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Motel room, late evening. The curtains part onto a half-empty parking lot. The sky above is thick with yellow clouds, the sun drowning at the edge of the horizon where bare trees jut supplicant at the highway’s edge.
Donna, sitting on the double-bed to roll a tennis ball across her sore calves, stares absently at the view. Of all the universes they’ve seen so far, this is the quietest. Even Jason, who rarely fails to articulate his displeasure with something, only swears softly under his breath as he does battle with the stovetop. The smell of the cheap beef stock they picked up at the gas station fills the room. In the single bathroom, the shower sputters away to itself. Kyle’s shirt and bomber jacket sit in a rumpled pile at Donna’s feet. There’s something there she hasn’t seen before: a gold crucifix, nestled among the folds of fabric.
In the bathroom, Kyle is hunched over the sink. A red line of saliva is drawn between his lip and the porcelain. He spits. Blood splats into the basin. He cups his hand under the faucet and drinks until he can't taste metal anymore.
They picked up a car in the dingy town where they landed, so that Kyle could sleep as they followed the beacon. This universe is slow and silent, caught in some half-hearted apocalypse. They drove for hours on the highway, cutting the brownish fields. Jason and Donna in the front. Kyle sprawled in the back, jolting in and out of alertness with every shudder of the tires through a pothole. Occasionally he caught fragments of hushed conversation. Got shaken from a daze, just once, to the sound of Jason laughing: a short, aborted sound. Without the usual abrasiveness, it sounded like it could belong to a stranger. Kyle had stared blearily at the passing landscape, the red light bleeding through the clouds. Bare trees. The shadow of a harrier on the horizon. He was still learning how to sleep again.
They found the motel shored up against the landscape; hills jutting up like someone’d hacked them out of the ground. Kyle slumped on the bed while he waited for the shower. Lay on his side facing the window, thumbing his grandmother’s crucifix in one hand, listening as Jason rattled around the tiny kitchenette. Too tired to pick a fight. After so many weeks of this, they’re running out of arguments to have anyway. Kyle’s initial animosity has dulled like the edge of a blade.
Donna finished washing her hair. Kyle took the bathroom next.
Now: blood in the sink.
“What happened?” Donna’s asking. She’s standing with her shoulder in the bathroom door, open just enough to talk. Kyle’s not wearing a shirt yet. Water runs from his hair down the back of his neck. Donna is looking down at the sink, at the ropy little streak of blood that’s still pooling at the drain’s edge.
“Pass me a toothbrush?” Kyle asks instead of answering. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.
Donna disappears for a moment. Comes back with it still sealed in plastic. Before Kyle can shut the door on her, she slips inside. The shower-tub fills up half the standing-space of the tiny bathroom. In order to avoid crowding her, Kyle sits down on the tub’s edge. Donna sets the toothbrush on the countertop, and then looks down at him with concern. The flickering bathroom light halos behind her in the mirror.
“Let me see,” she tells him quietly.
It’s hard to avoid her when she’s looking right at him. Kyle opens his mouth. Donna takes his jaw in her hand, tilting his face up, gently, to catch the light. She smells like the cheap motel soap, the scent of ozone underneath. Her touch burns at his skin, but he can’t—won’t—pull away. The halogen glow catches at her wet hair, dribbles gold through every strand. The way his heart’s caught in his chest, he could be floating above the atmosphere—Connor’s hand on his shoulder, murmuring to him to really look at the Earth, haloed precious against a velvet abyss. Like seeing the stars for the first time all over again.
Donna’s thumb catches at his lower lip. Any remaining thoughts are thrown from Kyle’s brain.
“You’ve cut yourself,” Donna murmurs, seeing the little toothmarks that line the inside of his lower lip. Not deep enough to maim: just enough to bleed, and keep bleeding, even though it’s been weeks since Kyle’s teeth were sharp enough to make the wounds.
Kyle exercises immense self-control, and does not shut his eyes, and does not close his mouth until he’s put his hand over Donna’s and gently guided her fingers away from his lips. Ignores the terrible cold she leaves in her wake. He swallows, and says, “Parallax.”
Donna’s hand curls around his.
He adds, “My—his teeth were sharp. Didn’t care that it cut when I smiled too fast.”
