Relias: Uprising (43 page)

 They wasted no time getting to their room. One of the attendants led them to a discreetly placed door marked ‘employees only’ and led them through it. They descended several flights of stairs before ending up in a nice but not so lavishly decorated portion of the hotel which the tenant explained was the servants quarters. Since the hotel had lost a good portion of its business they had cut down largely on the amount of staff they maintained, leaving the servants’ quarters vacant.

 The attendant insisted that they shower off before going into the quarters which, after a small argument (mostly due to superiority issues) they agreed to wash off first. Morlo tried to butt his way in first but Sable stopped him, allowing the younger members of Rush to go first. While they waited Seraphine was kind enough to do a small amount of healing to Hendrick’s wounds. The reminder of where the wounds had come from drove the spike further into Hendrick’s back.

 But they all waited patiently for their turns, one by one returning from the shower cleaner than they had been in a while. And as Tess passed, Sable lightly grabbed her arm. With a sullen face but strong face, Tess regarded Sable.

 “Hey,” Sable said gently with a small, encouraging smile. “You okay?”

 Tess forced a smile, trying it clear that she was all right. But, before moving on, she returned Sable’s question.

 “Are you?”

 It shouldn’t have even had to have been asked as Sable was sure that Tess knew the answer. Luke was gone and he didn’t want anything to do with them. After years of waiting, wishing, everything amounted to what it now was. But Sable hid it well. “I’m fine.” She said with a reciprocated smile.

 Tess’s fragile smile reflected sadness and revealed her true opinion. Slowly, after all optimism had melted away and water pooled up at the base of one eye, she shook her head. “No, you aren’t.”

 Sable’s jaw tightened and her lips pursed. She struggled to contain herself as a knot thrust itself into her throat. Until this point she had done very well with controlling her emotions, yet seeing Tess struggling vainly against her own sadness brought out the worst in Sable. She released Tess’s arm and prompted her onward before she lost it entirely.

 She stood there and watched the rest of Rush pass by, followed by the rest of the Ditrinity. She hugged herself tightly with the assumption that she was still alone. But, despite that assumption, a hand rested on her shoulder, rubbing it gently. Sable reached a hand back and clasped it tightly as her eyes began to water. She already knew whose hand it was.

 “We’ve still got each other, right?” Hendrick said, his voice having a soothing tone to it that it rarely had.

 Sable didn’t know what exactly he meant, whether it was the Ditrinity as a whole or her and Hendrick specifically. Whatever he meant, she interpreted it as the latter consideration and took a good deal of comfort in it. She squeezed his hand tighter and pressed her cheek against it, closing her eyes and suspiring quietly.

 “Always.”

 “Hey Hendrick.” Pitt said from the top bunk.

 Everybody had gone to sleep for the night, wrapped up in their blankets and resting gratefully upon thick padded mattresses, a more than welcome departure from the thin, comfortless rollout pads they had been sleeping on for the past week and the itchy cotton linens they had been forced to endure, not to mention that not a one of them had an actual pillow. Now, in what might as well have been a blessing from some divine being, they slept beneath silky cotton sheets, thick down comforters and well-stuffed feather pillows. Everybody slept peacefully and soundly. Except for Pitt, obviously, as he just laid in bed with his hands clasping the bed sheets firmly beneath his chin.

 “Hendrick?” He said again, looking up at the dark ceiling with wide, tireless eyes.

 No reply. Without blinking Pitt said again, “Hendrick?”

 This time there was a shuffling on the mattress below him, followed by an exasperated groan.

 “Hey kid, you ever heard of aggravated assault?”

 “Do you ever just sit in bed at night and think?” Pitt asked, disregarding Hendrick’s statement entirely.

 “You know, now that I think about it, I do.” Hendrick replied, his words sounding mockingly sincere. “Right up until I fall asleep.”

 “Have you ever thought about time?” Pitt asked, still looking unblinkingly at the ceiling.

 “Like the amount of time I get to sleep after a week of walking?”

