A Touch Of Lightning (COMPLETED!)

Chapter 41 Powers and Ties 2

Chapter 41 Powers and Ties 2

Ahleena was quiet for a moment as they ran, envisioning the air rushing past as water sweeping away old dirt. Sweeping her clean, letting her think clearly, despite the turmoil cluttering her mind from meeting a Rift Wraith again.

"Mirage's powers reminded me of Carmen. And now, thinking about it, they even look related. Sisters, possibly." Ahleena said.

She watched Callin's mind through the link very carefully as she spoke, wondering how he would react to her words.

The nearly frantic twist inside Callin's mind was not what she was expecting. He seemed to be reaching some inner conclusion, some realization, his conscious thoughts making choices faster than she could follow. It was unnerving, seeing an animal mind in action with a human intelligence woven into it.

"Carmen needs to stay away from me. And Mirage is dead to me. I couldn't care less if they are related. It changes nothing." His voice was emotionless, and all the harder for it.

Ahleena had a sudden urge to body-slam him and get in his face and scream that he wasn't allowed to pull back like this, he wasn't allowed to fall into his animal side and leave her alone now that she finally was beginning to wake from the dream, the nightmare, her life had always been. Instead, she said nothing, just letting the link between them grow warm with her concern.

She felt him warm slightly, felt him grateful for her being there, and decided it was enough for now. Then she found herself thinking about the geometric pattern on the wall in the underground lab. The strange message created by the Torn, for Callin. For his mind alone. For the actual core of his mind.

"What is this message for me you always think of? You haven't explained it and the images in your mind don't make any sense." Callin said.

He felt like saying the images in her mind were so twisted, so strange, that he wondered if she had done it intentionally, to keep him from seeing it. He felt like she knew quite a bit about the message and was almost scared to tell him. That she was in fact keeping him from knowing what it meant, what it said. That maybe somehow it was pivotal for him.

Ahleena ran silently next to him, not attempting to shield her thoughts from him. Letting him see her trepidation in him actually seeing the image, the message. Letting him understand that she herself was scared to even dwell on the memory of that image, that it had that much power. Letting him learn what she intended to do.

"You really think we should go there, just so I can see that message?" He asked, his thoughts beginning to dart all over at the thought of going back to that hated place.

Part of his mind latching onto the thought of maybe hunting down that tablet computer he had abandoned somewhere in Alaska when he had fled the lab. Retrieving it so he could hear the audio recordings of what he had said in his sleep in those nightmare days on the run, being stalked by the Flayer, and worse, by his own memories.

He couldn't think of those days without thinking of that feeling of leaving without Mirage. Of that soul-crushing guilt, of that insane rage that hovered just below the top layer of his mind as he thought of all the labs had stolen from him. The burning fury in his very core surged hot, whipped into a frenzy by these memories, by having seen Mirage again, but not really seeing her. Seeing what they had done to her. And he deep inside, on the oldest, strongest of his walls, he began to build a door. A door he intended to open on the day he finally was face to face with those who ran the labs.

He knew the lab he had escaped from was now ruined, was now empty, with bodies everywhere. He had seen that much in Ahleena's mind. But he also knew those that ran the labs had escaped. Somehow, he could feel it. Like he was psychically tied to them. If they had died at the hands of The Torn, he would have felt it. He would have known it.