First-person, third-person. It’s muddy. John and Guy talk about Parallax like it wasn’t Kyle too. Like the fear-entity that crawled inside him was solely responsible for what happened next, like Kyle’s body was just an empty vessel to contain it. Water brimming at a glass-edge. But Kyle was there. Hal understands it the way the others don’t. It had been their hands, their words, their smiles. It made him want what he did.
Donna crouches, in that narrow space between the bath and the sink, so that Kyle has to spread his knees to make room for her. Her face, when he slouches forward, is just inches from his. Her expression is drawn open by pity. With her free hand, she smooths the wet hair from his face, and this time he doesn’t have the strength not to lean into her touch.
“It’ll heal,” Donna tells him gently.
Hasn’t yet. But Kyle just nods.
“Did you get any sleep while we were driving?”
“Not really,” Kyle murmurs, letting his eyes flutter shut as she cards her fingers through his hair. “I sort of—forgot.”
“To sleep?” Donna chuckles softly.
“How to sleep,” Kyle corrects. He opens his eyes to look at her, and huffs, self-deprecating. “I couldn’t—when I was Ion, I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t need to. For a whole year I just—” and he gestures helplessly with his free hand. “I’m not used to it.”
Not used to being so human again. His mouth tastes like blood. He thinks of the saints on the kitchen wall that his mom’d swear to in Gaeilge. Stories of ever-weeping stigmata illustrated in little perfunctory stripes of red.
“Do you believe in God, Donna?” Kyle asks suddenly.
Donna’s hand falls from his hair to his bare shoulder. Her thumb traces a circle on the raised edge of his clavicle as she frowns. Eventually, she says, “I’ve met gods. I’m not religious.”
But Donna does believe in fate—in a story. Knows there’s something unfathomable that directs her life and rewrites it as it pleases.
She adds, staring off to one side with a frown knitting her brow, “You need to love God, don’t you?”
“No,” Kyle says immediately. “You don’t.”
Donna looks at him for a moment, her expression unreadable, and then she leans forward and presses a fierce kiss to his forehead. She says, “If you can’t sleep, at least rest. We’ll work this out.”
“You’re changing the subject,” Kyle says.
“And we’re both hungry,” Donna agrees. Kyle lets her pull him to his feet. “Let’s do theology after we eat, alright? Jason’s making dinner.”
“Great,” Kyle mutters, but even his irritation’s half-hearted. Donna just rolls her eyes as she pulls him out of the bathroom with her.
“Jesus, are you two done?” Jason announces.
“Are you?” Donna says, raising her eyebrows. Kyle ducks past her to grab his shirt.
“Yeah, I made dinner while you two—” Jason slams the salt shaker down on the counter for emphasis, “—were off offending every standard of basic propriety.”
“What, jealous?” Kyle shoots back, as he pulls the crucifix on. The motel room’s not that big—there’s no way Jason didn’t hear half their conversation anyway.
“Sure, Rayner. I’m jealous of literally everyone else who doesn’t have to be in this room right now,” Jason snaps.
“Do you have to be in this room right now?” Kyle says coolly.
“I made you dinner, you ungrateful—” Jason cuts himself off as Donna gently shoves him away from the stove so she can start serving herself. The comedic effect of someone of Jason’s stature deferring to Donna isn’t lost on Kyle. Jason catches his grin and flashes him another scowl over Donna’s shoulder.
Donna sighs audibly. “Kyle, stop antagonising him.”
“He’s antagonising me,” Kyle protests, finally untangling his shirt from his jacket.
“Maybe you just have that effect on people generally,” Jason suggests.
“Just on you,” Kyle says sweetly.
Donna tips her head back to look at the ceiling. “Oh, for god’s sake, Kyle, would you put your shirt on and come get a bowl already?”
Kyle yanks his shirt down over his head, and immediately catches Jason still glaring at him. Kyle scowls back. They could exchange petty snipes indefinitely if it weren’t for Donna—for her sake, Kyle holds his tongue long enough to get a bowl of food. Jason stakes out a place at the table, pouring over the road map while the beacon blinks faintly at his elbow. Donna sits cross-legged on the bed. Kyle leans on the kitchen bench, doodling little thumbnail sketches on a pad of paper until his pencil breaks. He persists with the splintered edge for a bit, but it's useless, and he doesn't have a sharpener. He leaves the drawing unfinished: a woman's face in profile, looking upwards.
