, or Lucan and Inanna.

I sigh into my pillow. Damn, it sure smells good for being fake.

“It’s not fake, Junco.”

I shoot up and the sheets fall away, exposing a pretty white camisole top I had no idea I was wearing. Sera sits at the end of my bed.

My bed.

The bed I shared with Charlie all those weeks when I was going through that first morph.

“Get out,” I snarl. I’m not sure why I have this severe dislike for her, I just do.

“No,” she replies as she smooths down her flowing red hair. “Today is a work day, Junco. Get out of bed. You’re on the clock. We have a lot of things to go over and I have other places to be, so don’t waste my time.”

I lie back down and snuggle back into my covers. I can feel her move and I decide to give her a warning. “Let me be very clear here, Sera. If you touch me, if you speak to me, if you look at me, I will never get out of this bed. Isten already let the truth slip, honey. You guys can’t make me do anything, so fuck off.”

She sighs, like she’s about to test me with speech.

“And I do mean that in the most literal sense possible. I’m not done doing whatever it is I’m doing in here. I’m not fucking done. When I
am
done, I will let you fuckers know. Now, go do whatever it is you need to do and leave my motherfucking cabin—or I promise, I will do the exact opposite of everything you ask me. And I have no problem with it.” I sit up and look her in the eye for this last part. “I will let them all die, Sera, just out of spite. So do not fucking push me.”

She disappears.

And then Isten rolls over and drawls out in his sleepy voice, “What the fuck, Junco?”

I shrug and lay my head on his chest. “I deserve some happy minutes, Isten. I really do. And I meant it. I’m not done with you yet. I’m not moving, I’m not getting up, I’m not doing anything except enjoying you for this whole day.”

He laughs underneath me and it’s only then that I notice. I never tried to count him.

It makes me sit upright. “Isten!”

He throws his arms wide and the sheet falls away, revealing his bare chest. “What?”

“I didn’t count you!”

“I got nothing for that, Juncs.” He pulls me back down and plays with my hair. “Come here.”

I do. I have no desire to deny Isten anything. He could tell me to pretty much do anything right now and I’d say yes.

“What’s that mean, you didn’t count me?”

I don’t want to talk about it, but I do because he asked. I start from the beginning, just like I did with Tier. And Isten listens and never interrupts once. He lets me tell him everything. About my sickness. The OCD that compels me to count things, mostly breaths these days, but the stars in the past. And how I got started playing piano and doing the mounted aerialist stuff on horseback.

“How come I never saw this stuff, Junco? When we twined?”

“I locked it up, Isten. If you could find it, then so could I. And I needed to forget all that bad stuff. It made me insane, it took over my mind. It just hurt too much.”

“Does it hurt now?”

I think about this for a few minutes. I revisit the memories. The Stag training. Which actually, now that I know how big a role Gideon played in my childhood, is not so bad. Yeah, all those Stag visits were scary and hard, but Gideon was there for most of them. “Some of them do, Is. Like the years with that clone father. That stuff still hurts. And the time with Inanna, that still hurts. But my dad did a pretty good job raising me, don’t you think?”