Scheherazade: Part Two

by Alicia McKenzie

The bedroom she shared with Nathan was cramped, to put it mildly. There was enough room for the bed, the chest of drawers, and the chair beside the window, but that was it. With the crowding problems in the Oasis, two people couldn't justify having much space to themselves. Still, the room was theirs and only theirs, with a door that locked and walls to keep the world out.

Walls that felt like they were closing in on her at the moment. This room was supposed to be an escape, a refuge. She wasn't supposed to feel so trapped. More than anything, she wanted out, but she couldn't leave. Not yet. Not until Ilsa told her--

"He'll be fine." Ilsa straightened and pulled the threadbare blanket up over Nate. Domino slid down from where she'd been perched atop the chest of drawers, a demand for more details forming on her lips, but Ilsa turned away from the bed and shook her head. "He will," the thin blonde repeated more firmly. "He lost a lot of blood, but so long as there's no infection, he'll be climbing the walls before we know it."

Domino managed to swallow the laugh. It would have come out sounding just a little too hysterical, and besides, she and Franklin had roused the whole house carrying Nate in. She didn't want to wake up anyone who'd actually managed to get back to sleep. "Franklin does good work," she said, rubbing at her hands. They were sticky with blood. She supposed she should go wash them.

Blood. Ilsa hadn't needed to remind her of how much blood Nate had lost. There'd been so much blood. All over her hands and Franklin's, drenching the front of Nate's shirt like someone had spilled red paint everywhere. Intellectually, Domino knew how quickly Franklin had repaired the damage the knife had done. But kneeling there on the floor of the bar, Nate motionless in her arms, it had seemed to take an eternity.

"Yes, he does. I'm glad he got there so quickly," Ilsa said. It was the nearest she'd come to admitting how close it had been, Domino knew. Ilsa had her own ways of coping with the impossible burdens of her role in their little community. "Why don't you go get cleaned up and then get some air?" Ilsa suggested, a tired smile tugging at the corner of her mouth. "He'll be asleep for a while, and I know you don't like doing the bedside thing. I can stay with him until you come back."

Domino gave her a sour look. It always seemed so unfair that the Oasis's lone nurse - lone medical professional of any sort, to be precise - was an empath. The two identities dovetailed far more neatly than was comfortable.

"Thanks," she said curtly. Her eyes lingered for a long moment on Nate's pale face before she forced herself to look away. "I won't be long," she said, getting one of her other shirts from the drawer and heading for the door. "Thanks, Ilsa."

"Not a problem."

So much easier to breathe, out in the hallway. There was no one in the bathroom at this hour, and miraculously enough, the pipes seemed to be having a good day. Domino washed the blood off her hands, then stripped off the stained shirt and got to work.

The soft splashing of the water and her own harsh breathing as she scrubbed at the shirt with the rough-edged hunk of homemade soap were the only noises she could hear. The house was almost preternaturally quiet. She didn't like it. She didn't want to be alone with her thoughts. They kept running in circles, coming back over and over to how close this had been, how terribly close--

But she should be used to that by now, shouldn't she? Domino sighed irritably, blowing a stray lock of hair out of her eyes. She just got so tired of it all. He was constantly getting hurt, and her track record wasn't all that much better. But Ilsa patched them up, Franklin healed anything serious, and they went on. She wondered sometimes about cumulative fatigue, whether that was the reason for the times neither of them wanted to stir from bed. The spirit might be willing, but eventually the body would decide it had taken enough punishment.

She really should be used to it. There was no such thing as safety anymore, not even in the Oasis. Sanctuary was very much a limited concept. Even here, danger waited everywhere you turned. Violence lurked beneath the surface of even the most peaceful situation, waiting to explode. If you let down your guard, you were going to get hurt. If you let yourself feel--

Her stomach twisted, warning her to go no further with that train of thought. Domino growled under her breath and finished with the shirt as quickly as she could, hanging it up to dry. Pulling on the clean shirt, she left the bathroom, slipping down the stairs and out of the house as quietly as she could. Ilsa was right. She definitely needed some air.

