Shanakee's Tale Page 11

  Everything happened all at once then. A soldier came running from behind Sena, lifting his gun towards the child. With the strength she did not know she had left, Aideen jumped from the ground and threw herself in front of her son, who was crying even louder now. A sharp pain shot through her whole body, tore the tissue of her skin, muscles, and inner organs. She felt all and none of it at the same time. She shock of pain could not overshadow the relief that her son was safe. And the knowledge that this was the end.

  Someone had knocked out the soldier, but Aideen barely perceived it.

  A tender voice resounded in the background. John’s voice. His cold hand touched her forehead and kissed her while she felt her life fade away slowly. It didn’t matter. John had their son. When she opened her eyes, all she could see were the rising flames, and a face that had become so dear to her. She had made the right decision.

  It seemed as if John had aged all of a sudden, aged with the knowledge burdened upon him. He fought against tears, kissing her forehead.

  “I love you,” he whispered yet again into her ear, and it was true now as it was true the first time he had met her. Her hands began to shake with the pain and the realization that soon, she would be gone. Swallowed from the face of this earth, her existence vanished into the abyss of nothingness. She was afraid.

  “I’m so sorry …” she said through her tears, and coughed.

  “No, no, no, no …” John pressed his forehead against hers, his warm tears fell down her skin while his black locks caressed her, “Don’t be. Please don’t be.”

  “I love you, John.” It was the first time that those words meant something.

  She closed her eyes and was swallowed by nothingness.

  JOHN

  He had known it. He had seen it in his memories, and still it had shattered his world. The pain he felt was unbearable. Nothing compared to him seeing her body, now lifeless in front of him. Memories lost their intensity and clarity over time. This was real life. Everything in him hurt beyond reason. His insides seemed to explode any minute. He wanted to collapse, right here, right now, and die. Nothing made sense anymore, even if he had seen it coming.

  More soldiers streamed towards them from the distance.

  “John.” A hand shook him up. He lifted his head towards Arthur, who held his son. “You need to get him out of here.”

  This little boy with the red locks stretched out his hands towards John, and John followed the plea. Sena’s expression was otherworldly while he forced his eyes away from Aideen’s corpse.

  “Yes, John,” he murmured. “We’ll divert them.”

  And for the last time, the three of them put their heads together, like in the old days.

  “One.”

  John looked into the faces of his friends, who had aged so much, and who had learned so much pain on that day.

  “Two.”

  His friends, who were still there for him.

  “Three.”

  They parted, and John sprinted towards the forest where he’d left the car, never looking back.

  He knew that this was only the beginning of his ordeal. He did not know why or how. Memories kept coming back to his mind, memories of Aideen’s beautiful green eyes, his son’s clumsy attempts to walk, his crazy nights with the boys.

  All of it was over now. He kissed his son on the forehead when striking pain hit his right thigh. John collapsed. The child crashed to the ground next to him, and began to cry. John turned around and saw a man he knew from his dreams. He was Conall’s age, wore a leather jacket and boots, and held a gun pointed at John. He wore himself with authority and strength. Manasseh.

  “John?” he asked, and John nodded. The stranger’s eyes wandered to the weeping child, and John thought he saw compassion rising in them.

  “Is this your son?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where’s Aideen?”

  Soldiers ran towards them from afar, and John knew that this was the end of it. For the first time, he was afraid. The man hectically knelt next to him.

  “Dead.”

  Although Manasseh tried to hide it, John instantly saw the pain in his eyes.

  “I offer you a deal,” he whispered. “You surrender, cooperate.”

  “With what?”

  “You will be brought to a laboratory, they will test you, might dissect your brain. But we’ll have more success if you cooperate. And if you do … I promise your son will lead a normal life. Nobody will know that he’s yours, or Aideen’s. He won’t become their laboratory rat.”

  John narrowed his eyes to see if the man was serious.

  “Do you accept the deal?”

  Aideen had meant something to him. As did the child that looked so much like her.

  John took a heavy breath and nodded. The stranger nodded in return, picked up the crying child, and left.

  “Put him in chains!” he yelled to the soldiers who approached John like a swarm.

  John watched his son vanish. He hadn’t seen this in his dreams, but he had very often felt the pain of the torture to come. He accepted it willingly.

  CONALL

  From amongst the burning houses, Conall watched the scene while he held the black leather book in his hands. This damn book that bound him to a senseless promise. He was forced to watch, and his hands were tied. He saw Aideen die, then John being swallowed by the monsters after his conversation with Manasseh. He watched a little girl with silk brown hair and strikingly, along with other little children, being seized by the soldiers and dragged into the blue trucks. Conall wanted to run, to tear away the John’s child from Manasseh, although it was hopeless. If anything, he wanted to pick up a gun and shoot a bullet into this pitch black heart of the man he once called friend. And they had been friends once. As students, they had been ignited by the idea of an algorithm that would scientifically predict the future, created this program that changed the world forever. But Manasseh was the charismatic politician while Conall involuntarily became his science puppet. Manasseh was the crazy idealist who reformed the world behind Conall’s back the way he had seen fit. It was the social reform, the banishment of families and the creation of Raising Centres that had driven a wedge between them.

