Encase

  encase

  sequel to edge

  by Serena Sallow

  Published internationally by Serena Sallow

  © Serena Sallow 2014

  Terms and Conditions

  The purchaser of this book is subject to the condition that they shall in no way resell it, nor any part of it, nor make copies of it to distribute freely.

  Pictures by David Hofmann and Yoriam Musiek, used by courtesy of Unsplash.com, edited by Serena Sallow.

  All Persons Fictitious Disclaimer

  This book is a work of fiction. Any similarity between the characters and situations within its pages and places or persons, living or dead, is unintentional and coincidental.

  Contents

  pre 1

  one 10

  two 16

  three 20

  four 34

  five 43

  six 49

  seven 55

  eight 60

  nine 67

  ten 81

  eleven 94

  thirteen 113

  fourteen 122

  fifteen 128

  sixteen 145

  seventeen 161

  eighteen 175

  nineteen 185

  twenty 204

  twenty-one 207

  twenty-two 219

  twenty-three 223

  twenty-four 234

  twenty-five 249

  twenty-six 254

  twenty-seven 258

  twenty-eight 260

  twenty-nine 271

  thirty 277

  pre

  Death.

  Not me. Not yet. It’s in the distance, on the other side of a long, never-ending glass barrier that locks me in a world of clear and white. Fingertips search against smooth surfaces. Somewhere on the trip from my throat to my lips, my breath catches, withers, collapses and dies within my paper frame.

  This is the first and last time this will happen in the lifetime I am currently in.

  And I am only universes away.

  I’ve seen the figure, fatigued and frightened, misstep. I’ve heard the soul-tearing scream escape now air-starved lungs as a small body, brittle and near broken, tipped over a never-ending ledge.

  I’ve been waiting for this. I’ve been ready for this.

  The salt that I taste on my lips must come from my blurring eyes, I know. This is it. I’ve bonded with this one. I knew everything about her. I even went through the glass, once, though it took more out of me than good it did her. I touched curled red hair, listened to that nasally voice in person. I listened to her cry, watched her fight with herself, her own terror, and I even tried to battle down automatic annoyance at such pitiful desperation.

  I know I bonded. I must have.

  I close my eyes, let my body curve against the separator, the mirror, the movie screen that has dominated so much of my life since her arrival.

  It is time now. My turn.

  Finally.

  I force ragged, frightened breaths slow, let paled hands close in over one another, holding themselves over my sure-to-be-broken heart. And I wait for the peacefulness of an eternity of sleep to overcome me.

  No more. No more of the blinding light of this world. Of the voice croning above me. Of a charge crying in soot. Of a face identical to mine stained with horrors. No more of any of it.

  Finally, I will be free. Finally, it will end. No more re-starts. No more wake-ups. Love has saved me.

  “Ives.”

  The voice is sweetened with the softness that is only afforded when one cares far too deeply for another. I noticed it ages ago, yet I never found power in me to comment.

  Something drops from within or beneath me – perhaps everything that had been me, perhaps the nothing that was truly, apparently, me. I breathe out, hard, a singular huff of pain. “No,” is my response, broken and strained beneath a fear that cannot be fully expressed, not in a singular moment nor at all.

  Blue eyes open to my world, my never-changing forever. White clouds float, somewhat serenely, above a staircase that can be easily seen through, propped against a clear wall, a sort of looking glass, through which worlds just beyond my grasp are revealed. There is little argument, between myself or the voice above me, that this place is beautiful.

  And I hate it.

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “I really... I thought I had...” I trail off, look downwards as though avoiding imagined eye contact. Something aches in my center. I try to breathe hard enough to break it, to shatter through it.

  “I know. I know, Ives.”

  I slide to the floor, something I must have done millions of times but never remember. My body is exhausted from a sudden depression that settles over me with a deepness that my skin must remember, but my mind never does. Fingers play with each others, nail press gentle.

