Nemesis: Book Five (11 page)

I
s he alive
?
Michael asked. The blood on his body, the few inches still left on the floor, none of it concerned him. Briten's eyes were still closed, and Michael couldn't see out, couldn't see anything besides the books dripping blood from their leather backs.
I know you hear me. I know you're healing. You tell me if he's alive, goddamnit.

He knew why Briten kept his eyes closed. The creature didn't want Michael to see his father die, the only goddamn mercy the thing had doled out this entire time.

IT'S NOT YOUR CHOICE
, Michael shouted.
YOU DON'T DECIDE THIS.

Briten said nothing in return, only lay on the ground, his breathing returning to normal with each passing moment. And if he could heal, if Michael's body could heal, then certainly his father's could too.

Please. Just tell me if he's dead. Please.

Michael collapsed to his knees, blood splashing up on his legs as he did.

She knows and you can ask her. She'll answer you.

How many times had Michael wished his father dead? How many times had he fallen asleep, crying, wishing his father wouldn't be there when he woke? He would have rather had no parents than to have his dad. And yet, Wren just kept living. Kept waking up everyday and creating hell all round him. He woke up and destroyed the lives around him.

Yet Michael couldn't stand up. He couldn't stop the tears flowing down his face, turning a dirty red almost from the moment they left his eyes as they mixed with the blood. He wanted his father to live, wanted to see him again, to talk to him, to fucking do
anything
besides bury him. Because the truth, as real as the years of abuse that Michael had taken, was that he had no one else. His mother was dead. Thera was dead. Bryan and Julie remnants of some other life that he no longer remembered. His father was the only one left.

And if he died, Michael had no one. He would live in this library and listen to an alien's thoughts, knowing that everything and everyone he ever loved was dead.

Please
, he said again.
Just tell me.

He loved his father. That's what he knew now, on his knees, and blood dripping from his body. He hadn't always known it; for much of his life he knew that he hated his father. And maybe he still did, what had been done couldn't be undone, but even so, love remained for his dad too. Love and longing, for something that had once been and would never come again. Because they had been a team, once. Three on the team and then two, but a team all the same.

Michael didn't need that back. That could never return and Michael was fine with it. He only needed his father alive. Just breathing and talking, and he wouldn't ask for anything else. No relationship, no team, just alive.

Give me that, God,
and even as he thought the words, he didn't know if he was praying to a deity or simply begging the universe.

Briten was doing something. Michael didn't know what, exactly. It felt like a transfer, like osmosis even, cells moving an item from one entity to the next. Michael didn't know what was being moved or to where, but the transfer was happening.

What are you doing? Tell me if he's alive!

No answer came back though, just that passage of … information. Nothing physical moving out of Briten, only knowledge.

FIND OUT!

Briten had to hear him; he just wouldn't answer.

Michael reached down into the blood around his knees and threw it, casting the red drops far away from himself.
YOU MOTHERFUCKER TELL ME IF HE'S ALIVE!

Silence answered him, that and the constant pitter-patter of blood dripping down the walls.

And then, Briten spoke.
He's alive
.

Michael fell to his elbows, his face merely inches away from the red liquid. Clear tears fell into the blood causing tiny ripples to spread out as relief washed over him, more cleansing than water could ever hope to be.

* * *

B
riten opened his eyes
.

He saw Michael's father, saw the other kid kneeling next to him, checking on him.

The man was alive. Morena had been able to save him.

Morena.

Briten saw her green aura still wrapped around him, though the blood that shot from his body no longer covered the white strands. She saved him too.

Could he get up? Could he stand?

Morena was reading him, somehow, even in this body, and he felt her aura tighten.

"No," she said. "You're still weak. Wait and rest."

She was nervous, unsure what all this meant, and he didn't have the strength to give her all of the information right now. She saw three humans, and her husband inside one of them, yet at the same time she was still fighting a war.

Briten smiled, his face still on the soft bed of strands. His warrior wife. Would his father be proud? Or just amazed at Briten's stupidity? He left his planet for another, and now he lay nearly dead with a wife more powerful than he could ever hope to be again.

Briten put his hands underneath him, balling them into fists, and pushed up even as he felt Morena trying to hold him down. He wouldn't stop, though. He would see his wife on his feet, not lying down. She must have felt his determination, because her resistance turned into support, as her aura helped hold his body. He put one foot underneath him, kneeling, and looking at Morena's world around him. He had seen it before, but not from this vantage point. Not next to his wife. Before he had seen it with only that one thought: finding Morena.

