VIII

For the longest time, I did as I promised. I managed to bluff my way into a job in Zyx. They needed a Port Specialist for their illegal non-Guild-affiliated Port Station and I was one. I refused to give credentials and they might have realised who I was, but the need for a Port Specialist was stronger than any suspicions they harboured. They needed that Port to smuggle drugs and god knows what else, and it was not as if they had a spotless criminal record, themselves. So I could stay.

I detested the border city with its filth and all the criminal activities and I resented being a part of it with my work, but it was a living. Nobody asked me any questions here as long as I didn't stand out. They didn't look past the facade of the adept girl with the bleached pink hair (I'd changed it again) and the shy smile.

So I did my job, gained some quiet respect for my good work, and nobody made any inquiries. Perhaps it was for the better. There was a significant price on my head in Parsia and there were enough people in Zyx that might have ratted me out for the money.

It might have happened eventually. I stayed in Zyx for the better part of a year before it all went wrong... but it had nothing to do with the price on my head or the Parsian authorities that might have been looking for me. The danger against my new life came from within. I found myself dreaming at night of crystal and power. I dreamed of swimming through icy water and clamping my hands over the smooth crystal surface of the Lentagon, with hot flashes of power and possibility shooting up my arms.

I tried to distract myself with thoughts of my family. Mirella, moving house to somewhere I didn't know, starting a new life. Seamon in prison. How was he doing? The media seemed to have forgotten about him. Perhaps they were ignoring him... but every day he came closer to his twenty-first birthday and his majority, and what would happen then? Those thoughts didn't do much to cheer me up.

The dreams were so sweet against the grey dreariness of every day life at the Port Station. Manipulating reality became tedious when you did it so many times a day. The permanent headache and nausea that I walked around with didn't much to help either, so eventually I began to long for the nights. During the nights at least I felt at home, powerful and in control. It was so much better than daytime. I tried to tell myself that I shouldn't, and that it was dangerous, and that I should stay away as bloody far as possible. Yet in the end my mind lost out on my instincts. It was a lengthy process, but it happened anyway. It was pretty much inevitable.

It got to the point where I was sleepwalking and falling asleep on the job. My boss began to bitch me out for it. I told him I was sorry, but at the same time I couldn't explain why I was looking so longingly in the direction of Mentorn on stolen moments between helping out Porting customers. I couldn't explain it to myself, either. It was like the damn crystal was calling me. It was worse than it'd ever been before.

For as long as the damn thing had been in existence there'd always been an urge to pick up the amplifier and /do/ stuff with it. Living in the same house as the crystal ball had been a trial sometimes. My parents had been adamant about not touching it apart from research hours, though. Not that it helped much. Everyone in the house was affected by it, even Mirella. And my older sister didn't have our talents and shouldn't have been as sensitive to it as we were. I caught her once in the dead of night, sitting in the research facility that had been built onto our house, sitting in a darkened room with the crystal in her lap, rocking slowly and humming. She'd been smiling deliriously, happier than I'd ever seen her.

It had been that good for her. It was even better for me. On nights Mirella wasn't holding the crystal ball like she would hold her own baby, I'd been doing that very same thing. Sometimes I wondered if my parents and my brother did it, too. I never asked. I was ashamed of what I did, of those urges. Yet I couldn't stop it, it seemed to be stronger than me.

But that was when it was in the near vicinity. There were over a thousand millometers between Zyx and Lake Mentorna now and still I was yearning, still I was dreaming.

“What the fuck is wrong with me?” I wondered one night, standing before my window and watching over the sleeping city. My eyes followed the trail of the river Lethe all the way west as far as I could see, to where it would spring from the lake in Mentorn. I leaned with my forehead against the cool glass, watching the glass fog up with my breath. “What is happening to me?”

The night had no answer, just dreams. Dreams and dreams... until there was that last straw that broke the camel's back and Sirka's willpower.

One night I woke up screaming from a dream where Aidan was sitting in a boat with some government officials, pointing out the location of the Lentagon. The night was just as dark and perfect as it had been on the night when I had dumped it in the lake, with a myriad of stars twinkling in the sky. The officials were nodding, and Aidan was pointing to the water surface and I wanted to shout them to stop it, to stay away from it – and then I saw that Aidan was not alive at all but a corpse, horribly burnt and blistered and rotting. And now he had the Lentagon in his hands and he smiled at me and said/I finally got me the Lentagon. And with it I'll destroy Delgado, hunt down your filthy family, and then I'll kill you. Wait for me Sirka, I'll find you.../

Before I knew it I was standing in the middle of my small apartment, trembling on my legs. I wanted to cry but I was too shocked, too afraid. The afterimages of Aidan's face lighting up with the power of the Lentagon seemed to be burnt on my retina's. I took a shower and scrubbed myself as clean as I could. As if I could scrub away the images and the yearning inside of me. It was stupid, maybe, but it was all I could think of at that moment. I couldn't sleep anymore. The rest of the night I spent on the balcony, smoking grass to calm down my frayed nerves.

