Two friends clinked their nonexistent glasses together to toast the crisp summer evening. They had been engaged in this celebration every night for years so that by this time, the operation of their ghostly limbs ran on mere mechanical memory. They sat perched like parrots on two finely gilded chairs at a table carved with the intricate golden pattern of a thunder dragon, its vine-like body coiling around the table legs like a boa preparing to consume its hapless prey. Both regarded, for a moment, the looming TV tower that rose high above them outside, and a strange feeling of nostalgia overcame them before they drained the content of the dead air they cupped in their dark hands.
The door to their restaurant retreat suddenly swung open, but neither reacted to the odd tattooed girl that emerged, quiet and strangely fearful, nor the little yipping dog that surveyed his surroundings before ambling up to the table.
"Excuse us, lovebirds."
With that statement, the dog jumped right through one member of the shadow-wreathed couple, and her form dissipated entirely into the air. The companion, now alone, did not even look at the staring Tribal girl. He simply bowed his head and vanished, too. The passions of the dead were nothing compared to the affairs of the living in this world.
And it looked like these two had something to talk about.
Jespar placed his pack on the table and cast a surreptitious glance at Rain-Born, who still had not taken her seat.
"Geeze, do I have to ask ya to sit?"
"You promised me an explanation," she said. "No more games?"
He winked at her. "Just one more."
She frowned but sat in the chair and winced at its ornate extravagance bordering on excessive. She yearned for the simplicity of the suburban hovel she had seen before entering this city death trap. Then her mind flew back to the Chainmen and her bloodied hands as she decapitated their leader, and she remembered that there truly was nothing of the Old World that was not tainted.
Jespar rummaged in his bag full of water, looking for something, sniffing around, prodding the corners of the rucksack as only a creature like him could. It made Rain-Born chuckle, despite everything.
But his lack of urgency frightened her. Though his body was now calm, his every word seemed tinged with panic.
"You know, I was saving these," he said from within the bowels of the bag. "For some rainy day, maybe, when I could look back on our little adventure and smile and think about how much ass we kicked. You gotta admit," he said as his face appeared from the satchel with two small canisters clenched in his teeth. "We kicked some serious ass."
He set one cylindrical canister on the table and nosed the other towards her.
She caught it as it rolled towards the table's edge with ease, still looking at his terrified eyes.
"We showed the Deadlands who's boss," she agreed.
He chuckled meekly as he used his teeth to operate the small metal hook-like device at the canister's apex. "I love it when you talk like a shithead."
"I'm talking like you!"
"Exactly," he replied as he pierced the can with its metal hook and allowed the gas it produced to escape into the air with a fizz. Rain-Born wondered what kind of water was possibly contained within.
He took it in both his paws and gestured to Rain-Born's can.
"Go on! It's a present, Chief. A little something extra I picked up from ol' Venchenzo, the rascal."
She saw he wouldn't drink without her. She knew this custom in the tribe – the sacred Harma-Durr was only consumed by companions to sanctify agreements. And yet, what exactly was she agreeing to here?
Despite these thoughts, she opened the can by mimicking Jespar's action, using her thumb and forefinger to force the hooked device into the object and pierce it open, tearing the metal away and revealing a frothy, yellow liquid within.
The ingenuity of the Old World never failed to amaze her. They truly knew how to complicate even the most basic of functions.
"Jespar," she said as she stared at the swirling liquid. "This looks like piss."
"Ha!" he burst out. "Well, we Old Worlders just loved this kinda piss in our day," he said. Then he leaned forward and tapped the rim of her can with his own. "Cheers!"
She stared at him with sudden shock.
"It's a tradition!" He explained. "We're two friends celebrating the end of our journey with a nightcap. All you gotta do is say the word."
She nodded slowly as she understood the intention. She even managed a half smile. Sitting here, surrounded by tables filled with the shadows of the past, she could see them performing the same act. Everything here was like a play being staged for an audience that did not exist or one that had long since departed.
"Cheers," she said, and they both raised their cans to drink.
At first, she tasted only the bitterness of the beverage, then, noticing that Jespar seemed intent on gulping down as much of the liquid as possible, she continued drinking out of politeness to his culture. Only then did her head begin to feel overcome with a kind of heat that she could only associate with feverish symptoms or the thrill of combat in the canyon. She put the can down and, sputtering, made a sudden discovery.
