Namaste
“You have to be more careful,” Raven hissed once we’d put several blocks between us and the soldier. “If it hadn’t been for that old woman getting her husband’s attention—telling him you were ‘another of the mad ones’—you might have been caught.”
My legs trembled beneath me. The delayed rush of adrenaline made my knees weak. I leaned against a crumbling brick wall, trying to catch my breath. Each heartbeat reminded me of how close we’d come to disaster.
“I’m sorry,” I managed, wiping sweat from my forehead with a shaking hand. I unbuttoned my jacket to let in some air. “I just… I hated to leave them.”
“I know.” Raven’s expression softened, though his shoulders remained tense. “But getting yourself captured won’t help anyone. Especially not if…”
He didn’t finish the thought, but I knew what he meant. Especially not if he wasn’t there—visible to others—to help me.
“I can’t believe how the world has changed almost overnight,” I said, pushing myself away from the wall.
Raven made a short, humorless sound. “Not so much overnight as page by page.”
“What’s happening now is the result of Aoife, unchecked,” he continued. He stepped carefully over broken concrete. “Without any of the saner or softer influences on her life. She was already experimenting with soldiers for nanotechnology in our reality, but here she’s had free rein.”
“Who kept her in check in our reality?” I asked. “Terre?”
“Partly,” Raven said. “Terre Vanderholt certainly provided guidance, though he kept his relationship to her quiet. Her mother, Siobhan, had her own set of problems, but like most leaders of the priesthood throughout the centuries, they’re just people doing bad things for all good reasons, or so they think. And Dr. Jung, her stepfather—for all his faults, he at least insisted on ethical oversight. At least for a while. Maybe in this reality, he didn’t have influence or wasn’t in her life as much.”
“What if this is who she was always meant to be?” I asked quietly. “What if the rest was just… temporary restraint?”
“Then we’re seeing what happens when someone with that much power loses all their moral anchors.”
I thought about the soldier who had convinced me to join the military in our original reality several years ago. I remembered the man, who had found me at the Orlando airport when I was lost and spiraling.
“Lieutenant Tracey,” I murmured, the name surfacing from memory. “He caught me when I was running away from bad things in my life. Talked me through a tough time, gave me purpose. He talked to me about the military giving life meaning, helping make up for bad decisions.”
“And now?” Raven gestured back toward the distribution center and shook his head. “Now Aoife’s soldiers don’t recruit. They hunt. We’ve already encountered two of the Angelseeds. Aoife and her stepfather were deeply involved in lab experiments in our own reality, too. The difference was, they just hadn’t been successful on a large scale. Until now. In our reality, they’d had less than a hundred chimera experiments, but here, they’re wholesale kidnapping everyone who qualifies and not caring who dies as a result.”
“The Daeganean scriptures mention the Coming Darkness,” Raven said as we continued walking. “Aoife from our time, like her mother before her and her mother before her, believes it’s literal—a pole shift, massive environmental changes, civilization collapse. Humanity dies out in the shift to a new age. In our reality, she was preparing. We all were. It’s all the priesthood does. Here… you can tell that things are changing. The seasons, the weather. Here, I think, the end is sooner than in our reality.”
I understood now: this was large-scale. “She’s grabbing everyone she can because she’s desperate,” I said.
“Exactly. For Aoife, the end justifies the means. It doesn’t matter who dies as long as she can find a way for the priesthood to thrive after the pole shift.”
“And the rest of humanity?”
“Expendable. In her eyes, at least.”
The buildings around us grew more sparse as we walked, giving way to overgrown lots and abandoned structures. Ahead, a line of trees marked the beginning of what looked like dense forest—our best route to Drusilla’s compound while avoiding the main roads.
We continued walking into a dense forest. Raven took the lead in case of snakes. Or drones. He’d be able to spot either first.
The forest floor was thick with decaying leaves and twisted vines that seemed determined to trip us at every step. The canopy above was dense enough to block most sunlight, casting everything in a greenish gloom. An unnatural hush hung over the trees. No birdsong, no rustling of small creatures. Just the occasional distant rumble that might have been thunder or bombs.
“Look,” Raven said suddenly, pointing through a break in the trees. “What’s left of that building.”