Outside, the silence was just as overwhelming. Under the pale purple-rose of the false-sky of Franklin's shields, the entire rag-tag community of Oasis stretched out before her, utterly still. If she hadn't known how many people were tucked away in the bunkhouses and pre-fab shelters and ragged shack, she would have thought it was a ghost-town.

The usual sense of energy in the air, that vague crackle of strange electricity, was almost too faint to notice tonight. It had been replaced by the heavy, just-before-a-storm feel that meant there were shiftlines battering at the shields from outside. Chaos, howling at the walls. No wonder everyone had taken cover, so to speak. Times like these made her realize just how fragile this little world of theirs was.

This strange, timeless little world. She didn't really miss having a regular day and night, but sometimes, the lack of a sense of coherent time did bother her. The garden grew, but none of the plants seemed to move through any visible pattern of seasons. New buildings went up 'overnight', it seemed; the landscape of Oasis was constantly changing. New people, new faces, children who looked at you with eyes so knowing and adult that it was frightening--

The--wildness of it all did bother her, the sense that they were trapped in this desperate, unpredictable, borderline existence. Sometimes she wondered whether this was really life. Whether they weren't actually dead, lost souls condemned to a particularly bizarre sort of hell, and Someone Up There had just forgotten to mention it.

It was a good thing Nate was safely unconscious. He'd have yelled himself hoarse, telling her what an idiot she was for entertaining a thought like that. Never mind that he'd said worse on countless occasions when he was too shift-muddled to remember.

Domino went over and sat on the remains of a stone retaining wall, scuffing her feet in the dry dirt of what had once been a flower garden. Maybe this hadn't been such a great idea after all. At least if she'd stayed with Nate, she could have curled up in bed beside him, relishing the fact that they were both still alive. Out here, she couldn't do anything but brood. She leaned her head back, staring up at the not-sky for a moment, wishing it were blue, before she closed her eyes.

It really did feel like a storm. Domino could almost imagine a real thunderstorm rolling in from a real horizon. She couldn't see the real storm, the reality-storm hammering at Franklin's shields, but she knew it was there. She always sensed a storm, when it came. Straight at her, across shift-lines, it didn't matter. She always felt the storm.

Parallels teased at her mind. The storm. Nathan lying bleeding in her arms. It brought back memories of another storm, another Nathan.

She'd sensed the storm coming that night, too. Then again, so had he. And it hadn't done either of them any good.

***

It was hard to remember now what the shifts had been like at the very beginning, or that there'd ever actually been a time when they'd been brushed off as rumor, the stuff of tabloid stories. So far away, those days. It seemed like another life entirely.

Maybe that wasn't such a bad way to think of it. She had been a different person, then--the sort who hadn't paid much attention to wild stories of rifts in reality, of swatches of Arctic tundra appearing in the Sahara and people seeing two moons in the sky in the middle of the day. It had all seemed too implausible. In retrospect, Domino supposed she'd been too comfortable with her world as it was. All of them had been.

Except maybe Nate--the Nathan from her world, that was. Hindsight was twenty-twenty. Thinking back, she could remember his preoccupation, those odd blank spells of his during those last few weeks, and see them for what they had been. He'd felt the first stirrings of the accident, even though it hadn't happened in their world.

But he'd never said anything, never so much as hinted at the scope of the catastrophe about to descend upon them. Domino preferred to think he hadn't understood it himself.

In the year their world had ended, the Pack had numbered thirteen. After all the years, all the successful jobs, they'd risen to the stature of living legends, able to name their own price. The mission that night had been a relatively easy one, a simple search-and-destroy remarkable only for the amount of firepower it was going to take to pull off.

They'd been in two helicopters - GW piloting one, David Rabin the other - heading for their destination at an altitude of barely a hundred feet over the waters of the South China Sea. They were on target, ready for the insertion. It was nothing they hadn't done a thousand times before.