 Pitt was still oblivious to Hendrick’s hints. “No, I mean like time itself. Future, past, present, that sort of stuff. I mean, I was just thinking about it and, mathematically speaking, there are other worlds out there in the universe, right? There’s trillions upon trillions of stars with planets and moons that probably circle every single one of them. Even if life on this moon of ours was a one in a trillion shot, that would mean that there are still billions if not trillions of others planets out there that have life on them, right? And don’t you think that at least one of those trillions of planets developed long enough before ours that it might have the technology to come and visit planets or, in our case, moons?”

 “You’re talkin about aliens, kid. Not time. What’s this got to do with anything?”

 “Well I was thinking about all the different stars out there and then I started thinking about how many lightyears each of them were away from here and that made me think about how much time it would take to develop the technology that it would take to be able to get to those other stars and then
that
made me think about the intradimensional pathways that the Dimenisors use which made me think about how they could only cross space as opposed to space-time which made me think about time travel.”

 “Take a breath kid.”

 “So then I got to thinking. If time travel is possible which, according to Rowling’s Arc Theory, it is, though only backwards in time… well, relativity says you can but that method’s cheating… then at some point in the future somebody developed that technology and if used it to travel back in time to a point before now, then they’ve already done it and our current reality has already been altered because of it.”

 This time Hendrick had nothing to say. Instead, he focused his efforts on wrapping his mind about what Pitt had explained.

 “Say what?”

 “Say a person in the future hops into a time machine and comes back in time. Now a lot of people will make the argument that their actions will create an alternate reality at that point and separate timelines will form wherever it was that those people travelled back in time. But according to Arc Theory which is just short of a completely proven principle, any time a person goes back in time they meld with the timeline that they were already on and, instead of creating an alternate reality, they add to the one that they were already in. So, theoretically, that person could live alongside themselves if they chose to.”

 There was a deep voice that came from the opposite end of the room. “My god, shut up!”

 “Kinda cool to think about, don’t ya think?”

 “No! It’s not!” It was Morlo. “

 “Ee’s right.” Sounded an accented grumble from Kristik. “Shut up!”

 “He’s gonna talk and you all are gonna fold your pillows over your heads and go to sleep!”

 There was an immediate silence as everything once again went quiet. Pitt’s eyes narrowed in surprise. He leaned towards the edge of the bed as though doing so would make himself better heard. “Thank you, Hendrick.”

 “Shut up. Now keep going with this Arc Theory stuff.”

 Pitt’s mouth stretched out in a yawn and was accompanied by what sounded like a large animal getting the air sucked from its lungs. Pitt rolled onto his side and pulled his covers tighter around his chin. “Maybe some other time.”

 “Wha… No, you woke me up and you’re going to answer every damn question I have, you little bastard.”

 Pitt was snoring just as Hendrick finished his statement. Hendrick clenched his teeth and folded his arms. “You’re not… you’re not asleep. I know you’re not asleep.”

 Pitt kept snoring, and Hendrick was quick to give up. With his eye brows furrowed and a scowl on his face, Hendrick looked up with frustrated disapproval at Pitt’s upper bunk. But soon, doing the same as everybody else in the room, Hendrick’s eyes got heavier and heavier until he was soon snoring louder than anybody else in the room.

Chapter 23

 The Legionnaires came down on the forest’s edge hard and fast. The others were lucky that they made it out when they did. With the amount of security seeming heavier and thicker by the minute, Luke could only hope that they were able to make it inside the city without detection.

 That was the thought that kept tearing at Luke’s mind.

 They didn’t understand how Luke was looking at things. He tried to make them understand that he cared, he honestly did. But it only took a slight mention of the Legionnaires before he was driven to drop everything and rip them to pieces. And that was when Luke wasn’t sure if he even knew himself anymore.

 Why was he so bent around killing Legionnaires? Even with the Ditrinity in consideration, Luke was the only person that the Legionnaire’s feared, even respected. They regarded the Ditrinity with caution, but never apprehension or fear. Maybe it was because Luke knew that the Legionnaire had to be defeated and he was one of the only men who could help that happen.

