The Second Wave (23 page)

Had one whole season passed? It had felt like
forever to her.

Tentatively she called out, but her voice was
swallowed by the wind and her words fell uselessly into the snow.
Concentrating on climbing down, she refused to listen to a nagging
doubt that hissed inside her mind, a voice she wouldn’t listen to,
a thought she would never acknowledge: that perhaps she had been in
the darkness forever; perhaps John was long gone; perhaps she was
indeed all alone now.

Somehow she made it to the village through
the forest and the snow. It was a relief to see it was still there.
It seemed bigger to her—the fence that surrounded it was oddly
shaped, as if it had been moved or grown. The stables she
remembered were now inside the enclosure and they, too, were larger
than she recalled them. But the houses were still there, although
nobody was about. People kept indoors because of the blizzard, but
Eugenia couldn’t know that. As far as she could tell from the
boarded up buildings the village was deserted.

The cold cut her skin. It ripped effortlessly
through the scarce protection the dress provided. Her teeth
chattered against one another. The snowflakes which landed on her
bare arms and legs melted from her body’s temperature and
immediately froze over in the biting wind, effectively covering her
in a tiny layer of ice.

When she finally reached house number
twenty-three, she couldn’t feel herself anymore. In a last outburst
of strength she hammered against the wooden door. Then she sagged
against the frame, seeking what little protection she found under
the canopy. Maybe she heard footsteps over the storm, but she
wasn’t even sure of that.

The door opened and she found herself face to
face with someone familiar at last. Peter looked different from how
she remembered him, more serious, sterner, with wide, surprised
eyes; but it might just be the shock and the surprise that deformed
his features to her eyes.

He swore by way of a greeting. He immediately
wrapped an arm around her cold waist and led her inside, where it
was suddenly warm and bright. She found the strength to ask for
him, but when Peter replied all vigour fled her bones and she
collapsed.

* * * *

It was a harsh winter and it seemed to go on
forever. The villagers were prepared, but it was still a dark and
trying time that consisted mostly of chopping fire wood, knitting
more blankets, and seeing to it that the animals in their pens were
taken care of anyway. The children, who usually loved snow in the
first weeks, were almost tired of it now. They wished for Spring
every time their parents wrapped them up in yet another layer of
clothing before they let them play outside.

Things had changed on Alternearth. For one
thing, the wormhole never reopened since the day Elizabeth Burke
came to visit, leaving the colonists completely by themselves.
After a time, they even gave up preparing a second colony, as it
became clear that nobody was coming anytime soon.

Another thing was that they never built the
temple the workmen had insisted on. John forbade it, and somewhere
along the line, the man nobody trusted in the beginning became the
one person everybody turned to for a while. Things had changed
indeed.

And John didn’t live in number twenty-three
anymore.

The blizzard had been raging for almost three
days without interruption. Finally today was the day Peter refused
to even get dressed. He wasn’t going to leave the house, there
wasn’t any wood to be chopped for now; he was going to spend a
quiet day in with a book and a bowl of soup.

In the middle of chapter seventeen he heard
the faintest of knocks on the door. It sounded more like fingers
brushing gently over wood than an actual knock, but Peter got up to
check nonetheless. And there she was. He recognized her at first
sight, she hadn’t changed a bit. She was even wearing the same
dress she wore that horrible day that had changed everything.
Shivering in the frost, snow on her shoulders, icicles in her hair,
teeth chattering so loudly it was breaking his heart.

“Sweet Ceres!” was all he managed. And
because they were both about to get snowed in, he carefully nudged
her inside the house and closed the door against the storm. Her
body felt like it was made out of rime. It wasn’t easy to
distinguish words in between her teeth chattering, but he thought
she asked for John.

He said, “John doesn’t live here
anymore.”

It was probably the cold rather than his
words that drained all energy from her. He caught her before she
could hit the floor, then carried her into the living room and laid
her down on the sofa.

“What happened? Who is it?”

Wearing nothing but his pyjamas, Luke stood
in the door to their bedroom, rubbing his eyes. Infected with the
staying-indoors bug, he had dozed off half an hour ago.

“I am sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you. Would
you be so kind as to help me move the couch, please?!”

Together they moved the sofa as close to the
open fireplace than they thought was safe. It was only then that
Luke took a good long look at the woman lying on it, while Peter
went to fetch all the blankets he could find.

“She looks familiar,” he stated on Peter’s
return.

“She might just, yes. You see, this,”
answered Peter, carefully spreading the blankets on top of her, “is
our very own Eugenia.”

Luke was too bewildered to help Peter spread
the covers. “The crazy woman?”

“Woman, yes. Crazy, I was never quite
sure.”

“But she’s dead.”

“It would appear, my love, she isn’t.
Although how she could have survived out there all this time all by
herself is rather a mystery to me.”

When Eugenia had positively vanished
underneath the woollen quilts, Peter stepped back, a pensive look
in his eyes. “She came here for John.”

Luke didn’t reply. He had never got used to
John. The initial jealousy had lessened, but hadn’t gone away
completely. Peter was over Duncan’s death, but parts of him would
never get over John. It was the con man’s fault that Peter was
never going to be entirely his; Luke reserved himself the right to
hate him for that.

Number forty-two, where John, now a regular
fisherman, lived, was close to the stables. The march on foot
through the blizzard, carrying the tightly wrapped bundle that was
the still unconscious Eugenia, almost took Peter twenty minutes. He
sincerely hoped John was home and not outside somewhere tending to
the animals whose company he kept these days.

John was the one who found out it was
relatively easy to catch and tame the gigantic hounds who lived in
the subway tunnel system and the forest, so he was mostly in charge
of them. They were, once domesticated, loyal creatures and
generally mild-mannered servants, despite their terror inducing
appearance.