There'd been no reason for her to be edgy, no reason at all--

"We're forty minutes from the LZ, people," GW's voice said in her earpiece. Domino leaned forward in her harness, craning her neck to see out the cockpit window, but she was at the wrong angle to spot the coast from here. All she could see was a swatch of clear blue sky. "Nothing on the radar. Looks like smooth sailing so far."

Sitting across from her, Vasily made a face. "I wish you would not say such things, Bridge," the young Russian said dourly, his pale blue eyes straying nervously from person to person. He was twenty years old, the newest member of the Pack, and far more used to solo urban work than full-out assaults like this. "It makes me nervous."

"Pipe down, Vas," GW said with a snort. He liked Vasily, Domino knew, but GW had never had much patience for anyone indulging in a display of nerves. You were supposed to keep things like that to yourself, that was GW's credo. "Find some wood to knock on."

"But--"

"Relax, kid," Theo advised him genially, reaching out an enormous hand and patting the youngest member of the Pack on the shoulder. "You keep worrying so much and you'll go old and gray before your time."

Ordinarily, Domino would have reinforced the 'lighten up' suggestion. The kid really was too tense for his own good at times; in this sort of high-stress occupation, he was liable to give himself an ulcer by twenty-five if he kept on at this rate. But nothing came to mind--no joke, nothing. Probably because she wasn't feeling particularly light-hearted herself at the moment, and she did so hate sounding like a hypocrite.

Leaning back, Domino closed her eyes, trying to focus on the source of that vague anxiety. Her powers might be nebulous, but they had a habit of functioning as an early warning system. Figuring out precisely HOW the shit was about to hit the fan, though, that was the challenge.

"I'll be glad to get this over and done with," Mina said from the other helicopter, her upper-crust British accent in sharp contrast to her mischievous tone. "I don't intend to be late getting back to San Francisco. David and I have tickets to the symphony on Friday."

"Still making up for forgetting the anniversary, Dave?" GW asked with a nasty chuckle.

"Yeah," David grumbled. "One of you could have reminded me beforehand, you know. Bastards."

"Ah, but then we wouldn't have the fun of watching Mina plot her revenge," Lien put in slyly.

Domino smirked, almost despite herself, and opened her eyes again, studying her friends. No one else seemed overtly anxious. Vasily was making faces at Lien, who blew him a kiss, and Garrison was trying his best to glower at them both in mock-jealousy. From the sounds of it, the atmosphere was just as calm in the other helicopter, as well.

This was stupid. Domino shook her head irritably, trying to squelch that still-lingering unease. She had to be imagining things. If the danger was as imminent as her instincts were telling her it was, they surely would have seen some sign of it already. Catastrophe didn't just descend on you out of the blue.

She glanced sideways at Nate where he sat beside her, eyes closed and quite comprehensively spaced out, judging by his expression and the numb feel of the link. SOP for him, at this point in a mission like this; he was scanning ahead of them, she knew, searching for any threats of the non-obvious sort. The thought made her feel a little better, and she reached out, placing her hand over his where it was resting lightly on his knee. If anything was coming, he was a whole hell of a lot more likely to sense it - and pick up specifics - than she was.

As she touched him, his eyes snapped open and something shot up the link, something that felt more like--electricity, almost, instead of thought or emotion. Domino started to draw back instinctively -she hadn't intended to startle him that badly - but he seized her hand, gripping it tightly.

#What does it feel like?# Nathan's voice in her mind was urgent, and his mismatched gray and gold gaze bored into her almost desperately.

Domino blinked. He was sensing something too? But--no, he hadn't reacted until she'd touched him. He had to be just picking up on what she was feeling, and the thought made her almost angry. Nothing like infecting other people with needless worrying. *Just--nerves, I think,* she sent back.

His eyes flashed angrily, his grip on her hand tightening until it was almost painful. #What does it FEEL like?# he snapped.