  “How long has Issac planned?” My words sound oddly stoic compared to the shattered pieces of my soul. Perhaps that’s exactly why I sound so stoic. No more of me left. If there was ever anything there.

  “He planned about six more months,” replies the figure-less voice, almost as saddened as I feel. Perhaps more.

  “Six months?” I repeat, voice pitched up slightly. He’d already been out for four! But my twin brother always had an odd eccentricity about him. His decisions were impractical, often driven by illogical emotional whimsies.

  Then again, perhaps at this exact moment I cannot be one to speak, sitting cross-legged and crying on the floor.

  I think my tears are fading both from cheek and soul, or perhaps at least pausing enough to give me room to consider the conversation I am now having. Perhaps it is because I know that I have to be different now. I have to be brave and sharp, because soon, I will have no opportunity to be either.

  Soon, I will forget everything.

  So I steel myself and think.

  “I am worried about him, Thomas. I feel as if he has bonded too much, yet not enough to take him. He tells me that his memory shields don’t completely work.”

  “I know,” confesses the voice. “He’s mentioned the same to me.”

  A bite of anger nags at me. (Good – throw my emotion at him, where it belongs, not at me. I’d done my best, after all, right?) “And yet you continue to allow him to live with such memories?”

  The bored pitch of his sigh seems to communicate that this is an old argument. “There’s nothing I can do once he’s awake. The best I could do is assign him to a charge that dies quickly, yet often, the ones that look as if they’d die off-hand are the ones that make it the longest.”

  I grit my teeth, simmer as I stare downwards, take shuddering breaths that stoke flames inside. My words burn, liquid fire when they drip from my lips. “Are there any charges in five months that you believe might not have a chance?”

  There’s a hesitation, and then, “Well. I’m... I’m not sure. I suppose they’re all very resilient.”

  Oh, to kick at the coals of my soul! “You suppose?”

  “I – no, I didn’t – ”

  “We have time to shoot the shite, right? No, no, no, take your time, Thomas. Tell me what you guess as the clock on my life runs out.”

  I’m beginning to lie down on the staircase, careful strides contrary to my anger, pulling long, silvery-white hair out from underneath me and spreading it on the stair above where I rest my head.

  “You know I didn’t mean it like that. You don’t have to waste time being mad.”

  “You don’t have to waste time acting a fool, and yet, here we are.”

  He’s stuck in haughty silence, but just for a moment. Neither of us truly want to waste any of our remaining moments – I’m just too mad and proud, and he’s too hurt, wounded and injured like a pup whose owner chastised him.

  As quick as the anger’s grown, it
retreats, fades into nothing, just as my sadness over my charge had waned. I close my eyes as I settle, attempt not to breathe heavily.

  This part frightens me. More than death does.

  “Ives, there is another option,” I hear him come in, somewhat tentative, voice cautious. “I could keep him under for... longer than five months, and wake him up when I think I’ve found someone.”

  I nod, once, but then amend his words. “You mean wake us up.”

  “What?”

  “I may not have my memories, Thomas, but I do not enjoy waiting around forever as much as you undoubtedly do. Waking up at a different time than my sibling, my twin, no less, is absolutely absurd. You wake us up together. You stage a meeting. Isaac and I start off together.”

  There’s a pause that spells his lack of understanding better than his words could have. I feel an urge to roll my eyes, do so behind my eyelids.

  “I– I’ll have to put one of you on the other side of the barrier.” His voice is guarded in a way that I recognize. When I am angry, I rear, snap. When he is angry, he swallows.

  For some reason I don’t recognize, I feel the ghost of a smile on my lips.

  “I do not see why this is problematic.”

  I’m so focused on my own uneven breathing, the fear that’s beginning to take hold of my own long, lanky body, that I don’t realize how hard his silence is until it’s gone on for nearly a minute. A minute of wasted time. “Thomas?”

  “Then I would have to assign one of you to a staircase.”

