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Authors note: Darwin has the honor of writing the first chapter. We'll be switching every other chapter from here on out. She gets odds, I get evens.
Common Ground
Chapter One: The Stranding
By: Darwin
Snatching at an outcropping of heavily weathered rock, Cabal prevented a fall to the canyon bottom a hundred feet below him. He crooked his long, olive-skinned fingers into the fissure, wedging his knuckles into it, as an anchor for all other efforts. His muscles started to sing with the strain.
He was glad he had the forethought to take his gloves off during this effort; gloves would have made such acts impossible for him. He learned rock climbing long ago, but it certainly wasn’t his forte. It showed in the struggle he was having getting himself up the face.
Why didn’t I just fly up here? He asked himself yet again. He shook his head, recalling that there were no landing spots above or on level with the small cave. He marked the coordinates, circled the area twice looking for a place to set down and had no luck at all. His only option had been to set the hover-car down at the canyon floor and scale the walls.
Cabal’s hand began to cramp as he scrabbled to get his footing. He blew air noisily as his left toe caught hold, taking the weight off of his straining arm. His right foot wedged into another crack and he pushed up, using his left hand to feel for another handhold out of his sight. He wished he had traded for some climbing shoes now, instead of wearing his slick soled boots.
Why the hell would Renate climb up here? What possible reason would he have to be in this God forsaken place?
He let the thought slip again, concentrating on levering himself up onto the ledge his hand traced out the moment prior. Anchoring his grip, Cabal lifted his weight over the edge and onto the small outcropping. He rolled away from the rim, ignoring the discomfort of his arm being pinned under and behind him and the wrinkle of long jacket leather under the bone of his hip, glad just to be away from that drop. He blinked as his dark braid slid off his shoulder and tapped him in the face, the coil of silver clinking on the rock under his prone form.
He rested but a moment, wanting to make the cave and find his clues before day was well started. Then he could rest. Drawing in and puffing out another breath, Cabal made himself move again, gathering his legs under him and assuming a crouch. He flicked the rope of hair over his shoulder, feeling it swing, brushing the small of his back as it settled into place. He peered about him. Color came to the night darkened rocks. Reds, yellows, and oranges leapt to life, intensified by the sun cracking the horizon. Strata of different mineral compositions stacked on one another, showing as horizontal and diagonal slashes of ochre, eggshell, orange, and tan. They painted the large columns and pillars that walled him out as if he had stepped onto a gigantic chess board.
Slapping his hands together to loosen the dust, he rose to his feet and moved forward. He picked between the rows, scrabbling over several piles of rubble before he found a flat but narrow path through the sentries of stone. Cabal sought out energy traces from the air around him, reading, with long practiced senses, that other realm. It was a place where the Earth recorded her history in energy trails. His bastard breeding had given him a way to tap that realm, read its mysteries and extract useful information from the surroundings. He might just find a trail to tell him if someone had been through here in the timeframe he was interested. There was something - some ebb of power - but it was very faint.
Still, he followed it, knowing it was the best lead he had.
The shadows were deeper here. The predawn light was enough, however, that he could see the meandering passage through tumbles and columns and arches of rock leading away from the ledge. He allowed his fingers to trail along the sandy stone; his footsteps and that scraping of his touch were the only sounds to break the silence that enveloped him.
Out this far from the domes little existed. People were scarce, and though mutants wandered the wasteland, they tended to be close to the underground wellsprings. Surface water was unusual in this burned out husk of a world, and that kept most living things gathered around what little was left. There were no birds in the sky, and on the ground, only an occasional reptile, well adapted for absorbing water and nutrients through feeding. He was utterly alone out here.
While that was good for his purpose, he hated how forlorn these kinds of places were. If not for his overwhelming desire for revenge on Renate, he would return to Miranda’s side and just stay there for the rest of his days. He risked losing her to the passage of time, just like every other human acquaintance and lover he had ever known. He consoled himself with the thought that he had thickened his skin enough over the centuries. He was willing to keep Miranda company at the dome until death stole her from him.
Just like Lucinda.
He swallowed, pushing that pain from him, centering on his path.
Cabal spilled from the narrow canyon into a larger opening. Actually, it was a small plateau, and fissures plunged off on either side of it. Cabal grimaced, he needn’t fall into those. Peering up, he could see the burnished sky fading to the washed out blue that permeated the desert atmosphere on any given day. Here in the canyon there was still a dusky hue, the sun not yet caressing the depths of this place with her light and warmth.
His gaze fell and his heart leapt to see an opening maw of darkness in the sand and tan stone.
At last!
Cabal’s informant was forthcoming with Renate’s sighting, how the vampire had been adamant about directions to this very cave, only ten days ago. There was time to catch up to him if he got the trail fast enough. He stepped forward, eager to find the trail.
As the dhampir neared the entrance, a sensation like electric shock passed over his skin. He skittered to a stop and even stepped back as the feeling faded.
“What the fuck?”
An electrical field?
Cabal was preternaturally sensitive to all forms of electricity; it was part of what made his talent work, but he never encountered something like that. Swapping sight for another style of vision; he sought the field out. He sifted through the oranges, blues, and greens that made up the energy spectrum, searching out any yellow. It was a color often associated with that kind of phenomenon. He was unable to find it - as if it dissipated on contact.
