That night, I had a miserable time trying to sleep. I tossed and turned in my bed for two hours. My wounds had all been healed up with no scarring left behind, so my face was spared permanent disfigurement. The soreness was a different story. The healer, Marcus, said he could take care of the soreness, though that’d take longer. At that point, I’d already been down there for nearly an hour getting the worst of the worst patched up, so I opted to just take that and get out.
To my face, Shelly had been oddly calm about the ordeal. She was never a lecturer to begin with. She just told me to stay safe and get better. Maybe she just thought the beating I took was enough of a lecture and she’d just be pouring salt into the wound. She did mention that she liked how my Shimmer looked, now that I could make the creations visible to other people. Like Lori, she told me it was pretty, which didn’t exactly thrill me. Whatever, it could look however it wanted to as long as it kept bringing in results.
Megan thought it was just the coolest thing ever. She said the injuries were gross and nasty, and maybe implied I wasn’t the brightest for not taking care of myself. Of course, she said all that with a smile on her face. She was dying to see the pictures and video that Shelly adamantly refused to show her. At least in the eyes of an almost seven-year-old, I was kind of cool with just a pinch of stupid thrown in for good measure. I wasn’t sure how to feel about that one. I felt like getting a kid’s approval was a lot easier than getting their dunce cap branding.
I still wasn’t sure what was holding me back from sleeping. I was both mentally and physically exhausted, and the soreness wasn’t that terrible. No matter what I tried, I just could not persuade my body to shut down for the night. Braden didn’t seem to know about his shadow goop causing me more pain. That made sense. The guy probably wasn’t stabbing himself with the shadows. Marcus did confirm that something felt off with my body during the healing process. I checked the time on my phone, and the harsh white numbers told me it was one thirty in the morning.
“Great,” I mumbled, shoving my face against my pillow.
Giving up trying to wrestle sleep away from the Sandman, I grabbed my jacket and went out for the walk outside which was starting to become more common than I cared for. The Luna complex was sleepy and quiet, which gave it an eerie feel when everyone was still there. With so many temporarily evacuated, I found myself getting nervous in the small hallways. Something could have jumped out at me from one of those empty apartments at any time. I was glad when I felt the cool outdoor air hit me and I didn’t have a thousand doors behind me that could burst open to reveal a knife-wielding maniac.
I made my way over to the spot where Rebecca and I had just gone on our date. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky and there was minimal light pollution so far away in the mountains. The sky was beautiful, and I couldn’t keep my eyes off it. I nearly tripped at least three times just enjoying the view. I regretted not taking Rebecca out then, because that view would have been worth talking about. I had briefly considered giving her a call to see if she wanted to come. Then I realized waking her up at one thirty for anything other than an emergency was a good way to end a relationship.
As I approached the little gazebo, I began to hear grunting and other exertion noises from behind the bushes that blocked my view. I couldn’t even recall hearing another person outside the Luna complex before, so I created a Shimmer-Spear and advanced with caution. The fear that it was a massive bear or something worse was in my mind, even though those noises wouldn’t make sense with that sort of animal. I had just gotten my butt kicked by a bunch of shadows, so things making sense wasn’t something I wanted to bet my safety on.
I readied my spear and leaped around the corner. For the second time in twenty-four hours, I was nearly decapitated. There was a flash of silver, and a blade missed my face by a couple of inches. Even though it would have missed anyway, I fell back in surprise and landed right on my ass. That sent a minor jolt of pain through my aching body and a groan escaped my lips.
“What the hell!?” a female voice cried out. I blinked a few times and saw Val running toward me, blade still in hand. The panic instinct took over and I placed my Shimmer-Spear between myself and her, making her stop in her tracks. She dropped her sword to the dirt and put up her hands. “It was an accident!”
“I know it was.” I stood up slowly and broke down the spear before rubbing my sore shoulders. “Sorry about the scare. I’d never seen anyone else out here before, so I didn’t know what was going on. I wasn’t sure if you were some kind of bear making weird sounds. Bit of a reflex.”
“You’re not hurt, right? I didn’t hit you?” Val looked like she was going to check me over for injuries before I put some more distance between us. I wasn’t looking for a repeat situation of being taken hostage. She got the message and backed up herself. “I was trying to tire myself out with some training. Sleep hasn’t come easy lately. I’ve learned that sleeping in a bed that’s not my own is harder than I expected.”
“I’m having some troubles sleeping too.” I was still skeptical of her. Her swinging a sword out in the middle of the night wasn’t exactly normal in my book either. Then again, she could have killed me if she wanted to. Again. There was something about the distressed look in her eyes that made it harder for me to muster the same hatred that Lori held. Or maybe that was just part of my exhaustion lowering my defenses. “Why are you here?”