"Jespar, this is alcohol."
He gulped another mouthful, and she saw the cheeks on his greedy face turn lambent red before he placed his drink back on the table, threw back his head, and belched, howling "Yeah!" and "Wow!" in equal measure.
Once more, he had her stupefied.
She looked at the liquid and then back at him. She said nothing.
"Y'know," he burped. "If there is a God, someday I wanna meet 'im and ask 'im two things. One: What's the meaning of life? And two: If you're so great, why in the name of Hell did you make it so that chocolate and booze could kill dogs?"
She remained neutral. "Is that why you brought me here? To watch you drink yourself to death?
He frowned, swaying. "Hey, I didn't say it'd kill me. I'm different. I'm a bonafide miracle of nature. I'm a-"
"Enough!"
She slammed the can on the table, letting its contents spill onto the floor and pool beneath her feet. He huffed and wheezed like an old, decaying man. There was the fear again in his eyes – his tiny trembling body and his sad smirk that betrayed the mind of a creature that held the weight of the world on his hairy shoulders.
"Fine," he said quietly. "Fine, Chief, fine."
He kept himself steady, for he was looking at her too. He was looking at a girl that was starting to see the truth of things already. He was looking at someone realizing that he was a piece of shit good for nothing hustler for the first time.
"You ever heard of a game called "Twenty Questions"?"
She shook her head. "No," she said, lips trembling as the word spilled out.
He leaned forward and winked. "It's an easy one. See: I ask you a question. You answer. You ask me one. I answer. We go till someone can't answer anything else."
"It sounds like a mean game," Rain-Born said, trying to control her twitching hands clenched together on her lap. "We should have played it sooner."
"You think it's mean now? Just wait," he said, baring his fangs in a mischievous smile. "Tonight, we're gonna break all our rules. We're gonna be free."
She noticed a melancholy groan issue from him as he said the word, as though this admission was somehow painful. He looked ready to melt into the chair he was perching on.
"Question 1," he said, sipping generously from his can, holding it with his outstretched paws. "Why're you lookin' for Callisto?"
So it is to be like this, she thought. We are to bandy our curiosity around like old women gossiping by the fireside. But another part of her knew that this was his way of letting her in, for the first time, really, on their journey. And childish curiosity is a force more powerful than any tribal conditioning.
So, with apologies muttered to Father-Mother, she played along.
"Father-Mother sent me on this quest to find Callisto," she said simply. "They need it to protect the tribe from the hordes of the Guthra, who have attacked us since before I was born."
Jespar sipped his can nonchalantly, acknowledging this truth as though he already knew the answer.
"Your turn," was all he said.
She breathed deeply. His mind games did not provide the thrill of combat she was accustomed to. This was a different duel altogether.
"What is Callisto?" she asked.
He looked at her, his eyes narrowed to slits and pursed his lips. "You have been searching for it all this time, and you don't know what it is?"
"It's my turn to ask, Jespar. Yours to answer."
He smirked, "Touche," he said, though he kept his gaze level with her and sipped again from the dregs of his can. "You don't know," he said quietly.
Then he leaned forward as though some hidden passion had suddenly taken him.
"You know what a gate is, right?"
She nodded.
"Well," he said tentatively, looking at some of the ghosts that had started turning their attention towards them, their spectral mouths forming the word "Callisto" like mute puppets. "Suppose there's this invisible gate between your mind and the world. A gate that's normally locked up, tight. For good reason. But, suppose there was a key that could open this gate right up so that your thoughts could pass through into this lovely little world. That key is Callisto."
She tried to follow his meaning but was stopped partly by the explanation and partly by the manner of contempt in which he spoke that name.
"It is magic?" she asked innocently. "It conjures that which exists in our heads?"
"Oh, it's no magic," he scoffed. "Nothing so high and mighty. It's nothing more or less than every artist's wet dream. I never did pay much attention to the theories the lab coats put out there, but I know enough. And all you have to know is that it never did the world any good."
He looked at her with burning hatred, a desire for vengeance that had never once ignited in his eyes.
"You know what killed humankind, Rain-Born?" He asked.
She frowned. "Weapons of the Old Ones. Evil magicks and steel dragons. Father-Mother tells of the days of fire that blazed through the Old World. They tell of the cataclysm that their hubris brought. They tell-"
"Imagination!" he roared like a possessed beast. Then, quieter, he whispered. "Imagination killed us all."
