Epilogue 3.29

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---Em---


     I stumble out onto the ash-covered street. Everything's a blur. Like I'm dreaming. Gail's mouth moves, but there's no sound. Just a jittery ringing noise. But my vision focuses in on something. Colby. My heart overclocks, pumping acid through my veins.

     I'm not here. Override. Autopilot. This power... this force that Melody awakened within me. It's in control. My hands are thrust forward. The skin blisters as searing energy gathers into a globule above the M shape hatched across my palms. Misnomer. It's not energy—it's me. My essence.

     My bones rattle from the kickback as the soul pellets fire out of me. My arm is nearly ripped right out of its socket. I smell the sizzling heat as my spirit energy rips through the air, searing the atmosphere in its wake.

     Colby shouts something, leaping out of my line of fire. But I can't hear him over the ringing in my ears, the pulsing in my soul. I keep on firing.

     Be here.

     That's all I can think. This is your pain, I tell myself. Don't tune it out.

     I open my eyes, not the ones I use to see, but the ones I use to feel. And then I'm here. I'm here, and Mya's dead, and Colby has to pay. I fire off a couple more soul projectiles. One of them takes a chunk out of his thigh. The other busts open his shoulder.

     "Bryan... please," Colby looks up at me, gurgling blood. I must've hit him more than a couple times—three distinct trails of red dribble down his shirt. I look into his eyes as he crawls away from me and out onto the street. I can barely recognize the boy who had my back when the class bullies got together to punch my lights out after school. The boy who invited me over to his house every day to play video games when our mothers thought we were doing homework. The boy who realized that I was in love with Olivia before even I knew it and promised not to get in the way, even though he'd been crushing on her for even longer than I had.

     It's not that I can't recognize him. It's that I won't.

     Somewhere, that Bryan, the one who kept staring at the cracked screen of his phone... he died. Or maybe he's been dead ever since the world ended. Maybe it's only just catching up to me now. My past. My home. My family. Colby. Olivia, even. What do they really mean?

     Where's the continuity? Has all of this been the epilogue to my pathetic little life?

     Of course it hasn't. The End wasn't the end.

     It was a reboot.

     In this new canon, Colby isn't my friend. He's the enemy.

     I shoot him a couple more times, shuddering as I feel each hollow cavity rip open inside me. The more of my soul I use to attack him with, the less there is left for me.

     But I've never felt this much power well up inside of me. The boundaries between my body and the world outside have dissolved; I can feel the particles colliding in the air that surrounds me. I can feel the light, feel each ripple of sound brush against my aura. Feel each individual particle within me and around me vibrate. But it's more than that.

     Everything's become malleable. And everything I can feel, I can destroy. Ripping, that awful tearing through the fabric of space and time, was always accompanied by a sick crunch—a queasy screech in the pit of my stomach. But this isn't ripping. It isn't even peeling.

     It's burning.

     "Please," Colby, or rather this dishevelled stranger who vaguely resembles my childhood friend, begs. "I wasn't the one who—"

     I set off a beam I've been charging up; it pierces right through his gut. Not without consequence—an emptiness claws its way open inside me, and I drop to my knees. The big trade-off. Kill him, and I kill me. I struggle for air. My eyeballs feel like they're about to pop. Lips curl inward. I'm imploding.

     Need to focus on something else. I glance back over my shoulder. Gail, Martha, Ace, and Liluye—they all stand by the darkened threshold of the lopsided house. They've been inside. They've seen what's lying there. They know why I have to do this.

     "Em!" Melody calls out, rushing over to me, but I throw up my hand and will her away from me. She goes flying backwards, slamming against the side of the house. My aura expands, sucking in energy from my surroundings. But it's leaking out of me at a quicker rate than I can absorb it.

     I flare up my spirit anyway. Charge up another beam. Shoot. Colby deflects this one, rising to his feet.

     "I don't want to hurt you," he says, glaring at me. "But hit me one more time—"

     I pelt him with energy bullets. He holds out his hands in front of them squeezing an invisible force with his fingers. Suddenly, my aura starts to contract. No. The world starts to contract around me. Compressing me. Squishing me into a tiny little box.

     And the pressure. The cavernous hole inside of me eats away at my insides—at what lies beneath my insides—while the world crushes me from the outside. I'm shrivelling away into nothing. Even physically, I can see my body starting cave in on itself.

     No. I refuse to go out like this. Not after...

     The grounds starts to rumble. The pressure eases, and I fall flat on my back, gasping for air. The volcanic rock that paves the streets starts to splinter. Geysers of ash spurt up into the air, accompanied by rabid growling. The street splits open down the middle, separating Colby from the rest of us. Just another of the many chasms between us. Everything's symbolic.

     I crawl over the edge and then instantly jerk back. Golems, dozens of them, come crawling up out of the hole. I feel a hand on my shoulder. Look up. Melody. She's flaring her soul along with me. And the golems are staying away, as if we're protected by some sort of forcefield. Our essence repels them. They climb up the opposite side of the rift and cluster around Colby instead.

     He looks at me pleadingly. A couple of golem heads explode, but they're emerging from the abyss too quickly for him to take them all out with his psychic powers.

     "Bryan..." he begs.

     I hold up my hand and shoot twice. One energy bullet rips through Colby's right knee, the other his left. He falls to the ground. The golems swarm him.

     "Let's go," I say, turning my back on Colby. It's all surreal, like I'm watching a scene play out in somebody else's head. The raging storm inside of me calms... for now. My insides are dry. Aching. Itching. I can barely breathe.

     I'm not going to watch. I'm in enough pain as it is. I turn my back on Colby and start limping up the slope of the street towards the base of the volcano.

     I'm not sure if anyone's following me. But I don't look back.

     I'm done looking back. 



Author's Note:

Would you believe me if I said the real tragedy's still to come? What am I saying--of course you would! My apologies to anyone who's not a big fan of abstract, disorienting action scenes. If it's any consolation, all of what just happened was probably as confusing to Em as it was to you. I wanted to distinguish the climax of his storyline from Comma's, which is a much more straightforward action sequence. Speaking of which, that should be concluding next chapter. By my calculations, we've got 4 or 5 more chapters to go in total. Let's see how accurate that estimate is (I always underestimate how long it'll take to conclude things). Thanks for your patience with these last few chapters--I know they're taking me longer than usual to write. 

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