Donna sends Kyle to bed after they eat. She and Jason negotiate about whether someone ought to stay awake to keep watch, keeping their voices hushed even though Kyle isn’t even pretending to sleep.
“You’re sharing the bed,” Donna tells Kyle quietly a few minutes later, sliding under the covers on the other side.
“Figured,” Kyle murmurs, cheek still pressed to the pillow.
“Jason’s taking the first watch, I’m taking the second,” she adds, shifting until she gets comfortable.
“I can take a shift,” Kyle says, which is probably a lie.
“You’re useless to us without sleep, Rayner,” Jason says from across the room. He’s set up at the table, started laying his knives out with a bottle of oil and a rag he swiped at the gas station earlier. The sheer quantity of blades is almost comical.
“Fuck off,” Kyle mumbles.
“Just rest. Try not to worry about it,” Donna tells him. She rolls over and presses a kiss to his temple, withdrawing again before Kyle can even respond. The blankets shift again as she bundles herself beneath them. “Night.”
“Night,” Kyle echoes. The memory of her lips burns like a brand against his face—he rolls over and curls on his side, pressing his face into the pillow. From this angle he can watch the lone lamp on the table pulse through his slitted eyelids. Jason’s working steadily through the knives. Motions neat and methodical. Almost gentle. The regularity is soothing: between the soft rhythm of the blades clicking down on the table and Donna’s breathing beside him, Kyle drifts.
It doesn’t last. He surfaces still half-tangled in a nightmare. Mouth dry, sheets sticking at his shoulders. The room is dark now; streetlights pooling at the curtain-cracks. Jason is an eerie shadow seated at the table—he turns to look, as Kyle stirs, and the low light catches at the edge of his eyes. Two pale slivers in the dark.
Kyle’s throat is tight. Donna’s still curled under the blankets beside him. He whispers, “Was I screaming?”
“No,” Jason says, voice low. “You were saying something though. Wasn’t in English.”
“Gaeilge,” he murmurs, feeling scaped raw. He sits up slowly, so he doesn’t disturb Donna, and untangles the crucifix where it’s looped around his neck. Sleep-fog clings to him—he’s thinking aloud, trying to recall what had torn him from unconsciousness. “My mom, she always made me greet her in Gaeilge.”
Jason tilts his head. Kyle braces for an abrasive remark, but Jason just says, “She’s dead?”
Kyle nods, not trusting himself to speak. Maura’s death had left him unmoored. An easy target for Parallax in his grief. His mouth tastes like blood.
“That why you can’t sleep?” Jason asks. From someone else it might sound like an invitation to commiserate, but with Jason it’s intel. Every question comes with a calculated edge.
And there’s no way he didn’t overhear Kyle and Donna’s conversation in the bathroom before. Kyle swallows, wary. “Sort of. Not really.”
Jason tilts his head. An invitation to elaborate.
Kyle just says, “The hell do you care, anyway?”
“Out of the goodness of my heart,” Jason says wryly. Kyle’s unimpressed look must be visible in the low light. Jason lets out a slight huff. “Fine. I’m a pragmatist. You’re useless without that ring, and that ring’s useless if you’re too tired to concentrate on it. Yeah?”
“I bet you say that to all the girls,” Kyle deadpans.
There’s the briefest flash of teeth from the other side of the room, reflected pale in the light. “Just stating the facts, Rayner. Unless there’s something I’m missing?”
There, again. Pressing for information. Kyle feels a surge of irritation. “I don’t owe you my life story.”
“Not asking for it. But I’m trusting you to have our backs out here.”
Kyle lets out a breath. It’s as close to an incredulous laugh as he can get at this volume. “Are you serious? Don’t pretend like you didn’t hear every word Donna and I said earlier. If you want to know something, Jason, just say it.”
Silence. Jason leans forward a little. Deliberately casual: “Okay then. What’s Parallax?”
The only sound is Donna’s steady breathing. The rumble of an engine outside. A car reverses out of the parking lot, and blood-light pools at the curtain edge. Kyle keeps his tone even. He says, “Me.”