She looked at his depressed, sagging form, seeming to become more and more deflated as the truth spilled from his shaking lips. She pondered the meaning of this. Her world – was it all merely the product of some Old World denizens" thoughts? Was she and her people nothing more than the children of such frivolous fancies?
"No," she said. "I will not believe it."
"Doesn't matter what you believe, kid," he laughed. "Not anymore. Belief's a dead power. When Callisto came, people didn't need faith anymore. All they needed was to hold that fucking thing in their hands."
He slumped in his chair, his mind swimming with thoughts she could only dream of as he told her more.
"Can you imagine, Rain-Born?" he asked. "Imagine a little girl, six years old, and her daddy's been lookin' at her all funny like. Maybe he touches her one night when she's sleeping, and she doesn't like that. Not one bit. But what can she do? She's a fucking child. She's a baby. Mummy ain't gonna believe her. She doesn't know how to tell about this shit. She doesn't get it. Maybe it's just what daddies do? But she does know two things for sure: she's angry, and she got no power in this world. Nothing to do with all her anger. Enter Callisto."
His breathing became heavy, charged with fury.
"Then, oh, then she's got something," he continued through saliva. "Then she's got something that can burn her daddy out or chew him in half in two seconds flat. And she knows it. And the power makes her laugh like a little girl shouldn't be able to. All she's gotta do is think about it and press the button. Then BAM! One shishkebabed papa, hold the onions.
Or what about that down-of-his-luck average Joe on the street, working a dead-end job on a night shift and then coming home to be chewed out by his mother, who tells him he has to find a girl or get the fuck outta her house. He heads out to town to drink his troubles away, and on the way home – ah! – Callisto finds its way into his hands. And then his poor old mama won't be talking shit to him anymore. Then his asshole boss won't be giving him long hours. Then, he won't be taking crap from anybody because he's got power now. Before, he was just 'average Joe'; now, he's got Callisto and thinks he's a God."
He looked at her tension-streaked face and laughed, but it was one devoid of good humor. It was the laughter of one who was desperately trying to communicate the incomprehensible, knowing it was futile and trying all the same.
"And maybe you're some broke-ass college student, no A grades, no girl, no parents that I've ever loved you. And you start reading about all the people you could blame for your shit life. You read books by people that are just like you, just as hateful, just as screwed up, but just a little bit smarter, and you get it into your head, "Hey, wouldn't it be better if we all ended up dead?" And then, just like that, you can bet your stupid ass that Callisto would fall into your lap."
He leaned back, his aggression abating, and sniffled as the memories of the chaos flowed over him, and he arrived back at the first thought he had ever had.
"Or maybe you're a little girl playing with your chemistry set one day, and you're hoping that one day it won't be play time anymore. One day you're gonna change the world for the better. But you got no friends. You got no one you can count on. All the other kids think you're a weirdo. They don't wanna play with you. You got no one that cares 'cept your stupid dog.
Rain-Born thought she could see tears form in the corner of his eyes. And so she listened, even as her head filled with questions. She waited and listened.
"And when you find Callisto, Callisto's got you, too. It says, "Go on, gal! Change the world! Make your dreams come true! But you ain't no prophet. You ain't no savior. You're just a little girl. And little girls have dumb dreams. You look at your dog and say, "Talk to me. Listen to me."
He cast his gaze down and began pawing at his empty can and sniggering to himself at some unheard joke.
"And well," he said. "That's that."
He sank lower into himself. The shadows around them resumed their silent conversations, some heading to the bar to look for refreshments.
"Jespar," Rain-Born finally said.
"My turn," he smiled, returning his eyes to meet hers. "Next question, and think about this one: what's your "Father-Mother" gonna do with Callisto?"
Rain-Born thought as he asked, but try as she might, she couldn't quite find an answer that was acceptable to her. The truth was all she could deliver.
"I-I don't know," she admitted. "They will use it to save the tribe."
"Not good enough, Chief," he replied, giving a disapproving tut-tut out the side of his tongue. "What, specifically, are they gonna do to save the tribe? Summon a rainbow? Unicorns maybe? Wish for everyone's baby pictures to make you guys all good again?"
"Stop it, Jespar," she said, wounded. "You don't know what you are talking about. You aren't one of us."
