Chapter 6: I Will Help You Swim

Her castle traversed the seas, a roaming principality of glaciers carved into buildings and barracks around a central fortress. Her family, black of hair with pointed ears and black sclera and violet irises and empty pupils, lived there with her. They roamed the seas and maintained her empire, killing all those who challenged them. They destroyed the structures of their opponents, killing their cities and hallowed halls and beloved landmarks, executing their leaders before crowds of their followers. Anyone who screamed in their vicinity, who made any unwanted noise at all, was put to death as an interloper.

Always, heroes rose up to face her, to end the Storm. Time and time again, they came for her, and time and time again, she and her family annihilated them. And always they came in groups, in armies, in heroic bands and parties and alliances of light. Until one man came alone: the Chosen One, clad in a resplendent armor that shined with a golden light all its own. His helmet revealed not his face, or even an inch of skin or any identifiable feature, but there was something undeniably, utterly, starkly human about this man, perhaps more so than any other person Lacy had ever met. He was tall and strong, and had been waiting for her all his life and all her life so that he might lop the head from her shoulders and end the hideous silence that strangled the world.

He appeared from nowhere, a shining portal of golden light exploding in the air. He stood tall and proud beneath her castle, and she looked down from atop her tower. On his side, he carried a Zweihander made of Midnight Iron.

Her family attacked him en masse, and he drew his sword and made quick work of them. All of them. Her family, three-hundred and four strong, all fell to the Chosen One. Soon, she stood above him alone as he threatened to bring back all the noise, the wretched cacophony of the human species.

She could not allow that. She would not go back to that- she would rather die than risk drowning in the noise.

And so, she brought her Star down from the sky to accompany her into battle. The Chosen One reached into his heart and retrieved a Star of his own. It was the same burning blue orb of power as her own, a twin, a mirror image, good where hers was evil. The Storm on the Horizon and the Chosen One fought, and the ocean boiled and the sky burned and the winds descended upon the land like the endless fall of the damocles.

Silence met cacophony.

The earth was no more.

***

Lacy woke up, unsurprised to find her sheets drenched in sweat. She didn’t groan, didn’t shake, didn’t even feel the usual tinge of shame. It was normal- it had been normal for her for years. She didn’t know why she was so ashamed of it. The nightmare was terrifying- what she’d seen, what she’d been seeing, was terrifying. She didn’t want any of that. But for now it was just a dream. It didn’t have to mean anything. Or at least, she prayed that it didn’t.

She stripped her sheets from her bed and gathered them up. Time for laundry- she’d been putting it off for the past week.

A heartbeat neared her room. Danny knocked on her door, and she opened it before he could say anything.

“What’s up?” she asked.

“Uh… Just checking on you.”

“What for?”

“Well you’ve been getting up earlier and earlier the past few weeks, but today you’re back to sleeping till noon. Just wanted to make sure everything was alright.”

“Oh… Fair enough. Thanks. I’m all good, though. Had some weird nightmares, but that’s nothing new,” Lacy said.

“Okay.”

“Besides, today’s Saturday, right? Day off and such.”

“Day off, right,” Danny said, sucking in his cheeks.

She hadn’t told him what she’d been doing. She still made calls, usually during the small hours of the morning when all she could do was leave voicemails, but she was still meeting her  quota and so he’d not questioned it. But still, he had to be wondering what exactly it was she was doing every day.

“Any big plans?” Danny asked.

“No. You?”

“I was thinking of going to the range, then maybe picking up some fireworks and setting them off tonight. You wanna come?”

Gwen gave her the day off. Lacy had been working her ass off every day for the past few weeks, and she could certainly use a distraction from the inside of her own head. “Sure,” she said. “Just lemme get dressed.”

To her own amusement, the process wound up taking over an hour. She only owned the one dress Gwen had given her, but she’d also purchased and learned to apply makeup. Well, she was learning to apply it, at least; it took a bit to get her face into a non-clown situation. When she was done, however, she beamed at her reflection: clean-shaven, with light foundation, eyebrows done, mascara applied, eyeshadow brushed on, lipstick a light red over her lips. She put on her chucks and met Danny in the kitchen, where he nursed a cup of coffee and a slice of leftover pizza. He did a double-take when he saw her.

A spark of shame ignited in Lacy, stoking her panic. “Does it look that bad?”

“No! No, no not at all. You look great. It’s just a bit surprising,” Danny said. Then his eyes went wide. “Wait, wait, no. Th-that that came out wrong.”

Lacy smiled with relief. “You’re good, man. Come on. Let’s go shoot guns and blow shit up.”

Jordan’s Gun Range was on the west-end of Grand Rapids, a converted warehouse in which dozens of firearms were housed for recreational purposes. They parked out front, and when they went inside, a choir of stares slammed into her. The expressions ranged from confusion to curiosity to amusement to outright disgust. Lacy’s heart beat louder than anyone else’s in the room, so loud she could barely hear anything else.

