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Wow. April already. I should be done with this one of these years.



Chapter 6

The ship seemed foreboding this time, dark and silent, as if warning them from what they were about to undertake.

A short time ago she had stated her resolve to do what it took to stop a return visit from Sara; now she wished she had stuck with her first impression. She should have stayed out. "Adam?" Lisa began, nervous.

More re-transitioning. This scene originally appeared very near the beginning of the story.

In response to her unasked question, Adam grabbed her hand and gave it a light squeeze. "It's okay," he said. "You're not alone."

No, Lisa thought, that was the whole problem. She gripped Adam's hand harder. "What do I do?"

He led her to one of the seats suspended like a see?saw from the central column. She touched it, letting her fingers drift over the cool metal, feeling the force that flowed within in. This chair, as did the ship and everything that belonged to it, pulsed. Its energy source was something more than electricity. It had life. Just sitting in that seat would further connect her to the ship than she had ever been before. Even those many years ago when the ship had reached into her mind and body and brought her back from the brink of a drowning death ?? even then she hadn't had to surrender herself as she was about to do.

She looked to Adam again, trusting him to guide her. His brown eyes held only understanding as he waited for her to finish her explorations, to make her own peace with the ship. "It's okay," he repeated.


Lisa believed him, even though a part of her was busy informing her that it was way too late for okay. She lowered herself into the seat, on guard against the moment when the ship would creep into her mind and take it from her.

"Relax." she heard Adam whisper. Then she was flying towards the ceiling, stomach dropping away behind her. She opened her eyes and looked down. Her feet were dangling in the air meters off the floor, where she could see footprints echoed in the sand. Adam wasn't there.

Meters? It couldn’t be that many meters, since the Ship never appeared to be that tall.


She fought down a moment of panic and twisted around, scanning the interior of the ship. There, on the other side of the column, Adam was climbing into the counter?balance seat. He settled himself, his body looking relaxed and comfortable. Of course, Lisa realized, he'd done this many times before. Sharing his thoughts with the ship was something he'd done more freely than sharing them with his human companions.

How would she know?

Lisa in this story seems to have forgotten the minor fact that she’s had nothing to do with the TP for many years. The earlier snark about how Adam’s powers and her powers should be the same was thought in the heat of irrationality. Clearly she’s not getting any more rational as this story progresses.


Just as suddenly as her seat had risen, it began to lower. She straightened herself up, conscious of the lack of seat belts or other safety restraints. Soon the seats settled into a gentle see?saw motion, up and down. It was impossible not to give herself up to the slow swinging, especially since she hadn't been sleeping well. She let her eyes close, felt her breathing slow.

Lisa became aware of a presence in her mind that she recognized as the Ship. All predictions to the contrary, there was nothing cold or alien about it. She pushed and felt it give. It understood her concerns, would stay only as long as she allowed it. She pushed harder, looking for the part that belonged to Adam.

[I'm here.] She heard.

[Good,] she answered sincerely, before looking around.

The ship had taken the two past mind merge to another place entirely: the place Lisa had been in her dreams the previous nights. It was as gray and ill?defined as before, lacking even the door. Adam was nowhere to be seen, although she could still feel him in the back of her mind. Knowing he was there lent her confidence.

Wow. I’m just wildly inconsistent about capitalizing “ship.” I’m glad my students aren’t reading this story.


The breath she meant to spend in a sigh of relief caught in her throat as Sara materialized inches away.

"Are you going to make it stop, Lisa?" Sara asked. She stood stiffly, drawn in on herself.

"I don't know," Lisa answered, honestly. She had no idea what they were here to do. If Adam knew, as she suspected he did, he wasn't telling. They had worked out that they needed to do a mind-trawl -- although how that was different from a mind merge, she also didn't know. The rest was still to be seen. "We're going to try."

"You came back," Sara said, with a nod of finality. "You can make it stop."

"Lisa," came Adam's voice. The girls turned as a unit towards the door. It was open, Adam framed in the doorway. There was a tenseness in his stance that Lisa could only attribute to anger, an emotion she couldn't recall seeing on Adam before.