She realized she'd been too harsh only as the words left her mouth. She couldn't stop the part of her that was still Hanakh. By the Great Spirit, she now knew that was only a part of her. The anger that was there was not truly hers. It belonged to her tribe.
"Oh, I don't know?" he asked mockingly. "I don't know. I've known more people than you've ever seen. I used to see them every day. And believe me, I know what happens when humans say they wanna save someone. You know how they do it?"
"Jespar..." she cautioned. She could do nothing else.
"They burn their enemies to the ground," he continued, unrelenting.
"If that is what must be done, then so be it!" she heard herself wail.
"No!" he shouted back and was just as shocked as she was at the outburst.
"No," he repeated. "Don't you hear what I've been saying? You fight and burn and claw and kill. When you see enemies in one place, you kill 'em all and call it a day. But it's never enough! You start seeing enemies in each other; then you kill them too. Then you kill again, and again and again and again until there's almost no one standing left. Then the only enemy left is the one that was staring at you the whole time from the inside. You kill, and you kill, and you keep on killing until the only enemy left is you. That's human history, Chief. That's what your Father-Mother's gonna start again."
"You lie!" she screamed, banging her knife on the table and gripping it tight. He hadn't even seen her grab it from her side.
She was shaking. She looked at her trembling hand, white knuckles and fingers bound to the hilt of her blade that was soaked in the blood of so much dead. Of Guthra, Stalkers, eye-demons and Chainmen. All those whom she had done nothing but destroy as they got in her way. Lives she had ended as callously as they who tried to end hers.
For a terrifying instant, the vision of the Changeling swam before her eyes yet again. The blood-streaked clouds loomed oppressively over her, Father-Mother commanding her to kill the evil pup. Her shaking, childish fear. Her people are begging her to do the job, looking up from their barren graves with dead, hairless skulls.
She dropped back into her seat.
"Who do I believe?" she murmured, shaking her head. "Who do I believe if not my Elder?"
"Is that your question?" she heard him ask. Distant. Detached. "Because I'll answer it."
She looked at him through the eyes, saddened and weary. She was ready for this journey to end.
"How can I trust you now? You, who have kept so many secrets from me, would tell me that my whole life is a lie. You who was going to let me die in that street."
She heard him gulp, though he tried to conceal it. His face was flushed with shame.
"Because I'm going to tell you how to stop it all," he said. "How to stop the death. All this," he gestured outside. "We can make it so it never happens again. At the very least, never on this scale."
She waited. "How?"
He considered his words carefully this time, trying to remember what Nicole had told him.
"You reap what you sow," he said. "Force is solved with force. Death is solved with death. War breeds war. It's a cycle, like. To break it, we need to remove the problem."
She waited for the answer.
"We destroy it," he said simply. "That's why I'm here. I made a promise. Callisto won't have power over anyone else. This one up there," he said as he stuck his nose in the direction of the tower. "This one's the last of its kind."
"How do you know?"
"I know," he said, then more reservedly. "It talks to us. Things made by its brothers. We hear its call, and we know where it is. It's like a siren, see? Some folk believed it could talk to regular humans, too. That's how the Old Ones always found a Callisto somewhere. But it's us, its children," he scowled at the word. "We're the ones who always know where it is."
Rain-Born looked through the ruined window glass at the desolated graveyard outside and was overcome by Jespar's words. She understood how the bodies had come to be here. They were called.
Just like Father-Mother...
How many had they sent here to their deaths?
Did they know?
Was that their plan all along...Rain-Born thought with a sickening, sinking feeling in the pit of her abdomen.
"You really think destroying Callisto will stop the bloodshed? She asked.
He cocked his eye quizzically.
"People still hate, even without Callisto," she said. "There are still wars, and people will still die. We of the Hanakh have killed without Callisto's help for years. Everyone we have met on this journey did not have Callisto on their side."
"Hehe, we can't ever stop violence, Chief. But the less toys children have, the less ways they have to royally fuck up the world."
She was hearing him, but she was also thinking now. Not like a tribal. Something was happening in her mind. She remembered the intricately patterned rugs that her mother had left her. She recalled the songs and stories she had heard from the Elders as a babe that had resonated so much with her heart and propelled her to action. Then, she looked around the dining room and was struck once more by the intricately patterned tables and decorative pieces the Old Worlders had fashioned.