Jason shifts again. The red light catches the skeletal edge of a cheekbone. He says, “It sounded more complicated than that.”
“It is. It wasn’t always me,” Kyle agrees. He won’t tell the whole story now.
“Is it still you? Parallax, I mean.”
Kyle twists the chain of the crucifix in his fingers. “No.”
Maybe Jason catches the gleam of the metal in the dark. The cool curiosity has gradually drained from his tone, and by the time he next speaks, it’s almost—gentle. “You don’t sound so certain.”
The chain bites at Kyle’s fingertips as he pulls on it. “Parallax is gone,” he says. Lifts his chin. Tastes the blood as he swallows. “Doesn’t mean it was never there.”
“Hm.” Jason’s tone is thoughtful.
The red light outside fades, leaving blue shadows in its wake. In the half-light, it’s easy to keep talking. Kyle adds, “And I can’t take back what he—I did.”
He still remembers the smell of charred flesh. A bright enough light can render anything unrecognisable. Torch out a chest cavity until it’s not even meat. Just ash.
Again, Jason shifts. The light catches his eyes again, makes them look brighter than they should. He says, “That why you’re wearing that?”
Kyle knows he means the crucifix. He shrugs, artlessly: it’s complicated. He found the cross on the end table beside his mom’s bed, as he cleared out her house. She was dead. His dad was M-I-A-missing-in-action. All Kyle really had left were fragments of childhood Spanish and Gaeilge. The Blessed Virgin on the kitchen wall above the bread-maker. And a crucifix gifted at his grandmother’s confirmation. The chain is wrought from such fine gold. It shouldn’t be able to bear the strain of his grief.
Kyle still remembers how the Padrenuestro goes. But in the half-light, it’s easy to admit, even to Jason: “I don’t know if I can believe in God.”
“Do you want to?” Jason asks, like it’s that simple.
Once, padding down the hall from his room in the night for a glass of water, Kyle caught his mom in prayer. Hail Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death: eyes shut, her head bowed slightly, hands flat on the kitchen bench like the house was a body on its way to the earth. Kyle’s tried the same, clutching his grandmother’s cross until it leaves furrows in his palms. But everywhere he looks for God it’s just tangled up in the rest of the sky. It’s hard not to think, addressing God or whatever it is he’s praying to: I know what it’s like.
Kyle was God for a year and a week. No matter how much he told Jenny otherwise. He folded the whole universe tight in his palm to keep. While Jenny curled against his side with her cheek pressed to his shoulder, a star collapsed four-thousand light years away, and a warship fell from a far-off planet’s red sky. A kid was throwing up on the F train four blocks away and a girl in Rotorua gave birth to twins, and an earthquake levelled an ancient city on the plains of Okaara, pluming bronze ash and rubble down the craggy hillside. Asteroids collided in the Kuiper Belt and someone felled a six-thousand-year-old olive tree and Kyle stared unsleeping at the ceiling of his Greenwich Village apartment and felt it all happen all at once, blistering bright and too loud. Like pulling a chair up in a hurricane. His hands in Jenny’s hair and his eyes pinned open against the weight of the stars like Atlas just waiting to blink—
I know what it’s like, he can’t help thinking when he prays, and hopes it’s not blasphemy if it’s actually true.
“I don’t know,” Kyle says slowly. He turns the cross in his hand and lets the hard edge dig into the flesh of his palm. “I don’t know if I could, even if I wanted to.”
“Then don’t,” Jason says. Like he can take one of those knives laid out on the table and cut it clean through the world.
Ion had held the whole world up over the floodwaters. For a week, there were no unkind deaths. No children left in burning buildings. No one left in the river’s path as the dam collapsed. The warships of Karalyx were turned away from the solar system’s edge. Jenny’s powers bloomed again, bright in her heart. Mountainsides settled before they could avalanche. The first drops of rain began to splat and steam across drought-cracked earth. Kyle was everywhere. And that night, he and Jenny took John and Merayn dancing.
He couldn’t hold that power without intervening. He still wonders if it was right, to give it up. But he did, in the end. Some people couldn’t be brought back. Some stories couldn’t be rewritten. He was still human at the end.