Peter was in luck: before he could even
knock, the door opened and he practically marched into John, who
was just about to go to the stables and see after the hounds. They
were restless that day.

* * * *

The first thing she
noticed was a warmth around her. A comfortable, almost hot cocoon
made from blankets. She was lying in a bed; the storm and the snow
nothing more than a memory. The second thing she noticed was the
soft crackling of fire close to her. But when she opened her eyes,
alarmed by the proximity of the flames, she saw it was a small,
tame fire in a hearth. She sat upright to view her
surroundings.

“Hello, love.”

Peter, sitting in a chair by the bed, watched
Eugenia regain consciousness. Some color crept back into her
cheeks. Her hair, having dried completely, stood out in all
directions, a ridiculous garland around her face. As soon as she
recognized him, she fell back into the pillows to stare numbly at
the ceiling, as if there were no point in speaking to him.

“I have so many questions right now, young
Eugenia,” Peter told her, keeping his voice as soft as he could.
“But I understand you came to see John.”

Her head snapped around so she could fix him
with a hopeful glance. “You know where he is.” It was more of a
question, although she said it like a statement.

“He is in the other room. He couldn’t bear to
see you.”

“And I cannot bear to
not
see him!”
She struggled free from the blanket and swiftly jumped to her feet.
Swayed for a second, then steadied herself and wanted to rush out
of the small bedroom. He held her back. “Let me explain to you
something before you speak to him.”

The house was unfamiliar to her, but even
though she wasn’t able to tap into her peoples’ minds anymore, she
was painfully aware that John would be in the room farthest from
hers.

He was. He stood at a window with his back to
her, staring out into the storm that was beginning to calm. Another
hearth was flickering. Its flames casting shadows that danced over
his back, giving the illusion of movement, though he stood
absolutely still. Not even a reaction when she spoke his name. If
possible, he froze even more when he heard her.

At a loss of what to say, she walked up to
him and wrapped her arms around his chest, pressing herself against
his back as tightly as she had the strength to hold on to.

“It wasn’t my fault,” she whispered. “I
promise, I would never have left you.”

“There is no fault,” he replied
automatically. His voice was thick with unspoken words. “Only
fate.”

It was not their fate to live like this, to
experience the pain that had almost destroyed her when they were
away from each other. No fate, she told him, should be as cruel as
that. His hands went up to cover hers while she talked, while she
ranted on about the suffering and the darkness. Garbled sentences
that made little or no sense to him, because although she knew the
words, she mixed them up in her haste to get it off her soul.

“Be quiet, woman,” he chided her
affectionately. “Or must I kiss you into silence again?”

Eugenia felt her heart stop for a beat and
his fasten its pace under her fingertips.

“Yes, please.”

Finally he turned around, without breaking
their embrace, and before she could prepare herself, he was kissing
her like he had that night so many eternities ago.

He looked different, but not much. A beard
adorned both cheek and chin now and his hair had grown out. His
face showed small, hard lines where it had once been smooth. Only
the eyes were the same—they had always seemed older than he
was.

It was beyond Eugenia to understand what had
happened. How five years could have passed here, when, although it
had felt like forever, she knew that only a few minutes had gone by
in her darkness.

* * * *

Tom deLuca returned from his trip to the
cafeteria with a mouthful of peanut chocolate and a handful of
vanilla wafers. When he spoke, the chocolate tried to leave its
calcium cage by any means necessary, “Bobby says hello.”

“What took you so long?” his brother asked, a
hint of impatience in his demeanour. Phil was sitting on the table
that took up the middle of their chamber, his feet on a chair. A
stack of print-outs rested in his lap.

“Sorry. Bobby spread the word immediately.
They’re planning a party at the cafeteria.”

“I hate to be the bearer of unfortunate news,
man, but there won’t be any party. Tony’s online again.”

“That was quick! How did you do that?” Tom,
dropping the wafers on the table, rushed to the monitors to check.
His fingers flew over two keyboards simultaneously to access all
the data at once.

“I didn’t,” Phil explained while his brother
studied the screen. “But I’m fairly certain I know what caused
it.”

By way of a further explanation he used his
pencil to point at the papers in his lap. “I wanted to secure our
high score and accidentally printed out Tony’s status report. Look
at that.”

Tom joined his brother on the table. He
grabbed for the papers and began skimming over the pages that
contained seemingly endless rows of numbers and digits—a language
the two of them were even more fluent in than their native
tongue.

“This is impossible,” he stated after he’d
read the first three pages.

“Indeed it is. So I also printed out
all
of the other reports,” Phil used his foot to indicate a
knee high stack of paper on the floor, “to double check. This is
pretty sound proof.”

Thinking of the amount of documents they now
had to carefully read through, Tom gave a world weary sigh. But
moaning wasn’t going to help, he knew. If what the report stated
was true and not a bug in the file, then they had to call the
general and perhaps a whole lot of other people, too. If it was
true, then further colonization of Alternearth was dangerous,
impossible even.

“I must admit, I am at a floss,” General
Fatique admitted about five hours later. He had refused to enter
the brothers’ room, so the three of them were in his office, where
Tom and Phil had brought the more essential print-outs, which now
covered the general’s desk as well as most of the floor.

“What are you trying to tell me,
doctors?”

Phil shrugged, obviously impatient with
Fatique’s inability to read binary. “Alternearth moves.”

“Of course it does,” Fatique replied,
impatient himself with the twins’ inability to come straight
forward with information. “So does Earth.”

Tom and Phil deLuca had been hired, among
other things, to keep the planets’ orbits from interfering with the
stabilisation of the wormhole. It was among their many duties to
keep the computers calculating to counterbalance those movements
and ensure a safe passageway through both realities. If they had
slacked on their job, this was an amazingly ill chosen moment to
tell him.