  Manasseh had no children, so he would never understand. But Conall had Kyla.

  Conall stared at the mess, and once again, he felt utterly powerless. He had promised to deliver this damn book to Skye, and he could not break this promise.

  He had stared into John’s eyes and made this damn promise.

  Conall fell to his knees, desperate, while the flames of the burning village danced around him, mocking his failure.

  Had he been so wrong? Had it been neither Aideen nor John? Or had Manasseh managed to stop the turn of events, turn the wheel of time to his own advantage yet again? Conall wished he would burn in those flames. He felt as if his existence suddenly became senseless, pointless. Why had everything gone so wrong?

  He buried his head in his hands while the sun rose over a village in ashes.

  The ashes of his own heart.

  * * *

  Dim and solemn, it lay behind the waters, the mountains as if bleeding from their tops. Skye Island. Conall had left Area Three behind and walked for days and days, further north, past the last signs the old world had left behind. The few who had survived the massacre in Glencoe had fled to the mountains. The Glencoe Massacre, he remembered this one note on his biomatrix that had pointed him to the area in the first place, referring to a systematical governmental killing in 1692. Time had made a circle yet again.

  Conall barely slept, plagued by nightmares, dragging one foot after another until he finally reached the Skye bridge that looked like a fish tail. He wanted to see Kyla.

  He had eaten nothing, drank only from the small pools and lakes around him as he walked. It was as if his world collapsed all of a sudden, and he was not sure what had caused it. Where was truth, and where was illusion? Had Manasseh snatched Prometheus out of his hand, just like that?
Or has all of it been a huge, huge mistake? Was Prometheus even real?

  Conall had been convinced that the future could be studied and understood as systematically as the past. Time revealed that life on all levels behaved regularly and on purpose. In fact, the only foundation of science in general was the belief in those principles, those general laws that are regular and constant. But was it really so? He had promoted the case for future science, sure that it would enable humans to feel more in control of their lives and societies, having learned to conquer time. He thought he had conquered time with World5 once.

  Now, it all collapsed in front of him like a house of cards. He was defeated yet again, and all he wanted was to see his daughter.

  Conall walked past the loud humming of the waterfalls. The fairy pools stretched along the valley, oblivious and untouched. He slowly wandered towards the mountain with a crack directly in the middle. Inside, a hidden cave greeted him with darkness. It was long, and Conall was so exhausted and dehydrated that he thought he might collapse any second. When daylight finally hit his eyes, and he slowly adjusted to perceive the dense forest that stretched before him, he wanted to yell her name.

  Kyla.

  But he was too weak. Those small, moss covered houses that were build around the tree branches appeared in the distance. Conall collapsed and his world went blank.

  * * *

  He felt the warmth of a cozy Skye house and the tender crackling of the fire in the fireplace. They had bedded him in soft cushions and furs, and warm tea stood by his bed. The fire in a simple yet beautifully carved chimney warmed the small house, and as Conall looked around, he saw Jed’s figure against the backdrop of the flames. Jed slowly turned around, eyes marked with an unusual sadness. Conall hectically set up.

  “Kyla, has she made it here … has she …” His voice was hollow, barely audible.

  But Jed nodded, motioning him to stay in bed.

  A woman entered the house and carried a small bundle towards Conall. She placed it in his arms. It was a child, ugly and red, barely several days old, and it slept soundly in Conall’s embrace.

  “Your grandson. She named him David.”

  Conall smiled towards the boy, and felt a love spread through his whole body with a warmth yet unknown to him. He had loved his daughter when she entered this world, but this was different. He was more mature, and it seemed he had more love to give than when he had been young and careless. Conall looked up towards Jed, and still his expression was grave. Without having to speak it out loud, he knew, and he was unsure he could bear any more pain.

  “She died in childbirth …” Jed whispered.

  Conall second-guessed every decision he had ever made. Maybe it would have been better for Kyla to be left in the raising centers of the government, never experiencing the pain, never having to die from a thing like childbirth. Had Manasseh been right all along?

  But time was irreversible, and he knew it far too well. It proceeded with endless speed towards the future. And for the first time, the future scared him. It was completely out of his control.

  Conall looked down to the small child in his hands. David. In this very moment, he swore to himself that he would spare this child all the pain and suffering he could not spare Kyla.

  The woman took the child and carried it away, leaving him alone with Jed. A silence covered them, and it weighted heavily in the room. So heavily that Conall could not endure the rattling of his own thoughts.

  Jed turned around. “What happened?”

  Conall made a deep breath, and told the story, from the beginning to the very catastrophe he had brought upon Area Three. When he was done, he watched Jed’s expression growing graver and heavier. There was a long pause.

  “There is something I need to tell you.”

  Jed’s voice had grown so dark that it scared Conall. He thought about Kyla. Could this be true, that he had manipulated her to leaven back then? Was this the confession he wanted to make?