But God’s not. Kyle keeps turning the equation in his mind, but no matter what angle he takes, it keeps turning up negatives. If God was everything, like Ion had been everything—omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, Alpha and Omega, fingers pulling up the world’s threads—how can he not intervene? Witness the scale of suffering and still stay his hand? Anyone who could hold that power and not use it can’t be human. And they can’t love.
“It’s the problem of evil,” Kyle murmurs. He’s adrift. “If God is all-powerful, He can’t be good.”
“Oh good, theology,” Jason mutters. And a little clearer, actually addressing Kyle: “You know what the usual counterargument is, right? God withdraws because it—He, She, whatever—loves us. Free will, all that shit.”
“Do you think we have free will?” Kyle asks.
Jason snorts. “You really need to get some sleep.”
Kyle’s silence is uneasy. Every time he’s stood at the start of his own story with the power to rewrite it, something has stopped him. As Ion he’d looked Hal in the eye at the edge of the abyss and said, I can change this. I can bring the dead back. I can save you. And Hal hadn’t disagreed. But he had reminded him that history’s path was long, and its foundations ran deep. And even gods knew to fear fate.
Kyle could have changed the story. But he didn’t. Fate remained unbent.
And maybe that had been his choice, but—it chafes at him now. Whether it really had been a choice. He thinks of Donna being pulled in and out of a hundred lives. And he thinks—
“What brought you back?” Kyle asks Jason. “I mean, you died, right?”
Neither Jason nor Donna had been forthcoming on the details.
“You really want to get personal?” A hint of Jason’s usual abrasiveness creeps back into his voice.
“Sorry,” Kyle says. “I just—I tried bringing my mom back. But she said it wasn’t right. And Donna died too, but she’s—” He trails off, glancing at Donna’s sleeping form. Her hair pooled around her face on the pillow. Her warmth, beneath the blankets. He can still feel the imprint of her touch on his face. Jason’s still silent. Kyle’s words carve through the quiet: “I was just wondering why some people come back wrong. And others don’t.”
Jason inhales. After a moment, he asks, voice low, “Which category am I in?”
Kyle frowns. It hadn’t occurred to him that the matter might even be in doubt. “I mean…you don’t exactly look like a zombie.”
But even as he says this, he realises it’s not quite true. Jason’s presence inspires a familiar kind of vertigo. A wrongness. Kyle's reminded of glancing in the mirror and catching Ion looking back: the way, sometimes, you could almost see galaxies pooling in the shadows of his face. Like a walking hole in the world.
“I don’t know what brought me back, and I don’t care,” Jason says, answering Kyle’s original question with a razor-edge. “But if it was your god? Tell him he’s got a shitty sense of humour.”
“I—we’re not on speaking terms,” Kyle says hoarsely.
Jason lets out a sudden laugh. Startled, he cuts himself off before he can wake Donna. Kyle’s startled too—an embarrassed silence settles between them. Jason leans forward, bowing his head and swiping a hand through his hair with a slight sigh. He says, “You really gotta try get some sleep, Rayner. I’m sick of driving that piece of shit car.”
Kyle releases a tension in his shoulders he didn’t even know he was holding. “Oh, so now you don’t have complaints about my flying?”
“Your flying’s fine, it’s the constructs I’ve got complaints about.”
“Uh huh. Maybe you just don’t appreciate art.”
“I’ve seen your art, and it’s way better than the stupid pirate ships you insisted on conjuring up in the last universe,” Jason tells him.
Kyle's brain grinds to a halt. “When did you see my art?”
“It’s hard not to see it, you’re holding a notebook the instant anyone tries to make you sit still for more than two seconds.”
Kyle doesn’t know what to do with this. He shrugs. “It’s just sketching.”
“Whatever.” Jason waves a hand dismissively. “It’s still good.”
“Wait. You actually—what.”
“Rayner, you’re an asshole, but I’m not blind.”
Kyle genuinely has no idea what to do with this information. He just mutters, “My pencil’s broken now anyway, so.”
“Jesus, just take a compliment,” Jason snaps. “And go to sleep.”
“You’re the one keeping me up,” Kyle snaps back.
“Fine. Good night,” Jason says shortly.