“What?” Val looked taken aback for a moment, her head tilting in confusion. Then she composed herself. I noticed her blue eyes weren’t as hard and cold as before, just very tired.
“There were a million other things you could have done besides come here. So, why did you come here?” I leaned against one of the support beams, too exhausted to even try to look tough.
“Your leader told me it would be best to answer questions to try and build trust,” she muttered. It was obvious to me that Val didn’t want to talk about it. I wasn’t going to back down, even if it might’ve been upsetting for her. I crossed my arms and waited.
“You already know why I left Dii Consentes,” she began, “but I’m here to try and right my wrongs before I die. When I found out McLeod had been manipulating me all these years, I...I was ready for it all to be over. I know I might come off a certain way that makes it seem like I don't have feelings. Well, I can't stand being lied to. It's one of the things that sets me off the most, so when I found out the man I considered to be my father lied to me like that, I knew I couldn't stay with him. I might be confused about everything else right now. I'm not confused about that. That's why I wanted to end my own life. I have no one now.”
“Jesus,” I said, remembering how quickly Rebecca had pulled that toy gun from my hand and held it against her head. I knew that it was something that almost never happened instantly. To actually commit suicide was generally something that was a long time coming, which had me worrying about both Val and Rebecca. Thankfully, the latter seemed to be in a better place mentally than she had been on that day.
“At least I thought I was ready. Turns out I’m too much of a coward to do it. I had my sword pointed at my chest and I couldn’t bring myself to do it.” She sounded disgusted that she didn’t take her own life. “It didn’t even come from a place of atonement. I wasn’t meant to have a family, since my first one was murdered and my second just used me for my power, and I lost...all of my desire to carry on.”
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“I...” My voice trailed off. I didn’t know what the right thing to say was. Was there even a right thing to say? She was still a murderer and an accomplice in massive destruction, but to hear someone say they didn’t deserve a family? That didn’t sit right with me.
“I had Luna’s hatred so ingrained in me for so long,” Val continued, not letting there be an awkward silence. “It was always at the forefront of my mind. I decided that if I could do anything to make my life worthwhile, I could at least give Luna what little information I knew.”
“Okay, I understand why you hated Luna. You were under those illusions for so long that there was nothing you could do about that.” I paused, trying to think about how to handle the next part. “Even if you hated Luna so much, why did you follow through with assisting in the slaughter of all those people? You mentioned something about McLeod being correct about the treatment of people like us, right?”
“I wish I had a better answer for both of us. I always thought the end would justify the means.” Val looked sickened just saying it. “I thought that, at the end of it all, McLeod would usher in a better life for people with powers. No revolution is pretty and kind, and it might not even be fully justifiable. I thought that since he’d saved me, he’d save others like me. I was never completely comfortable with what he did or what he asked of me. Clearly, I wasn’t bothered enough not to go along with his plans. The way he talked...he made the world sound like it could be a better place for anyone with an Anomaly.”
I made a Shimmer-Hand and drifted it to her sword, letting what she was saying sink in. Val made no attempt to stop or even question me. I brought the sword over to me and dropped it in my hands. It was heavier than I expected. I had to brace myself to not fall forward from the weight, sending fresh soreness through my tired muscles. I made sure not to show any weakness in front of Val, not that it looked like she even cared.
“He wants to kill everyone that doesn’t have a power. How could that be a better place for us? My sister—my only family left—would be killed and he wouldn’t bat an eye. Wouldn’t your old friend Emily still have been killed in a world ruled by McLeod?” I rotated the blade around as best I could, and it was impressive to me, even if I didn’t really know what a quality sword was supposed to look or feel like.
“He doesn’t want to kill everyone without powers. Or he knows he can’t, if nothing else. Things like that are mostly bravado for the cameras.” Val leaned against the beam across from me. “I won’t deny that he would exploit them for labor and make sure they live in a constant state of fear, but he doesn’t actually want them all dead. The population of people with Anomalies is too low to risk killing out everyone else, and we don’t know how much of a role genetics play in power distribution. He wouldn’t risk a population bottleneck like that without better evidence. From what he told me, his parents had no powers.”
“But if he got data that would support him, he would kill them if he could, wouldn’t he?”
Val inhaled sharply between her teeth. “I don’t think he would kill all of them. For as strong as he is, there are just too many normal humans in the world. I would believe him if he said he would enslave normal humans. He didn’t tell us a lot about his plans or who else is in Dii Consentes. He’s smart and confident, but there’s a paranoia under there too. Not everyone would be willing to risk their lives just because he’s strong, so McLeod started to pay people he thought he could manipulate. Enough of them have a price where they’d support any heinous act. When you start buying loyalty instead of earning it, there’s a bigger risk those people defect first. Besides McLeod, the only ones he let me interact with regularly were Heather and Eric. I think he wanted to keep Eric around me for his illusions, and Heather is his twin sister, so they were joined at the hip. That’s why it was the three of us that found you.”
