Music Track: “The Game Has Changed” – Daft Punk/Tron Soundtrack
That sickening feeling again. I know it well. Stop the world, I want to get off. Oh, I guess I did.
In the mist, though, a flash of green and black. A sound. A word.
“David!”
Pepper?
I landed with a crunch and found myself flailing to catch myself. My shoulder hit a fallen branch as my feet slipped in the gritty gravel soil of... wherever I was now. It was night, but I could see that apparently this David was hiking somewhere, and doing a piss-poor job of it.
“Shit,” I wheezed as I checked out my shoulder. Not dislocated, at least. I looked around and saw the distant lights of Los Angeles. A cold gust ripped through my clothes and tossed junk in my eyes and took my breath away. I guessed that I was probably somewhere in the Angeles National Forest.
I got my hands under me but as I moved, my head started swimming. Again? Already? But this wasn’t another jump, it was just dizziness. My stomach growled loudly and painfully. This David had gone without a good meal for far too long. I focused on my hands in the dim moonlight to try and clear my head, and realized that they were familiar, if a lot more boney than before. The black fragment of an unfinished tattoo and an inch-long scar. I knew what universe I was in.
I heard metallic clicks around me. I recognized what that sound was now—guns being cocked, safeties being taken off. It’s a sound nobody should really be that familiar with, especially when they’re all pointed at you. The three of them had somehow snuck up on me, probably when I had my dizzy spell.
“State your business,” said a muffled male voice from behind either a mask or scarf. I didn’t look up to check.
“David Blunt,” I said to my hands. “Tell Emma the other David is here. The other David. Say it like that.”
I could hear one of them run off into the brush. Uphill. So that’s where she was. The other two didn’t move. I had no idea if they’d put their guns away or not, and kind of didn’t care.
I wondered about the David I’d jumped into here, for the second time now. What he was like. Emma had said before, and I’d pieced together, that he was something of a freedom fighter in the shadows under a bright facade. I wondered how many other realities I was a fighter in. How many realities I was Batman. But nobody wants to be with Batman, except the criminally insane.
“David?”
I looked up and saw her. Emma. My....
But was she mine? She wore a black cloth over her head, something like the Virgin Mary wears on the covers of Christmas cards, but stealthier. She had a dozen different necklaces and smelled of patchouli and something else. Some other kind of thick perfume like church incense made liquid. I briefly flashed on the universe where I’d screwed up her holy vows.
“I made it back,” I croaked, my throat thick and my tongue dry. She peered at me, not sure what to think. I was not the same David that this body had been an hour ago. Hell, I wasn’t even the same David as I was the last time I was here. I wasn’t sure who I was anymore. Who or what I was turning into.
“Something from that night, that only we would know.”
It took me a moment, but I was able to understand what she meant and dredge something up. It all seemed so far away and long ago.
“Sushi, and the prism...” I started, my gaze dull. “Uh... the drawings... that spiral...” Don’t think about the spiral pattern, David, that’s what kicked you out the last time.
Then I realized that I had no idea how to get into, or out of, any universe. None of it was in my control. I seemed to be a leaf on the wind with no way home. Wherever home was.
“Give him some food before he goes unconscious,” she said. “Then bring him up to the camp.”
I heard the metal-on-metal sounds of guns being uncocked, and the rustle of plastic inside pockets. Someone shoved a snack bag of peanuts into my hand, which was shaking slightly. It was actually a little hard to get them in my mouth. Someone else pushed an open bottle of water at me and I managed to get both the nuts and the water down my throat, even though it was clear that this water was not the original contents of the bottle. Then more. Then more. Then all the nuts were gone. I didn’t feel a whole lot better, but at least the shaking had stopped. No one said a word. Emma had left long before.
When I could stand, I slowly made my way up the hill in the direction the patchouli-and-incense scent had gone. The gusts of wind threatened to knock me sideways, but I was single-minded and pressed on.
After five minutes or so, I saw some figures huddled together behind some bushes, trying to protect each other from the wind. I looked back at the lights of the city and blinked, then blinked again. Something was funny with my eyes. It looked like whole sections were flickering, like a candle about to go out. Maybe it was a trick of the atmosphere across the distance.
Someone was cooking some soup over a Sterno can. Well, heating it up, really. You couldn’t call it cooking. He was careful to completely block the flame from view, with his neighbor helping out too. Emma stood just above them, on a little hill, her pale skin framed by that black shawl thing that was whipping around her in the wind. She gazed out over the valley as if I weren’t there.
Someone jumped up and ran over to me, practically tackling me and holding on. I froze, unsure what it meant. Maybe I was going to get shivved.
But no, I recognized her as Sun, that little Asian girl that I’d crashed into the last time. She looked up at me like a lost child, her pretty face now scarred and disfigured.
I could feel more pieces of my soul crumble off like bits of charcoal.
“I’m sorry,” I murmured. I knew, somehow, that it was probably my fault. I had let them down somehow. Because that seems to be what I’m best at.
“David, come with me,” I heard Emma say from on high. Sun let go of me and I climbed up to be next to this Emma. I breathed in her scent, hoping that I could keep it inside me somehow as some kind of link. A connection.
“It’s starting,” she said, nodding out at the flickering lights.
“Starting?” I kept my voice low so that the others couldn’t hear. Their David should know everything.
She looked at me with that same sadness in her eyes as before, but a whole lot more of it.
“The facade is breaking down. It’s like The Matrix. Did you ever see that movie?
“Sure,” I said, watching the lights fail with her
“Enough people didn’t believe that there could actually be world peace that they started to dig,” she explained. “They dug too far. They brought the war upon themselves.
“But what can we do from here?” I asked, watching her face in the ghost-like light that seemed to be growing dimmer all the time. “Why are we here? Are you leading them?” My voice was almost a whisper.
“Yes. And we have one hope left.”
She took my hand and led me higher up, and over a little rise. Her hand felt so tiny and cold in mine. Around another corner was a large cement structure, perhaps an abandoned water silo, and behind that.
“Wait here,” she ordered, then disappeared around the cement thing. Soon I could barely make out her arms, beckoning for me to go to her. And go I did.
I rounded the corner to see a figure seated on what could only be called a throne, with two attendants, and Emma kneeling at his feet. Even in the near darkness I could see that goddamn cat-like smile that was like a knife in my heart and brain. His face seemed to glow.
“Gabriel,” I growled under my breath.
A/N
It is my extraordinary pleasure to present you the last cycle of Act two, written by Willow Polson who wrote the lovely chapters at the beginning of this act.
I have to say...Willow has really been a source of inspiration to me as of late: her passion and energy are so infectuous, and her chapters gave me goosebumps. You will no doubt love the next three chapters.
She even inspired me to get cracking on a SPECIAL epilogue chapter to close off the entire book on Wattpad!
C