She tried to pull away. He didn't let her. *Like--a storm, I don't know!* Domino finally sent in frustration, fumbling over the description. The words had just popped into her mind, but as she thought about them, they fit. It did feel like a storm, as insane as it sounded as they flew through a cloudless sky.

"Nate? Dom? What's the matter with you two?" The question came from Theo as he leaned forward, peering at them. His tone was casual enough, but Domino glanced quickly at him and saw the unease in his eyes. He'd picked up on their body language, of course. "Everything okay?"

They'd known each other for too long for her to try and conceal that there was something wrong. "Not sure, Theo," she said. The others were noticing the interplay and starting to look concerned, but she ignored them and turned back to Nathan. *You feel it too?* she ventured, afraid of the answer. If he was sensing something, that meant there was really something there.

#Not like that.# His eyes moved away from hers, stared blankly into empty air for a long moment, as if he could see something there, something terribly wrong. #But something's happening. It's--broken, like it doesn't fit--#

Domino opened her mouth to ask him what the hell he was rambling on about. Broken? What was broken? She'd expected him to say something helpful, not start raving. But the words died on her lips as their eyes met once more. His were incredibly wide, suddenly, wider than she'd ever seen them.

#No,# he breathed in her mind, the color draining from his face and a tidal wave of shock rolling up the link.

And he let go of her hand.

"Abort!" Nathan shouted into the headset, and she heard him echo it telepathically as he tore off his harness. "Bridge, Rabin, abort the insertion, turn us the flonq around RIGHT NOW!" The shock on the link melted rapidly into panic as he threw himself forward, heading for the cockpit.

Domino swore and fumbled at her harness, intending to follow him. But the buckles were stuck or something, she couldn't get it off--

"Nathan!" Bridge snapped. "What the fuck--"

"TURN!" Nathan screamed raggedly. Domino leaned forward as far as she could, trying desperately to see what was happening. Why 'turn'? Why--

The other helicopter was just ahead of them, beginning to bank to the left as David started to turn. More used to automatically obeying Nate's voice, he'd reacted before GW had.

Too late. Too slow. Something--shimmered in the sky, something that her eyes saw but her brain couldn't process as real. The sky didn't move like that. Didn't ripple, like a blanket being shaken out.

Didn't tear. There was a noise like the world screaming, and light spilled in a glowing curtain in the wake of the tear as it shot across the sky like some unearthly arrow trailing fire. Before David could complete his turn, he'd flown right into its path.

It hit, impaling the helicopter like a spear, and the Blackhawk exploded instantly. Domino flung up a hand to shield her eyes, but the fireball only grew for a moment before it--warped somehow, collapsing in upon itself, as if the tear was sucking it away, drawing it elsewhere.

She heard a burst of horrified profanity from GW, but kept her eyes on the tear as GW kept banking, trying desperately to get out of its path. It kept expanding, streaking across the sky towards them--

And past them. But GW hadn't turned the helicopter completely. The cutting edge of the tear missed them, but they went right through its trail, into the light.

The whole world came to a screaming, shaking, jarring stop. Everything was frozen, cast into sharp, cutting shadows by harsh white light that was coming from everywhere and nowhere. Nathan was caught in mid-lurch towards the cockpit, and the others were like shocked statues, staring at him or leaning forward, trying to see out the cockpit window. Trapped in a moment, in a heartbeat.

Domino tried to move. She couldn't. Couldn't even blink, or breathe. Dead, she thought. They were dead. The tear or whatever the fuck it was had taken them out, too, and this was the last moment before the lights went out.

And as she thought it, they did--

--but the darkness wasn't peaceful. And they weren't dead. Domino gasped in a lungful of air, and then cursed as she was thrown violently into her harness. The helicopter bucked, tossed back and forth like a toy by the wind screaming outside the helicopter. A hurricane, she thought distantly, as shouting rang in her ears. So there had been a storm after all.