I slowly swung her sword around, treating it more like a plaything than a weapon while still being careful. I just needed something to occupy my hands while I took in her information. The pain in my arms begged me to stop right when I was just getting the hang of its weight and balance. If Val was worried about me using her weapon against her, she didn’t show it. The look in her eyes and the deflated way she carried herself told me she genuinely didn’t care if I decided to run the blade through her heart. I fully believed her when she said she didn’t have the will to live anymore.
“I don’t want to hate you,” I finally said, sticking her sword into the dirt. “I don’t want to hate anyone. It’s too much effort to truly hate someone with every fiber of your being, and I’ve seen what it’s doing to someone I care a lot about. But you killed someone very important to my best friend. She watched it happen and I saw what it did to her.”
“If I could take it back, I would.” Val’s voice was raw with emotion, something I hadn’t been anticipating. “I would take back attacking you five in the Tomb if I could.”
“Did you mean what you said about giving your life up to Lori if we somehow come out on top?” I rested my hands on the sword, surprised at how well it held up sticking out of the ground.
“I did, yes.” Val took a shaky breath. “If I’m too much of a coward to take my own life, I’d gladly leave the judgment of what to do in her hands. I was so lost when I learned the truth about what happened to me. I know who I took from her, so I feel it’s only right to let her make the decision on what happens to me.”
Something about the way she said it didn’t sit right with me. I could understand that she wanted to do the right thing, commend it even. The rest of it made me uncomfortable. I didn’t like that Val was so ready to hand her life over to effectively be a pawn for Luna instead of McLeod. I wanted to speak up against it and tell her there was more she could do with her life. I ended up stopping myself, thinking it wouldn’t matter coming from me. To her, Lori was really the only one whose decisions carried any weight.
“The only thing I’ll say about your situation is this: you can’t hate yourself into loving yourself.” When Val gave me a confused look, I tried to put it another way. “You won't ever be able to feel like you righted your wrongs if you hate yourself, because nothing you do will ever feel like it was good enough. Maybe you won’t ever stop, maybe you shouldn’t stop, or maybe it’s up to you and Lori to figure it out. Just make sure that you’re focused if you help us. If you’re going to let self-loathing swallow you up, you won’t be in a good space mentally to help.”
She slid her back down against the beam and sat on the ground. “Do you think that I can do the right thing?”
“Well, yeah, of course you can,” I said. I handed her sword back to her. My arms had enough and I didn’t feel like trying to lift the thing anymore. I sat against the beam opposite hers. “Terrible things done in the past don’t mean you can’t do the right things after. People might not forgive you and may continue to judge you for those terrible things. That’s all up to them. There’s only so much you can do to control that.”
Val took her sword again and I battled the instinct to make another Shimmer-Spear in response. She used it to prop herself back on two feet. I still wasn’t used to our height difference, so it felt like she dwarfed me. Slowly, she stuck her hand out in a friendly gesture. It looked like she wanted to smile but was having trouble.
“Look, sorry, but not yet,” I said, stepping out from the cover of the gazebo. Val looked disappointed, and being the absolute loser I was, hated to upset people. I groaned and stuck my hand in hers. “We’re not really there yet. Still, I wanted you here because I think you can help us. It’d be stupid of me to not shake your hand as a welcome.”
“I understand, but thank you for going through with the gesture,” she said with a smile that seemed genuine. She turned her back toward me and started swinging her sword again. Like Alex and Rebecca, Val’s physique was impressive. A lot could be said about her, and none of those things could paint her dedication to fitness in a bad light. Looking at my arms, I realized how much I really needed to work out.
I felt bad about trying to be practical when it came to issues of the heart, especially when it was a lady telling me she wanted to commit suicide. After the way she made her entrance, I just wasn’t ready to give her my full trust. I couldn’t just leave her like that. “All right, if you really need someone to talk to, you can come to me. Nothing that you can do or I can do will be able to change what you’ve done, but you can’t just have no outlet here. You know where I live, so as long as you aren’t banging on my door at this time of the night, you can come by if you just need an ear to talk at.”
“Thanks, I'll keep it in mind.” Her voice was soft, barely above a whisper. She didn’t turn to face me. It might have just been a trick of the light, but I was positive that I saw some tension leave her shoulders.
“Good luck with your training. I think I’m finally tired enough to get to bed.” Even though she wasn’t watching, I waved bye to her and went back home, hoping that I said the right things about her situation. The last thing I wanted or needed was for everything to spiral down more because of what I did.