She had seen their world in all its rustic splendor. They had destroyed it, yes. But they had made it first.
She couldn't shake the feeling that there was simply more to these people, who had forged an entire forest out of iron alone.
"Did you not say that Callisto is a key for the gate between mind and world?" she asked. "A key is just a tool. You say – we must destroy it before it lets us destroy ourselves. But it is nothing without us. Just an object. You ask: what if it lets in Evil? I ask you: What if it lets in Good?"
There was a pause, during which they heard the carnivorous, bestial roar of the Harvester ring out again from the outside.
He smiled thinly. "You know," he chuckled. "Sometimes you even sound like her."
She felt her mind was one with him again. "Nicole," she said.
He nodded.
"The girl who made you. You loved her."
He didn't face her; he didn't move any muscle at all. His voice was a canine's sad whimper. "More than you can know."
"I know," she said.
He furrowed his brows. "How?" he asked. "How could you?"
"I know," she said again.
Their gazes met once more over their downed cans, each trying to get a final estimation of the other. There was the sense of understanding that passed between them again, wordlessly, like the most subtle of winds blowing in the wastes. The ghosts in the room had all but vanished, but they both sat with as much rigidity as those lost souls had as they languished in this room, playing games of their own.
"You give people too much credit," Jespar said, finally breaking the silence. "You ain't gonna change the course of history with just one act."
Images of the dry desert that was her home flooded her mind once again then, and the sands bore pictures of her sisters braiding her long, unkempt hair while she giggled sheepishly. She felt the tingling of the paint on her breasts and hands and the chalk on her toes as they inscribed her with ink to mark her as a member of the Snake house. She thought then to Jespar's stories of wonders like TVs and cars and libraries filled with the world's knowledge all bound together in little sheets of paper. Thousands of lives that had endeavored to create something out of the nothingness of existence.
Then she looked at her own hands.
"Jespar," she said, not quite understanding the thoughts swirling in her mind but knowing that she had the answer somewhere within her – not in her tribal mind, not in that fragment of her that was afraid of the Old World – the sacred "enemy" who had birthed the Deadlands – but her true self. Now the pieces of her that she had locked away back there within that suburb were slotting themselves together in ways she never imagined they could.
"Jespar," she said again, seized by sudden emotion. "Let us go to Callisto together. Please," she reached forward and touched his paw, stroking it with care. He did not recoil.
"Chief, I can't. I –"
"Please," she said again, pleading. "I do not know what to say. I am not you. Words are not my weapon. But we must go together. It cannot be like this."
His mouth opened. He said nothing.
"It can't!" she wailed hopelessly.
She could not read his thoughts or travel through his eyes and look at herself and know how he saw her. But there were cogs turning in his incomprehensible animal mind. Something was happening in there, too.
The wail of The Harvester came again, trapping some poor creature within its ethereal claws. He listened to it merge with the sound of her plea, but he gulped whatever answer he had away.
Because the wail came again. It was no creature's angry dirge – it was mechanical. The fruits of human labor. Getting closer. And then he knew that it was not the sound of the Harvester at all. It was a sound he knew all too well.
"Rain-Born," he breathed. "Run."
Her eyes widened as the noise drew closer, the steel-clad, chattering teeth of an airborne predator encased in armor that could withstand a hail of arrows. His eyes begged Rain-Born to flee, and it slowly dawned on him that he was so much more of an idiot than he thought.
"Jespar, what-?"
His mind went blank as he saw the red dot travel up her body to rest upon her forehead – the lambent eye of a demon getting smaller and smaller, centered like a pinprick on the frontal cortex of her skull.
"Rain-Born!" he screamed and, without thinking, leaped.
He felt the impact before he heard the sound of the bullet or the yelp that flew from his mouth involuntarily. He crashed against the floor and saw that she was ok from out the corner of his eyes. But the world started to sway; blindness began to creep in from the dark corners that had appeared around his vision. From the blood that was seeping from his panting chest, he knew a lung was punctured. He scarpered, but he wasn't getting up. It was strange. His legs just didn't quite work. His whole body felt heavy.
The helicopter blades were whirring outside now, and he dimly heard her screaming a name.
"Jespar! Jespar!"
Jespar...yeah, that was my name, he thought with a smile, letting his eyes close. That was the name she gave me...