"What is it?" Lisa asked. She felt awareness of the Ship's presence awaken in her mind; with it, a stronger awareness of Adam. Her judgment had been sound, as had his. She should have stayed out, and the ship hadn't wanted them to leave this alone. With its help, they would be able to safely cross that threshold, as Adam had just demonstrated by coming through the other side.

"You can't," Sara whispered, crossing her arms over her chest. "That's not an exit." Then, true to form, she flashed out of existence.

Adam didn't even blink. "I think you should see this," he said.

****

Grimm found his daughter staring in the full-length mirror mounted inside his closet door. It was a relic of a time when he'd had the storybook family. Before his wife left for greener pastures, and his daughters went missing, each in their own way. There were as many memories associated with that piece of glass as with the wedding band he still wore, and it was one of the few things that still interested Sara. She returned to it time and again, with an uncanny stubbornness. He could usually find her eyeing her reflection for what he could only imagine were signs of betrayal.

This is one of the scenes that is essentially original to the story (as in, present in the first draft that had any kind of completeness to it), but that caused so many problems that it got excised, rewritten, added, excised, rinse and repeat a number of times.

I have this image for the cover art of this story, if there were to be cover art for it ever, of one of those huge, freestanding mirrors with the thick, ornate frames. Oval. Sara is standing in front of the mirror with her hands at her sides, just looking. The reflection is standing with her hands up and pressed to the glass.


He set a loose pile of ungraded research papers on his bed and sat down next to it to wait. Although he seemed to be doing a lot of waiting recently, it never seemed anything other than natural. She was all he had.

Sara's hands were pressed against the glass, the weight of her body pushing the door against the bedroom wall. He couldn't tell if she was looking at her reflection, the reflection of the room, or something else entirely.

"What do you see?" he asked her. He knew that her answer, if she answered, wouldn't clarify anything. In his imagination, he could hear her aimless comment about the ocean that he'd already heard so many times.

He was still watching her some while later, with the same fascination with which a parent watches a sleeping child, when she stiffened suddenly, her fingers clenching against the mirror as though seeking to claw through it. Rising to his feet, Grimm stepped towards her, ready to catch her and pin her arms if necessary to keep her from causing damage to herself. Although he knew she'd struggle against him, fighting him for every moment of contact he forced upon her, he knew there was nothing else he could do. There was no compromising about his child's safety, even if she wouldn't recognize the efforts for what they were.

The scene was originally written with Sara’s fingers going through the glass and getting cut up. Lots of blood. I think I got two lines into trying to write that when I realized that it was just wrong for the tone of this story. There’s no blood, no gore. This is all psychology.


"You can't," he heard her say, as if she knew what he was prepared to do. "That's not . . . ." her voice trailed off and the last part came out unintelligible. Grimm's breath caught in this throat, and he found himself unable to move; for a few seconds, his daughter had sounded like her old self.


It was enough for him to ask, "That's not what?" before it occurred to him that she'd no more answer that question than any of the hundreds of others he'd asked over the last few months.

"Lisa? Adam?" she called into the mirror.

Who? he thought, checking his knowledge of his daughters' former friends for anyone with either of those names. Despite their commonality, he could come up with no matches. The twins had always been gregarious children, counting friends in numbers he couldn't comprehend. But he was confident that he knew, or at least knew of, all the ones who were more than classroom acquaintances. Since Clara's disappearance, the friend's numbers had dwindled to nothing. He couldn't blame them. Still, it made him wonder all the more to whom those two names she was calling belonged.

"Lisa?" she said again, continuing to claw at the glass. Her efforts were having no effect except to leave finger streaks on the surface. Nevertheless, Grimm found himself wanting to help her tear through the reflection, actually believing it possible for a moment. Just when he was about to break his immobility to help her, she released a shuddering breath, sank to the floor, and curled into a tight ball.

Any moment of lucidity she'd found slipped away and she started to rock.

****

Lisa hesitated for a moment. She had come this far already against her better judgment; her curiosity wouldn't allow her to turn away now. She stepped towards the door.

Although nothing moved, while she had been standing some distance away, now she was crossing that threshold that had so occupied her thoughts for the past forty-eight hours.