 But that wasn’t it. It couldn’t be it. Otherwise why would Luke have been so willing to abandon the Darks and the entire resistance in order to protect Tess?

 
Tess.
Luke thought as his eyes lit up in an epiphany. Tess was the reason. Or, more so, his family. She was all that Luke had left and Luke wanted to protect her at all costs. But his anger over the destruction of his family trumped the feelings of love that he felt and blinded him to other options.

 That’s when it struck him. Love and concern is what used to drive him, but because the objects his love and concern had been stripped from him, those feelings were replaced by a feeling almost as powerful: Revenge.

 They killed his family, his people, and they did it with a sick, sadistic smile on their face. They tortured them, mutilated them, hunted them tirelessly and dispatched of them mercilessly. They were the white-armored footmen of the devil himself and every last one of them had to die.

 Revenge trumped love. The realization made Luke sick. He thought about the Ditrinity, pulling him from the prison in Styne, supporting him in every ill-advised endeavor that he pursued, even backing him up against the Darks, their own side, when they made attempts to harm Luke. They were as loyal as they came, and Luke had betrayed them. And Tess, she was Luke’s daughter and he loved her more than anything in the world, and for all she knew Luke didn’t care about her in the slightest.

 Concealed within a muddy, tangled mess of roots, Luke watched from the darkness as Legionnaires combed the area, provoked by the violent disturbance between him and Hendrick. Nightwolves sniffed at piles of leaves and at trees, while Berserkers, Knights, and Skirmishers worked in a criss-cross, covering every last inch of ground in search of the perpetrators. Luke remained motionless, his scent covered by the scent of wet dirt, wood and greenery, and thought of a number of different ways he could turn this investigating squad into crimson gelatinous chunks of flesh. As he did, thoughts of his family, of Trina, came to mind. Then, the face of Frenz, laughing at him, as he laid on the ground helpless at Olsgrad Canyon.

 His breath became sharp and his jaw set. His hand shot back to his sword as he found his first target; a Skirmisher, skirting dangerously close to Luke’s position. Luke could drag him into the darkness and rip his heart out before any of the others could tell he was gone.

 Then he thought of Tess. The way she looked at him when he hurt her. The way she looked at him back in Praemon, or even earlier that day. The feelings he felt seeing her face and the faces of the Ditrinity made him want to tear his own heart out, and the recollection of those feelings calmed Luke, brought him back to his senses. He calmed his breathing and he fell back into the darkness.

 Luke had been fooling himself. He’d been thinking that he was doing the world a favor, justifying the mass slaughtering of thousands of Legionnaires when, though he told himself that he was doing it to destroy the Commune, he was doing it because he hated them. He hated them as much as it was possible for anybody to hate. But, in the end, Luke knew that he loved his friends, his family, even more.

 And he thought of what Sable had said, about him being sent to make things right. God, whoever or whatever he was, did have a hand in the world. It wasn’t through miracles, it wasn’t through divine intervention, but it was through people. It was through him.

 Luke had wronged the Ditrinity and Tess. It was time he became the leader they had always believed him to be.

Chapter 24

 “Welcome to the Leramato Shipyards.” Merino said, sweeping his arm across the massive open space behind him. “It’s the third largest airport in the world and has twenty multi-level terminals that are a mile and a half long each with fifteen of those terminals having twenty mobile jet ways which is enough to handle a Helio and even the next larger version whenever they come out with it.” Merino led them through the airport, between the luggage racks, past the bag-laden airport workers, and following the faded yellow line that all passengers were supposed to follow.

 The Leramato Shipyard doubled as a commercial port and a military one as well. There were two sections designated for each purpose, the commercial section of the airport being clean, contemporarily designed and consumer friendly, while the military side was just the bare bones; the management on that particular side of the airport had no concern with making the girders, beams, and bare cement visually appealing. Instead, it was a shimmering steel forest of grated elevators, intersecting walkways and the trusses that supported them, all of which formed a chaotic patchwork hundreds of feet in the air.