Work was a bleary haze that day. I went through my work like a robot, hardly acknowledging anything or anyone. I felt miserable and on the verge of throwing up all day and would have loved to crawl somewhere in a corner and die. I didn't want to be awake, and I was afraid to sleep.

But when night came I finally fell asleep three hours after midnight... and I dreamed again. I dreamed of the Lentagon in my brother's hands this time. He looked like hell. His hair was still shaved in a buzzcut and he must have lost ten pounds, because he looked positively skinny. He smiled sadly at me with dark empty eyes that had seen all the horrors in the world. /I understand why you did it Sirka,/ he said with a voice that reflected his inner deadness. /It's the feeling of belonging, of home. I want to go home, too./

/It's all I ever wanted,/ I wept, reaching out to my little brother, to the sweet surrender of the Lentagon. /I just want to stop running, I want to be home./

/Then come home,/ Seamon said. And he smiled a heartbreaking smile at me. /Let the crystal embrace you home. You've struggled long enough. Come home.../ The crystal in his hands pulsed in time with his heartbeat. I wanted it to beat with /my/ heartbeat. I wanted it so, so much.

/I'm afraid,/ I whispered. /I'm afraid it's too much./

/You'll be home.../

Home.

I woke up in tears. This time I didn't waste my day at the Port Station of Zyx. I got dressed, ignited my hard-earned motorcycle, and drove to Mentorn. Lake Mentorna was calling. The Lentagon was calling. And all I wanted was to go home.

It wasn't even a conscious decision. I just woke up from that dream and did what felt right. After fighting those urges for so long I gave in at long last. I was going home. The wind played with my hair as I drove and I was smiling the whole way to Mentorn, as if I'd been chewing haze. That's what it felt like too, as if I were still dreaming.

I was smiling because I'd taken my decision. There was the fear that somebody would take the Lentagon and do bad things with it on one side – I thought of the Radicals, of the government, even Jedian officials, Pirman-fundamentalists... there were so many people with an invested interest in the amplifier – and on the other side there was Seamon telling me it was okay, that I should come home.

It all seemed so logical. I would stay with the Lentagon, I would guard it and nobody would come near. Nobody would figure, nobody would know. And I would be there, guarding. It seemed like a perfect solution at the time. Who would expect me right there in Mentorna? Nobody even know that I'd ever been there with the amplifier in the first place. The only person who'd ever known I'd been in Mentorn had burnt to death.

Nothing is as easy as it seems of course. I took residence in one of the houses on the shore of the lake. Not the Lentan residency I'd occupied earlier, that would have been to auspicious, but a shed that'd been converted into livingspace. I decorated the place and I did some freelance distance manipulation work and at first I felt wonderful for coming home, for being so close to that beacon of possibility on the bottom of the lake. At first it was enough just to be there.

Yet soon enough – I think it was within a week or so – it was not enough anymore. I should have seen it coming. The dreaming started again, and in earnest this time. I was trying to stay in the city as much as possible, to create some distraction from the luring call of the lake, but that was useless. I found reasons to come home late at night. Once I'd found a lover in the city and he'd invited me home and into his bed. Hoping for a distraction I agreed but after we'd done our thing and we were basking in the afterglow I found myself getting up and getting dressed. The lake was calling. The Lentagon was calling. I was crying as I took that taxi home that night. There were more examples. I would do grocery shopping in the city twice a week, and once a week I checked myself in at the headquarters of the agency that was hiring me. It was a bit of a shady place and they utterly underpaid me, but because they weren't registered with the government I didn't have to pay any taxes over it, so it was enough to live from... barely. The rest was covered with the money that Mirella'd given me. It was a good thing I didn't need much. The call of crystal was sustaining enough of me as it was.

A month after I'd arrived in Mentorn I awoke from a dream of swimming in the icy lake waters towards the crystal only to find myself standing hip-deep in the water outside. It was early in the morning in the grey light that came before dawn and rain was drizzling on my head and I'd never noticed that I'd walked outside and into the water. There was just the moment when I jolted awake and realized that I was /in/ the lake and about to swim to the Lentagon.