She wasn't even granted a chance to gain her bearings.

"What would be enough?" a boy shouted. "Tell me."

In front of their eyes, Lisa and Adam watched a scene unfold; the participants coalescing out of the gray in the same way as Sara had appeared and disappeared. The one shouting was the Hispanic youth whom Lisa had seen before. He held a glossy booklet of some sort in his hand, brandishing it at an unseen audience.

"I get good grades. I stay out of trouble. Ay, but that's not enough for mis padres." He paused as though listening to a response, then shook his head vehemently. "Si, this es my son the doctor," he said, mocking. He spoke with a Mexican accent, his words seeming to be a random mix of Spanish and English. "This," he added, jabbing himself in the chest, "es your son the actor. That will have to be enough."

I tried to keep the traumas that each character was experiencing real. Teenagers live with enough trauma of their own making, that it shouldn’t be necessary to force them all into life-or-death situations to make them Break Out.



"I dunno," another male voice said, the words overlapping but independent of the first speaker. "Just . . . don't feel like it." Lisa turned to see a young red?head leaning bonelessly against the air, as if against an invisible wall. He had the kind of round, open face about which one always seemed to assume perpetual happiness. Except he was looking at his non?present conversation partner through half?lidded eyes, his mouth sculpted in frown, his shoulders slumped, hands shoved in the pockets of his high school letter jacket. Stitched across the right breast was the name 'Eric'.

"Yeah, I know that," the youth continued. His words sounded like a protest, but his tone didn't change. "Why can't you just leave me alone?" Despite his countenance, there was nothing happy about this youth, and Lisa sensed that everyone except him knew it.

Clinical depression. I had something cooked up about him wanting to commit suicide, but being unable to do it (because of being a TP), which just made him even more depressed. He couldn’t even kill himself properly.


She turned again towards a touch on her arm, and saw Adam pointing at another scene, already in progress. A young girl, just entering the peak of her adolescence, sat on the air, in the same way as the redhead had leaned against an invisible wall. A black seat belt strap contrasted against the light blue baby-doll shirt the girl wore; the strap began in nothing and buckled into nothing, and was visible only where it touched her.

This is left over from the original draft. Everything that goes with this bit was the original chapter 4 of this story, and was a telling/summary of the moment Clara killed, as seen from Grimm’s perspective. As soon as I caught on that it was all telling, I cut it out of the story. Later, when writing this dream sequence, I pulled back in the more descriptive bits because I thought the information was important.


"That looks like Sara," Lisa whispered to Adam. He put a finger to his lips and gestured for her to keep watching.

"Dad, I'm not making it up," she protested. She twisted in her seat to look at someone to her left. "She just disappeared. She just broke the seal on her test with her pencil, which is silly if you think about it cuz what if the pencil breaks while you're doing that, and then you have to use your second pencil and that breaks right away, and then what are you supposed to do? So she broke the seal and opened the test booklet like we were instructed, then poof! All gone. The sound wasn't a poof, really, but I don't know how to make it. It was cool."

See. Trauma. Clara Broke Out while taking the ACTs. No need for guns or government operatives.


She listened to the silence respond, then shook her head to the negative. "Nuh-uh. How am I supposed to know where she is?" Another pause while the occupant of the driver's seat spoke back. Sara started to lean back in the seat, then stiffened, sitting bolt upright. She turned again to the driver and spoke. Her voice was clear and high; her words were enunciated and happy. "I can hear the ocean," she said.

This is the part where Grimm slapped Sara in the first draft. That was removed because the child abuse became so over-the-top and more out-of-character as the story grew.


Then she collapsed, as if gravity had just become too much of a challenge. The muscles in her face slackened, her eyes dulled and lost focus, her body seemed to shrink. She sank against the seat, propped into place by the car door and the seat?belt.

"That was . . . interesting," Lisa said. She found herself leaning towards the scene, like trying to watch a show on television with bad reception. With conscious effort she pulled back, putting distance between herself and the scenario that was playing again from the beginning. "'I can hear the ocean'," she quoted. "I wonder what that was all about."