"Hold on!" she heard Bridge bellow, cutting through the noise. Nathan was struggling to reach the co-pilot's seat. She wanted to scream at him to sit down, to get his fucking harness on, but her voice didn't want to work. "Brace yourselves, we're going down!"

She wanted time to stop again. She wanted a moment's grace, enough for Nathan to get strapped in, for GW to find them a softer landing spot than the rocky ravine she could see through Nathan's eyes, across the link.

They weren't going to get it.

Her last thought as they hit was to wonder where the sea had gone.

***

She'd regained consciousness when Nathan had dragged her out of the wreck and dropped her on the ground at a safe distance. Pushing herself up to an elbow, barely able to see through the darkness and the storm, she saw him head back towards the burning helicopter at a staggering run.

He was almost there, only a few steps away, when it exploded. The fire swallowed him, and Domino shrieked his name. Sheer force of will let her haul herself back to her feet, but the wind was so powerful it knocked her back to the ground again almost immediately. She was reduced to crawling, dragging herself forward over the wet, rocky ground. She had no idea what she was going to do when she got there, but the link was still there, she could feel him--in pain, but alive--

Nathan stumbled out of the fire, carrying someone. She knew at a glance, just by the size of the body, that it had to be Lien. He got a few feet away from the wreck, just beyond the reach of the flames, and crumpled like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

"Nate, Lee--hold on, I'm coming--" Domino gasped out, and kept crawling towards them. The flames roared almost defiantly in the face of the pounding rain and the wind. It was a full-fledged hurricane, had to be to have knocked the helicopter out of the air like that.

Dwelling on irrelevancies, she thought. Anything so that she didn't have to focus on what had just happened--

Reaching them, she found herself wishing that the flames would die, so she wouldn't have to see. Wouldn't have to see Lien's delicate, elfin features charred and blistered, almost unrecognizable, or see her body so covered in burns that Domino knew she had to be dead or dying before she checked for a pulse and felt her friend's heart flutter and stop.

The wind howled louder, almost mockingly as she turned to Nathan, trying not to look at the wreck - there was nothing she could do, no way to get close enough to check, let alone pull anyone else out - as she leaned over him. He'd been able to get in and out and shield himself doing it, he couldn't be that badly hurt--

"Nate!" she shouted down into his face, laying a hand on his chest. Wet--it was wet there, but a warm wet, not the cold of the rain. Her hand came away covered in blood that looked black in the firelight, and her breath caught in her throat. *Nate,* she sent desperately along the link, sliding an arm around his shoulders, drawing him up off the wet hard ground and cradling his head on her lap. *Nate, answer me!*

His eyes fluttered open, the soft golden light letting her see his face more clearly. There was blood at the corner of his mouth, and his face was a terrible ashen color. Just the firelight, she told herself desperately, it was just the firelight, making him look so pale--

But it wasn't. There was blood everywhere, soaking into her clothes as she held him, mingling with the rain and flowing over the rock beneath him. He was bleeding from half a dozen wounds, and she could feel him struggling for breath. He sounded--like he was drowning--

He started to speak, then coughed, choking. #They're gone--# his voice murmured weakly in her mind. #They're--#

Domino looked back up at the wreck, her eyes burning with tears. *Shh,* she sent, squeezing her eyes shut tightly, willing herself back to control. *Take it easy--don't talk--*

His gaze unfocused for a moment. #Hurts,# he whispered, his features twisting in pain. She could feel his pain, along the link. That didn't frighten her. She'd experienced worse from him, second-hand like this.

It was the numbness beneath the pain, the cold just beginning to spread--

Maybe he sensed her fear, because he focused on her face again, his gaze almost clearing. Almost steady. #You--need to get--to shelter--# he sent laboriously, as if forming the thought took all his strength. She reached out and seized his hand, squeezing tightly. His grip was far, far weaker than it should be.