Danny stood next to her, and they went up to the front counter. “Hi. We’re back. We’d like to fire some guns.”

The man at the counter, a portly, bearded fellow with both arms sleeved in Confederate flag tattoos, looked at them back and forth. “Your friend looks a bit different than last time.”

“Yeah,” Danny said, his voice dropping in pitch as an angry growl infected his words. “You gotta problem with that?”

“Danny, don’t,” Lacy said.

The clerk laughed.

Lacy clenched her fists, shook her head. “Don’t do this for me, I can handle it,” she said. Then she faced the clerk. “Question still stands- do you have a problem with that?”

“With you? I mean, you’re a-”

“Do you want our money? Like, ever again?” Lacy asked, staring directly at the clerk, not blinking, not looking away. “Or do you want me going to the news with this- because no matter what their take on it is, they’ll hop on it to get a day’s programming out of it, the beautiful fucking parasites. And then after that comes the part where a swarm of know-it-all college kids from East Lansing show up with picket signs and megaphones- you wanna deal with that?”

A minute passed. The clerk laughed again, and said, “Sure. Whatever you say, freak.”

“You work at a gun range in northwestern Michigan- I seriously doubt I’m the freakiest person you’ve ever seen. I doubt I’m even the freakiest person you’ve seen today.”

The man didn’t laugh this time, merely smiled gently. “Why don’t you get out of here before you hurt yourself, tranny.”

Lacy brushed an errant lock of her long brown hair from her face, then smiled. Then she wound up a fist. Danny grabbed her, held her back, then pulled her out of the range.

They went to go shoot bottles in the woods instead, like they’d done as children.

Lacy held a Diamondback DB9 9 mm pistol, slightly too large for her hands. It was an object of power, an instrument of death, and yet at the same time… It was literally just a few sculpted hunks of metal crammed with ammunition. If you unloaded, it wouldn’t be much deadlier than baseball to the face. She’d held real power. She still held it. It wanted her to have it. Weirdly enough, this gun felt safer. At least she knew what she was getting into with this thing.

She emptied her clip. Her first two rounds missed the target wholesale. So she focused her breathing, and she listened, and she took aim. The next two rounds winged the bottles, then finally the other two were direct hits and shattered instantly.

She looked over to Danny’s respective shooting gallery- all direct hits, no bottles remaining. “Nice work,” he said when they finished up.

“You too,” Lacy said. It was honestly scary how good a shot he was.

After that they drove back into town, to a fireworks shop owned by three elderly identical triplets named Isha, Kamala, and Amirah Khara, wherein they bought a full set of twelve rockets. They stopped by a pizza place on the way back and picked up square pineapple, bacon, and jalapeno pie, and they drove past their bungalow on the edge of town as it bled into the forest.

They parked in an empty field, and they set off the first rocket while Lacy gingerly bit a slice of pizza, trying not to smudge her lipstick. The night sky was a black canvas of stars and moonlight. Lacy flinched, looking up at it, but was reassured when the rocket burst in an explosion of color and light. Lacy sat on the ground and looked up at the sky, and she listened to the screeching sound and let it pour over her perception.

Two heartbeats.

A dozen explosions.

A snapping twig.

Lacy jumped up and ran directly at the source. She dove through the woods, the wind curving up around the hem of her dress. She stopped a hundred yards into the trees, spun around on her feet looking for the source. Where was it, where, where where where where where where where-

“Lacy!”

Lacy pivoted a hundred and eighty degrees while swinging a fist. Danny jumped backwards and avoided the blow by a quarter-inch.

“What the hell are you doing?!” Danny asked.

“Did you hear that?” Lacy shouted.

“Hear what?”

“The noise- a twig, snapping!”

“Lacy, I couldn’t hear anything over the sound of fireworks going off.”

“I heard something- it- it- it…,” Lacy trailed off.

Danny stared at her flatly, his face half-shadowed in the moonlight. “What aren’t you telling me?”

Lacy’s eyes were wide as plates, and her arms hung limp at her sides. She looked Danny directly in the eyes as her breathing spiraled.

“We’ve been here before,” Danny said. “What aren’t you telling me?”

Lacy stared at him for another thirty seconds before finally the words came tumbling out of her sandpaper throat. “My parents are dead.”

Danny blinked. “Fuck. I am so sorry- I-”

“That’s not all of it,” Lacy said. She dragged her arm upwards and held her left hand flat over the ground. She breathed in, out, in, out, as she let the Stardust falling from the night sky flow into her, the electric river of cosmic energy resonating inside her veins. She channeled it through her heart and ignited it with her spark. She reached into the earth, into the stray dandelion seeds on the ground, and they bloomed from seed to flower in moments. The seeds were carried away on a wind Lacy wound through the trees with her right hand.

Danny blinked. He collapsed to the ground and sat down, his legs folded together. Lacy offered him a hand up, which, after five minutes, he took. After that, they gathered their things and went home. Lacy explained everything to Danny over a bottle of vodka, and by the end of the night he was caught up.