"The ocean?" Adam repeated. "That's Sara?" He sounded as though he were struggling to remember something very important. "She was . . . there was . . . something . . . ." He shook his head.

One reader commented that Adam in here is written like the Doctor, too all knowing. While I can’t disagree with that, the catch is that he’s really not knowing. He has the answers in his head, but he doesn’t know that yet.


"There was what?" Lisa asked. "You knew this was big; that's why you made me come here. Why? What's so important about these three people?"

Adam shook his head again. "I don't know. I ??"


"I have to leave," Adam was saying, but it was a different Adam. He looked several years younger, several years less mature. His hair was long, like it had been when Lisa first met the Australian, pulled back in a pony tail. "I . . ." he closed his eyes, an internal struggle visible on the lines of his face. "I'm sorry . . . I didn't want things to end like this."

There was that interminable silence; the one of the other person or persons responding. The silence was almost palpable; even the other voices had ceased as if out of respect for this moment. The response was brief, though it seemed too long.

The other Adam's voice dropped to a hoarse whisper, heavy with emotion. "I didn't want things to end."

More of that silence, except it wasn't. In the background was a sound, too far away to hear. Lisa felt it in the very back of her head, where sounds on the cusp of human hearing could sometimes be sensed. The other person was responding. If only she could hear them.

Lisa turned to look at her Adam just as the younger one started to speak. If she'd had any doubts about the vision, they disappeared as she watched the elder mouthe the words along with the younger, "I didn't understand. I know it's too late to apologize, but I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

I woke up this morning with the words to a song in my head, a song that I didn’t even know I remembered because I can’t recall the last time I heard it. It’s the same idea here. Elder-Adam is speaking along with Younger-Adam, but he doesn’t know what he’s saying. He just knows to say it.


"So you did exist before you broke out." The words were out of Lisa's mouth before she could stop them. She spoke while looking back and forth between the two Adams, comparing them. The weight of leadership wasn't evident on the younger, but he wasn't without responsibility, as evidenced by the scene playing out.

I like that line. I really, really like it.


Only when the elder tore his eyes from his younger?self and looked at her did she realize how callous she had sounded. "Oh, I didn't mean ??"

"It's okay," Adam said, though he clearly wasn't okay with a piece of his past being laid bare. "Let's get out of here."

"Who were you saying good bye to?" Lisa asked, not moving from her spot.

Adam didn't respond, instead oddly mimicking his younger self, eyes closed, hands locked together. His throat worked in a swallow, then another, as if he were fighting back tears.

"Did you love her?" she continued, taking a wild guess at the missing person.

"It doesn't matter anymore," Adam finally said.


"Adam," Lisa said, putting a hand on his shoulder, for the first time initiating physical contact with him. "I know it's a lot, being a Tomorrow Person. I do know, and I think I'm starting to understand what you mean about not being able to go back. But I learned something important when I busy ignoring you." It was her turn to find strength behind closed eyes, and when she met his sable gaze with her own, she couldn't help smiling as she gave advice to the advisor. "Sometimes, you have to be human too."

Okay, this bit is a little over-written. I still like it.


"I am human."

"No," she contradicted. "You're the leader of the Tomorrow People. You're the first of a potential next stage in human evolution. You're a shoulder to cry on and the person we turn to when we need help. You live in a tent on an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, for crying out loud.

I had to throw that in there. The TP (at least the NS TP) are just a potential next stage. There’s no telling whether this particular mutation will carry on.


"But when was the last time you were Adam Newman? *Just* Adam Newman?"

Adam broke their tenuous contact to look again at his younger self, still caught in the act of saying good-bye. Like the others, the Hispanic, the red head, and the girl, Adam's scene was playing continuously, all of them overlapping one another.

"That's what I thought," Lisa continued. "You expect us to trust you implicitly, and we do. But you don't have to be strong all the time. We need to be able to confide in you, but we also need you to be able to confide in us. We're a team."

"You left the team, Lisa," Adam quietly reminded her.

Lisa sighed. "That's what I thought, too."

I’ve always loved this little couplet at the end. I can visualize it so perfectly.


****

End Chapter 6