Now she was next to him, and when he stood, he would see her.

This was her world, what she was creating. Briten thought of his plan, the one that had them banished from her homeland. Spread Bynums to another world because their home planet couldn't sustain life any longer. She had done it.

He closed his eyes and braced his body, knowing that it would struggle. He didn't care. He wanted to see her and he wanted to see her from his feet.

He stood, slowly, his eyes closed, but feeling Morena all around him. Feeling the being that he gave up his life for. The being that he loved.

Briten turned so that he faced her. His legs shook and he felt his fingers trembling as well. Despite her help, this body was exhausted, nearly unable to continue. And yet, he stood before her, not falling.

He opened his eyes and saw what he had thought he would never see again.

His wife.

His Morena.

Her aura hadn't faded at all, still the green that communicated power, and for Briten, love. He would die for her, before, now, and in the future. Morena had his heart, his very essence, and as he looked on her, he knew that every decision he ever made was right, because it led him to where he stood now.

Morena's eyes narrowed as she took him in. She wasn't expecting this body—he knew, if she had ever expected anything. Still, Morena knew it was him, but not the being she fell in love with. Not the body of the being she fell in love with, at least. And did that change anything? Could she accept this frail body as his?

And then she smiled, her aura pulling him close, her arms wrapping around him.

Briten was finally home.

* * *

W
as it actually possible
, or was she dreaming? Would she wake to a strange world, alone? Morena didn't know. She could look at him, touch him, speak with him, but him being here still didn't seem possible. When she thought about the time, the actual years passed since they had been together, the whole notion seemed absurd. Millions upon millions of years, with the last time they stood next to each other in that cavern. The machines walking back and forth. Building a fleet that would never be used.

She held him then, his aura barely pink. She held him and then froze him.

And yet, here Briten was, sitting across from her on this foreign planet, inside shelter that neither of them really understood.

Briten stared up at a vent on the ceiling.

"So they heat and cool their homes through these?" he said.

"The hot or cold air comes out of that, but there is a machine inside here somewhere that generates it."

"It's so primitive, Morena." He looked down and walked around the living room, looking at other artifacts from the people who used to live here.

She couldn't think of anything to say back to him. She felt lost, like she didn't have any clue what to do next or where to go from here. Nothing in her plans changed now that he was here, and yet everything did. Before, she was singularly focused on her children, and now she felt something else pulling her.

Briten, but not truly
him
. Of course the body he used was different, but she didn't care about that. Something deeper. Something about his essence, something that she didn't think he noticed yet. She didn't know what it was either, couldn't name it, but her focus on her children … it hadn't faded, but she wanted to know what was happening inside her husband.

Because it felt wrong. Deadly, even.

"How are you feeling?" she said.

Briten stopped walking
across the room
and turned to look at her. "I suppose pretty good for everything that happened."

"You don't feel different at all?"

"Why?" he said, walking to her.

"Your body—what happened to it?" She said and reached for his hands, his
new
hands. They didn't feel like Briten, but they were him regardless. She didn't need his old body, but she needed to understand what was happening with him, even he didn't sense it.

"The Ether. I think it's still there, but I can't be sure."

"What do you remember?"

"I was dying. I think so at least. And then this boy, the one whose body this is, I felt him somehow—"

"Felt him?" Morena said, not understanding how any of it was possible; his body transferring to the Ether, him feeling a
human.

"Yes. He felt like a Bynum. I didn't know if he was or wasn't, but I thought I could call him, and so I did. And he came, and then I felt I could take him, so I did."

"But why now? Why did your body finally expire?" she said.

"When did you leave the ship?"

And it clicked.

She had been sustaining him. Her body giving life to the ship, and it giving life to Briten. When she woke, when she left and entered Bryan's body, her power diminished considerably. And the Ether pulled him over, maybe because of his weakened aura, maybe for some other reason, but that's how he got there.

"You couldn't survive over there, not without a source of life. That place is nothing but the dead," Morena said, speaking to both herself and Briten. "And now, you feel fine? You don't feel like anything has changed inside?"

"Well, this human has built some kind of library in here, and he's populated it with what he calls books."

Morena nodded, smiling, remembering her own venture into a library.

"So I think he's studying me, maybe us. But other than that, no."

Just because he didn't feel it didn't mean it wasn't so. She needed to figure it out, one of them did, because Morena didn't think what she felt would stop progressing, not until Briten couldn't take whatever it did to him. She didn't want to see that end, when this body finally shut down.

"Let's talk about your strategy," Briten said, his hands still in hers. "Where are we going from here?"