Yet the worst thing of all was that I was fucking planning to do it too. Wide awake from my sleepwalking, I was readying myself to swim anyway. I then realized that it would probably kill me and walked out of the water, contemplating to get myself a boat and diver's gear. Walking back to my house I also thought about how I could create myself a pocket of air under the water surface if I'd manipulate water and air enough that it'd be breathable. It wouldn't be comfortable, but it should be doable. I would swim down, I would reach out... and then I'd finally be home.

That's when I realized that I was losing my mind.

I took off my wet clothes and took a long hot shower. Wrapped in towels, I sat down in the livingroom and sat down on the couch with my lapscreen. News and entertainment glowed up under my fingers on the glass plate and I attempted to search for a solution. I did some searches on the web on things to do about addiction. There were some cases known of adepts getting addicted to their own talents, but those cases were rare. The few times that it had happened it had happened to the more talented ones, the stronger ones. It had never happened with anybody scoring under 80 on the Telchian scale. Well, that was just bloody great. I scored 95. The average person scored about 30 to 40.

Of the five documented cases two had ended in suicide, two in a manipulation-related accident, and one person had taken the hard way out and chained himself up with crystal restraints. They were bloody expensive and only the Guild had the license to create them, I knew that much. But with some high quality crystal and my experience with amplifiers, could it be doable?

The idea of it was too horrifying to be true. Especially because in the top of my screen a news item that I had tagged previously had started to glow. I clicked on the news item and found to my horror that it was the feeds on my brother that had news. My breath caught in my throat when I read a report on how they had upgraded his restraints. Apparently first level restraints were not enough for him anymore and they'd chosen to hook him up with second level bonds – which were basically the portal to a complete burnout. I had no idea how they worked, but what they basically did was that they barred you from accessing your talents – completely. It was like having your eyes poked out or your hands chopped off, they said. Like losing one of your primary senses. I shuddered at the thought and tried to imagine what Seamon must be going through. The news item didn't say much about the why of it, just that it was for safety precautions. Had he been trying to access his talents anyway, at the cost of blinding extreme pain? There were cases of criminals that had given themselves an aneurysm that way.

Yet at least it gave some measure of protection, some semblance of sanity. It might be just what I needed. So I made that phonecall to Zyx to ask for crystal. By now I knew enough people in the lawless border city that I had an idea of who might be able to help me. In Zyx everything was for sale, if you had enough money or favours. I had a favour lying out with some guys; me and two colleagues done a nightly Porting for them so they could smuggle some drugs that my boss didn't know about. When I asked them for the crystal to create those restraints, there were no questions. Just the assurance that yes, they were able to get it, but it would take a week.

“Sure, thanks,” I told him and disconnected. I stared in the distance for a moment, lost in thought. Would a week be too long? Would I be able to hold out?

I stocked up on energy drinks and haze to either stimulate me or to dull my senses enough that I wouldn't feel the call, but I knew that it was eating away at me. I built myself a little pier at the shore of the lake and I spent long evenings sitting there, watching the night sky over the lake. Stupid maybe, but the menial labour had kept me busy for a while. Yet now... now the pier was done, and I was sitting there, wondering and dreaming...

It was late spring in Mentorn and the scent of blossoms was in the air, adding to the dream-like state of being I was in already. I thought of Seamon, the way he'd been in my dream. /Come home,/ he'd said – and I wanted to.

And I dreamt – of the power in my hands, the limitless possibilities. I thought of the Pirmans, the government. I thought of the Radicals, and of poor Seamon in his crystal bonds. Tears were running over my face as I thought of myself with that power in my hands. What would I do with it? What would I want with it? Would I go and save my little brother? And if I would, what then? A life on the run? Being killed, and having the government take it from me-- I broke off that line of thought abruptly.

I would be dangerous with the Lentagon. I would be a force to reckon with. But I wouldn't get just Parsia after me, but the whole of the western continent. Hell, maybe even Jediah would join in on the witch hunt. I would be outmatched, outnumbered. They would kill me and take it from me. I knew that for certain. On my own, I wouldn't be able to get anywhere. It would make matters only worse.

Still I knew that the moment I would indeed pick up the Lentagon, I'd go for that. Because the Lentagon offered me the power and the possibility to kick some ass. And I wanted that almost as desperately as I wanted to come home. I wiped the tears from my face as I considered this disaster scenario. It would end in tragedy if I would pick up the Lentagon. And yet it hurt so much that I couldn't.

Only one option left. In seven days my crystal would arrive.
I would chain myself up. And then I'd wait... for something, for someone.

Someone to get me out of this. There had to be someone eventually, right?

...Right?