I followed his gaze to what appeared to be a massive statue, now collapsed and half-buried in mud. As we drew closer, I recognized the stern features of Aoife Jung, carved in stone, wearing full priestess robes. Moss coated her face like a disease, and a deep crack ran from her temple to her jaw, giving the impression of a frozen tear.
“She built monuments to herself,” I whispered, staring at the fallen effigy.
“Most tyrants do.”
Not far from the statue stood the rusted skeleton of what had once been a playground. A single swing remained intact, creaking softly in the breeze. Beyond it, the charred ruins of a school building jutted from the earth like broken teeth.
Unease swept through me. “It’s like walking through a corpse that remembers what life felt like.”
Raven didn’t respond, but his hand briefly found mine, squeezing once before letting go.
I’m not sure how long we walked, but my feet hurt by the time I saw Drusilla’s compound in the distance. I was grateful that it still seemed intact, even with all the bombings and super soldiers. Given its camouflage, you had to know where to look, and I did.
The familiar walls stood weathered but intact. Their tops rose above the trees. One of the guard towers had partially collapsed, but the gate remained. Its metal frame stood in stark contrast to the surrounding wilderness.
I reached the gate and punched in the code.
The keypad crackled with static across its surface. It flickered as I entered the numbers. Strange symbols flashed between the digits, and for a moment, the screen went completely dark. Raven tensed beside me, one hand moving toward the daggers in his hair.
“Did I enter it wrong?” I reached to try again.
Before I could, the screen reset itself, numbers appearing and disappearing in rapid succession. Then, with a mechanical groan, the gate clicked open.
“How?” He studied the malfunctioning display.
“It doesn’t make sense,” I said, shaking my head. “But Drusilla uses my birthday as the gate code. Between our reality and this one, that’s never changed, even when everything else shifts.”
We stepped through the gate and into a small guardhouse that controlled access to the main compound. We passed a cracked mirror hanging on the wall. I caught a glimpse of my reflection as we passed.
I froze. My breath caught in my throat.
The woman staring back at me wasn’t quite me. Her hair was short, with dirt or dried blood matting the strands cropped close to her skull. Dark circles shadowed her eyes, and a thick scar traced her jawline, the same alterations I’d seen in Earnestine’s mirror, but more pronounced now. More real.
And beside her, nothing. Empty space where Raven should have been.
“What if I’m imagining all of this?” I whispered. “What if you’re not real?”
Raven reached out, his hand warm and solid on my shoulder. “The glass is lying. That’s not us.”
“No,” I agreed, my voice steadier than I felt. “It’s not us. But it’s the versions of us that exist here.”
Dru appeared suddenly. She walked with a pronounced limp and approached from behind with a crossbow. The weapon was raised, aimed steady at my chest. I raised my hands slowly, acutely aware of how easily one wrong move could end everything.
“Don’t.” I kept my voice calm despite the fear that constricted my throat. “Dru, it’s me.”
Raven went utterly still beside me, remaining a comfort even if Dru couldn’t see him.
The moment Dru recognized me, she threw her arms around me. She dropped the crossbow. She appeared a lot older than in my reality, the result of lacking all the age-defying treatments available to women in my reality where survival wasn’t the primary concern. Here, her hair was completely gray and deep wrinkles lined her face.
Her embrace was fierce but brittle, her frame thinner than I remembered. The bones of her shoulders pressed sharply against my palms as I returned the hug. She smelled of smoke and sweat, with none of the bergamot and amber she’d favored.
The Dru I knew had been elegant, sophisticated, with silver-streaked hair that was always perfectly styled. This woman was all hard angles and weathered skin, her hair a wild gray mane shot through with dirt. She’d always been a survivor, but the Dru of my reality had focused on protecting others. This version seemed reduced to hanging on by her fingernails.
I felt a pang of grief for what had been lost—not just in this woman, but in the world that had shaped her this way.
“Something’s different about how you’re acting,” Dru said, pulling back to study my face. “I know you too well.”
“From all the years we’ve worked together at the library,” I said.
“Library? What library?”
“The Special Collections Library. Where we’ve worked together for years.”
“I moved here to be close to you,” Dru said slowly. “But why are you calling me Dru?”
“Because that’s your name. Drusilla. Dru.”
“No one calls me that.” Her expression grew more concerned. “You’ve always called me Mother.”