*I'm not leaving you!* she sent back harshly. She'd get him out of here, get them both to shelter. There had to be people around here somewhere, some way to get him medical attention--

#It's--not our world, Dom,# he sent to her. The words sounded almost slurred. His mental voice never sounded like that. It was always crisp and clear and--

Tears, in the rain. It didn't matter. No one would be able to tell. *You--stay with me,* she thought at him savagely, trying to hold back the sob struggling to get out. But he was fading, she could feel him fading--

His eyes opened very wide for a moment, focusing on hers, and Domino dropped his hand, a choked scream escaping her, barely audible against the storm, as he reached into her mind and severed the psi-link.

"NO!" she shrieked at him, her head spinning, her mind shrieking in protest as the place where the light of him had been went dark. "No, damn you! Nathan" His eyes were still wide open, unblinking. Empty.

Gone. It hit her like a bucket of cold water in the face, and she froze, even as she went to shake him, to demand that he put it back.

His empty eyes, her empty mind.

Gone. He was gone. They were all gone.

She was alone.

The noise of the storm seemed to go away for a while. Distantly, she was still aware of the rain and the wind, but she couldn't feel it, not really. All she could do was sit there and hold him as his body grew cold, cold as the ice running in her veins.

Part of her refused to accept it. He wasn't dead. Nathan wasn't dead. He'd cheated death a thousand times in all the years she'd known him, so this couldn't really be happening. It was a nightmare, just a nightmare--

It was real. The way his head lolled back limply on his neck, the stillness of that broad chest she'd rested against on so many nights--

Another scream bubbled up inside her, a sound of raw anguish that left her throat sore, as if it had shredded her vocal chords on its way out. Gone. He was gone. They all were. Nate, GW, Garrison, Hammer, Theo--oh, Theo--David and Mina, Lien, Vasily, Mario, Yannick, Pete--all the people she loved, her whole family, gone--

She really was alone.

Eventually, the paralysis eased, and it came to her that she couldn't stay here any longer. She had to find shelter, or there'd be three bodies here, lying beside the wreck.

Nate would be cursing her from the afterlife, if she let that happen. Domino drew in a shuddering breath and bent over him again, kissing him one last time. "Love you, old man," she whispered brokenly, and closed his eyes.

***

She'd left him and Lien there, by the wreck. There'd been no question of burial, not under these circumstances. She'd come back, if she could.

Not knowing where she was, where she was going, she'd stumbled across the rough terrain, through the storm, searching for refuge. He'd been right about needing to get to shelter, but she hadn't expected to need to walk so far to find it. Wherever they'd crashed, it certainly hadn't been the Vietnamese coast; it had looked more like the American Southwest, as impossible as that seemed.

She'd found a tiny cave and huddled there for some indeterminate amount of time, until the storm had passed over. Then she'd left again, searching for some clue as to where she was.

Eventually she'd found a road. Then a town. Neither of which had been Vietnamese. As far as she'd been able to tell, she'd wound up back in the US somehow.

But a different US. An America that did have hurricanes, in its Southwest, and a host of other, stranger differences that made her think back to Nathan's last words.

*It's not our world.*

It wasn't. And things had only gone downhill from there.

***

Domino sighed, and drew a foot over the idle patterns she'd been tracing in the dirt. This amount of brooding wasn't good for her, she knew that. Losing yourself in memory could be a dangerous thing, even here.

Even so. If she had to hold her lover's bleeding body in her arms one more time, something in her would shatter irreparably, she thought. Once was enough. Once should have been enough for a lifetime.

It was the echoes that got you in the end, Domino reflected. It would have been easier if the world had become entirely strange, entirely foreign. But it hadn't. Quite the opposite, actually. No matter where you went, what sort of shifts you experienced in whose company, you would always find echoes. Reminders, of everything you'd lost.

Domino took a deep breath and rose, setting her expression back into its neutral mask as she turned back towards the house. Time to stop remembering what was gone, at least for the night. He was still here, she was still here.

Living at the end of the world, you learned to find your blessings where you could.

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