Kyle slumps back down on his back and glares at the ceiling. After a moment, feeling a bizarre and very stupid kind of guilt, he mutters back: “Good night.”
He wakes to the dawn; startled from sleep not by the light but by the sudden realisation that he was sleeping. He lies there, half-drowning in the pillows. The dawn is seeping in under the curtains. And Donna: arched on the floor between the window and the bed; one leg raised on the chair in a hamstring stretch. Kyle watches her. The muscles of her back shift beneath the faded tourist shirt for this universe’s Boulder City—as she moves out of the stretch and lies down to begin her sit-ups, it bunches up against her shoulders, slips to reveal the dip of her collarbone. As she completes her reps, Kyle imagines illustrating her in chiaroscuro pastel, smearing at the shadows with his fingers.
Somewhere around the sixtieth rep, when she lies all the way back, her eyes meet his over her head. Her lips quirk into a tired smile. She murmurs, “How long have you been awake?”
“Long enough,” Kyle murmurs back. And he registers properly that the sleeping form in the bed beside him has to be Jason—curled a respectable distance away, not taking more than his share of the blanket. Kyle shifts just enough to look. Jason’s turned away toward the door, and his bare shoulders are thick with scars. He sleeps curled tight, smaller than someone his size should be able to be.
Kyle draws himself quietly from the bed and stretches. Donna sits up to watch him, settling cross-legged where she is on the floor. “Did you sleep alright?” she asks softly. Her hair has dried in little ringlets around her face where she slept with it still wet. The morning suits her.
“Do you want breakfast?” Kyle asks instead of answering, padding around the bed to the kitchenette. “There’s cereal, or…” he frowns down at the plastic bag of supplies on the bench. “…more cereal. Your choice.”
He’s rewarded with a little laugh. “Cereal,” Donna says, and she grants him a warm smile. Doesn’t press him further on the sleep question. “Thanks.”
Kyle ducks his head so she can’t see the flush rising in his cheeks. His notebook’s still on the kitchen counter—as he collects a pair of bowls and opens up the cereal box, he notices the broken pencil’s still sitting on top of it. Only now someone has taken a knife and shaved the splintered edge to a gentle, neat point.
Jesus Christ. Kyle slips the pencil into his pocket, busies himself with the cornflakes, and very carefully does not look over at where Jason’s curled under the bedsheets. He sits on the floor with Donna, and they eat as quietly as they can. Kyle slouches back against the wall beneath the window, until the dawn-light dapples his hands where he holds the bowl. Donna’s examining the road map in one hand, chewing thoughtfully on a mouthful of cereal, her spoon raised halfway between her mouth and the bowl.
Kyle asks, “Are you okay?”
She flashes him a bemused smile. He waits as she swallows her mouthful. She buries the spoon back in the bowl, holding a hand over her mouth for a moment until she can speak with her usual decorousness. “Yeah, sorry, just distracted. You know their highway numbering is backwards here?”
“Wait, really?” Kyle leans over to look at the map, and Donna automatically catches his bowl before he can pour its contents out onto the carpet in the process. He lets her take the bowl from him altogether and set it down on the floor; too engrossed in trying to make sense of the printed labels on the map. He says, “We should keep this. It’s actually kinda cool."
Donna hums in agreement. They resume eating in silence for a little longer, before Kyle remembers his original question. He says, “But seriously though, are you okay? Like, we’ve basically got the whole universe on our shoulders and you’re just—” he gestures eloquently to everything about Donna in general. Bearing it all with her usual grace.
Donna rocks back until she’s leaning against the wall too, shoulder-to-shoulder with him, as she considers this. After a moment, she says, “I don’t know. Are you okay?”
“Homesick,” Kyle says. It’s the best word to describe it. Even if he’s not sure where ‘home’ is anymore.
Donna nods quietly, one calloused finger scraping at the handle of her spoon. She’s got warrior’s hands; rough in a way the rest of her isn’t. She says, “Me too.”
Kyle sighs softly. “We have to keep going either way, right?”
“Yeah,” Donna says, with a soft smile. And as she leans forward over her bowl again, her knee comes to rest against his, just touching. They eat, keeping watch until Jason wakes. And Kyle almost doesn’t notice the taste of the blood.