The word stopped me cold. Mother? In my reality, Dru had been my mentor, my boss, occasionally my friend—and a maternal figure. But call her Mother? I’d never even considered the possibility.
I stared at her weathered face, trying to process this fundamental difference. In how many ways had my life been rewritten in this reality? What other relationships had been transformed beyond recognition?
“What else would I—” I began, but we were interrupted by bombing nearby. The ground shook beneath our feet as dust rained down from the ceiling.
“Dammit,” Dru—or Mother—cursed as she grabbed my arm. “They must have followed you. We need to get underground.” Already, she was pulling me toward the door. “The bunker under the carriage house. Now.”
We hurried across the compound, keeping to the shadows of buildings. Another explosion, closer this time, sent debris scattering across our path. The sound of drones—a high, mechanical whine—grew louder overhead.
The carriage house loomed before us, weathered but mostly intact except for one corner. My old apartment was gone. Dru yanked open a heavy metal door in the floor, exposing a steep staircase descending into darkness.
“Go,” she ordered, pushing me forward.
The stairs were narrow and slick with moisture, illuminated only by dim emergency lights that flickered with each distant explosion. The air grew colder and mustier as we descended, the sounds from above muffled by layers of concrete and earth.
At the bottom, Dru secured a series of heavy locks behind us before leading me into the bunker proper. Raven followed silently. As always, his presence was a comfort even in this sterile underground space.
“There’s someone with me,” I insisted, gesturing to where Raven stood. “His name is Raven Darbyshire. He’s a priest of Daegan.”
Dru stepped back. Her face paled. “There are no more priests of Daegan. Queen Aoife had them all executed years ago, except for one. The only one left is the Last Priest.”
She began checking me for signs—wings, crawling sigils, anything that might indicate I’d been injected with Angel DNA and might be going mad. Her hands were clinical and impersonal. I flinched at the invasive scrutiny, uncomfortable with this version of Dru who looked at me with equal parts concern and suspicion.
“Nothing visible,” she murmured, more to herself than to me. “No feathers. No scales.”
Raven tried to step between us, his jaw tight enough to break teeth. Dru’s hands passed right through him as if he were made of smoke.
“I’m not infected, Dru. I’m not mad. I’m just… from somewhere else. A different reality.”
“That’s exactly what the infected say. Right before the changes start.”
Raven paced behind her, running his hands through his hair in frustration at being unable to defend me or make himself known.
I looked around the bunker, trying to find something familiar to ground myself. In my reality, my living quarters had been upstairs—warm, filled with books and personal touches. Here, it was sterile and utilitarian. Metal cots lined one wall. Storage crates were stacked in precise rows. A single bare bulb cast harsh shadows. In my reality, this place had been for emergencies, but not daily emergencies.
“It’s like someone gutted my memories and left only the skeleton,” I whispered.
We heard footsteps above, heavy and deliberate. Dru tensed and grabbed her crossbow again as she moved toward the stairs.
“Stay back,” she ordered, aiming at the door.
I moved to shield Raven instinctively, though I knew it was ridiculous—no one could see him anyway. “Stay close,” I whispered.
The footsteps grew louder, followed by the sound of the outer door being opened. Then a muffled voice called out, a man’s voice that made Raven go rigid beside me.
“Drusilla?” the voice called. “We saw the fucking gate was open. Are you there?”
The bunker door swung open, revealing two figures stepping inside—a tall man in black tactical gear and a young woman with dark pink hair.
It took me a moment to recognize them: Jakin Crutchfield and Samantha, both transformed by this reality. Jakin looked harder, more severe than the version I’d known—all angles and scars, his dark hair loose and dirty, scruffy facial hair shadowing his jaw, with none of his usual sardonic charm. Samantha stood slightly behind him, her eyes darting nervously around the room.
Jakin’s gaze swept over us and locked on Raven.
“Do I know you?” this Jakin asked. “You’re… you’re the fucking Last Priest. Holy shit. You carry our God in your crown chakra, too.”
Raven and I exchanged a stunned look.
“Well, Nama-fucking-ste!” Jakin took a step forward and circled Raven as the two men moved around each other like predator and prey, neither knowing which was which. “The God in me recognizes the God in you.”
“You can see him?”
Jakin frowned without looking at me “Of course. I’m the Last Priest of Daegan, too.”
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