  “The day I came to pick you up in Dunvegan Castle … I messed with your biomatrix. I slipped in a hint that would lead you to Area Three, hoping you’d mistake that new clue for false intuition … and you did.”

  Even while he spoke, Conall could not believe that it was true.

  “So you slipped in the note that said Glencoe Massacre …”

  “I did not know that Manasseh would show up on the same day. I could never have guessed which proportions this tiny hint would assume.”

  The pain, the blame, everything that had eaten him alive over the course of the past days, suddenly resurfaced. Jed had manipulated Kyla, it was his fault that she got pregnant, that she died. And then, when he did not get his way, he manipulated Conall yet again, and brought death upon an innocent village … Conall got up from his bed and stormed towards Jed before he knew what hit him, picked up a sharp iron fire tool and brought it to Jed’s throat, while pressing against it with his other hand, strangling him slowly. Jed gasped for air while Conall’s eyes were wide with fury.

  “Why?” he whispered through clenched teeth, “Why! Why! Why on earth?” And while he strangled the man, he saw Manasseh in front of him. A manipulative, selfish monster.

  Jed was struggling, his eyes and head turning red from the lack of oxygen. Conall wanted to see him suffer. No, he wanted to see him to die. As soon as he realized it, he shrunk back at this thought, at the person he had become. He climbed backwards, letting go of Jed, who gratefully soaked in the air.

  “Why did you push Kyla to leave?” Conall asked, bitterness resounding in every syllable.

  When Jed had calmed down, he looked towards Conall. His voice sounded rough and broken: “Are you so blind that you still don’t see it?” Conall threw him a questioning look. See what? Jed made a deep breath, massaging his aching throat. He slowly continued: “I did it for the idea. The idea that will change the world …”

  The idea? What idea?

  “Prometheus.” Jed continued. “It’s just an idea, Conall.” Those words hung in the air for a moment. “It needs to be spread, planted in people’s minds for Prometheus to eventually rise up. It might start with one person, and it will grown into a movement. But it’s the idea that will change this world.”

  Conall stared at Jed. His words made so much sense that it hurt. An idea that will change the world. And Jed would do everything for an idea he believed in. But what about John? What about his abilities? Maybe he was part of some plan, as was this book he had given him. But it was the idea that needed to rise in people’s hearts first.

  Conall clenched his fists.

  Jed was a hypocrite. Even if he believed in Prometheus, he was not man enough to come crawling out of this hole and spread the idea himself. Do what was right. But Conall was.

  “Give me my grandson,” he murmured.

  “What will you do?”

  Conall got up, walking to the bed to get dressed.

  “I will leave this godforsaken island, and never come back.”

  ARTHUR

  Arthur stood in the middle of the village that had turned to ashes. They had spent several nights in the mountains where more people had died of their injuries. Barely a dozen had survived, it was all the massacre had left of Area Three.

  He stared at Aideen while she was wrapped into linen by two women. Sena was there also, but he watched the procedure from a distance. His face had turned so grave during the last days that Arthur was afraid of him. Sena spoke to no-one. Arthur glanced at Aideen, the woman he loved. Would he be able to love anyone again? He was not sure. Her death had driven a knife through his heart.

  And still, she had saved his life. Had given him a new chance.

  Promise me you’ll find my son.

  Those words rung in his ears day and night, words Aideen had whispered while they lay there on the ground, coughing. He thought that she’d been delusional back then from the fumes, and he had promised it. But now that her son was really gone, he knew that he had to keep this promise one day. He would have t
o find him.

  Before they wrapped her face, he tenderly kissed her forehead. The body was only a shell, a shadow of this woman he had watched from the distance for over a year. She was gone. As were his parents, whom he was unable to bury. Arthur had cried himself to sleep during the cold nights in the mountains, mourning his father whom he had always disappointed. But this morning, when they descended into the valley again, he made the decision he would live up to being a MacIan. He would finally make his father proud.

  “Take her to the others.” Arthur whispered to the woman who had been wrapping Aideen’s body. Over a quarter of the village had perished in the fire, their bodies never to be found. Still, there were dozens of corpses they would burn tonight, singing the old Gaelic songs his father loved. Arthur would introduce more of those customs, he decided. He was steadfastly determined to rebuild Area Three from its ashes. One after another, they would recover the houses, breed more cattle, and build a new leader’s hall. When he took over the command that morning, it came naturally. Nobody questioned him, they were glad that Arthur took charge of the chaos.

  He sighed and walked towards Sena who was staring at the mountains, lost in thought. He did not react when he approached, and shrunk back when he tapped him on his shoulder. Sena’s eyes glistened with a strange madness Arthur had never seen before. As if he was somewhere else.

  “I’m leaving tonight,” he suddenly said.

  A cold shiver ran down Arthur’s spine. What had become of his friend? “Where to?”

  No answer came. Sena turned away. After a long pause, he said: “I’m leaving to join the Sub.”

  “But … they are dangerous. For all we know, they are a bunch of fanatics who …”

  Sena turned around and pierced Arthur with such darkness in those eyes that it silenced him.

  “You don’t understand, Arthur,” Sena said, his voice full of scorn. “You never did.”