Cabal blinked, cautiously stepping forward. There was no repeat of the shock, and he wondered if he had imagined it. Shaking his head he stepped into the dark of the cave.
The cave wasn’t very deep; perhaps five steps took him to the back wall. The place was semi-circular, the edges actually curling back out of sight from the entrance tunnel. Cabal ran his hand along the stone wall, feeling how smooth it was. This was no weather worn anomaly; someone in the past laboriously carved this out of the igneous rock. The walls had been smoothed by human hands, the floor beneath him by thousands of steps back and forth across the space. There was a feel of the place, a lingering sense of reverence. Cabal fleetingly wondered why.
Had the place held a special meaning to more than just him in his quest?
Mere moments of observation confirmed that someone had been here - and recently. The remains of a fire lay to one side of the exit, an effort made to ensure no one would see the fire from the outside. It was not so old that it could be passed off as an ancient occupation.
He let out a breath that he hadn’t known he was holding as that physical sign comforted him. Cabal half expected this to be another in a long line of wild goose chases he had been on recently in an effort to track his father down. To have his faith confirmed was a boon to his confidence.
Now to get an idea of what Renate was doing here.
The vampire’s actions would go a long way toward Cabal figuring out Renate’s next steps. Once Cabal locked onto the trail he could easily trail Renate, closing distance during the day while the vampire was sleeping. It struck him again how advantageous his dhampir abilities were, especially in instances like this. The sun held only a minor discomfort for him, something he learned to take precautions against. Though his skin was a darker shade, he was forced to cover his skin as a tow-headed, fair skinned human would. If not, he suffered quick sunburns. On the positive side, he was able to stay up all day and all night if need be to gain ground on his quarry.
He hoped this was the end of it; that this lead, in particular, would give him the needed information to run his father to ground – to finally kill him for the torture his mother endured for his callousness.
Cabal settled himself next to the dead fire, sifting with one hand through the ash and charred sticks. A tremor moved through him, prickles crawling over his skin as energy made its presence felt. That was something he had experienced previously while preparing for a scan of past energy patterns, and he ignored it. Slowing his breathing, Cabal allowed his eyes to slide shut. He slipped into the current, tracing backwards, past his own ghostly entrance and into afterimages of events he never saw.
His body stiffened, his breath stilling, both natural events for his talent, as he came closer to the images he wanted to see. He rewound through the dead space, realizing that nothing else had disturbed the silence in this place between his father’s visit and his own. He would have drawn a breath of excitement were he able, as an image of Renate slipped into his second sight. He rewound a bit more, and then allowed the green and yellow apparition to play out in real time. Renate lay on the floor, stretched out as if preparing to rest for the day. One jacketed arm supported his head and his face was slack. He was staring from the floor of the small chamber at the embers in the dying fire. His dark gaze was fixed and unblinking. Throughout the vision the vampire did nothing, no twitching, no working jaw, he was completely motionless. That struck Cabal as odd, but he was too thrilled at his luck to put much thought into that unfocused expression on his father’s face.
He continued to move forward, only balking when he was washed in a tremor of energy. There was a moment as that wave passed over him that it seemed he - contacted another mind. Such was unprecedented. His talent wasn’t with telepathy. Though he could touch minds, compel them, even get a reading of emotion from them, he could not communicate in such a way. His mixed blood had given him many abilities possessed by neither humans nor vampires, but telepathy was not one of them.
The event alerted him to a problem and he tried to draw away. The vision was – wrong somehow. As he watched, the view distorted and twisted until he was unable to sort out just what it was he was looking at.
“Hello?” echoed in his head, frightening him. Sounds were not heard while combing eddies in this realm. Sound broke as waves of color, only that and movement of lips ever told him that conversation and sound was occurring in these electric recordings of the past.
The single word resounded through his awareness, striking him wrong. If the voice was someone speaking outside this sphere it would have been more distant, less sharp. This voice - soft, childish, and feminine - sounded as if it were right next to him.
Again he tried to pull away, becoming fearful.
In 599 years, no tracking job ever went down like this. This was off from even his deepest delving into this realm, when the distance between the present and the events of the past threatened to trap him forever. This was as scary, and he wanted out. He struggled free of the current, rising toward his body with an urgency of the devil on his heels.
“Don’t go.” She whined.
A nearly physical presence gripped his ethereal form and yanked him deeper; pulling his consciousness toward a glowing white whorl that took up the nexus of his other vision.
He tried to fight it, straining to pull free of that influence. The tow grew stronger the harder he tried to be rid of it. In that silent world he cried out, unsatisfied as the words rippled the air in front of him. Once more he begged to be let go, but that other being didn’t seem to understand.
Cabal understood perfectly.
His body would wither and die if he lost his tether to the real world. He remembered vividly what happened to the agent of Victor Sierra when the man was sucked down here upon contact with Cabal in trance. The human had run, losing his way forever in the shadows and eddies of energy patterns. Cabal didn’t want that to be him. He didn’t want to be trapped forever as a wraith on this plane of existence.
The child said, “I’m lonely.”
Even his dismay was stripped from him as the brightness shorted out his senses, pulling him down into the unknown.