  A sigh that says do I have to do your job for you? “No, you wouldn’t. Don’t be a fool. Just create one of those empty staircases and assign us together until we meet. This is your world, Thomas.”

  “Ives.” I hate when he uses that tone of voice, like I’m an imbecilic child. The anger that’s filling me, gentle sweep inwards of an ocean, is so heavy it nearly outweighs the fear. I suppose some part of me should be thanking him for taking my mind off my impending re-start.

  “It’s for Isaac.” I specifically make my voice as hard, unchanging, electric as possible. After all, Thomas may be disembodied, but like hell if I’d ever treated him as if he were omnipotent.

  “You know what’s required in an empty staircase. You know what happens to people who fall too deep there.”

  “Exactly. People with too many emotions. Too much baggage. Can’t even breathe through all their feelings.” Lucky souls, or unlucky souls? My opinion fluctuates daily. “But I am nowhere near that.”

  “You want me to put you in an empty staircase?”

  This time I obviously roll my eyes at his over-exaggeration – fully and slowly. “Was I somehow unclear?”

  “Alone, all by yourself?”

  Oh, for fuck’s sake. “Hence the word ’empty’, yes.”

  “I wouldn’t even be able to contact you until you found Isaac, Ives. You’d be completely alone – ”

  “Which is exactly how I please, anyway.”

  “But you’d – ”

  “You’d not be able to cater to me as though I own you,” I reply, teeth gritting my words to a hissed, annoyed sigh. “Re-started me would not care, Thomas. I would not remember. How many lives have I been through? How many times must you watch me re-awaken before you realize that I hold none of my memories, not even my memories of you?”

  His reticence states how hurt he is, but he shouldn’t be hurt. He may love me, but that does not mean there is any special place in my heart for him. He should know by the number of lives I’ve led that I cannot attach nor love. Even here, tear stains still on my face, I’m questioning whether those tears have fallen because of the loss of another living soul, or because I am going to be forced through countless more lives.

  If only it would end. If only I could get the impending death Thomas has supposedly promised to me every time I awaken. Perhaps it would be peacefulness, bliss...

  It must be better than re-living the same life over and over.

  “I am sorry for upsetting you, Thomas.”

  “You’re only being honest. As always.”

  “It’s my only redeeming trait.”

  “No,” he’s too quick to answer.

  I sigh once, close my eyes. I know he can see me and all of my actions, but even he must look like a love-sick puppy to himself.

  He couldn’t keep me forever, though. Even if I were his favorite.

  “re-start us. Put me in an empty staircase, Isaac here. Do it a few weeks before the right people are to show up. Assign Isaac and I to one another. After we meet – assign us to our real people. Can you handle this, Thomas?”

  “I can handle it.”

  “Please do so, then.”

  There’s a pause, and my heartbeat starts to catch up with me, find me, eat at and beat at my ears now that I’m no longer arguing with him. My hands clench, grabbing at nothing, and I pray a prayer to every God in any religion.

  “Are you ready?”

  I shut my eyes tightly. I don’t want to see this world again. I don’t want to see anything ever again.

  “I am ready, Thomas.”

  “I will be commencing the sleep in thirty seconds. Twenty-seven...”

  I tense my body, as if awaiting to be hit, to be struck. I know it won’t feel quite as hard as such, but my nerves do not allow me to relax as I await my impending forgetfulness.

  “Can’t you just kill me and get it over with, Thomas?”

  “Don’t say things like that. It’s not funny.”

  “I’m not trying to be funny. I’m never funny.”

  “You’re always funny. Fourteen...”

  Fourteen seconds. “Do you have to count down?”

  “You would ask me to if I didn’t.”

  “I would not.”

  “Seven.”

  Here we go. I begin twitching, my body is so wired with terror. It’s hard to think I’m about to sleep for countless months, maybe even years, with how ready to bolt my body feels. Here we go. Here we go.

  “One...”

  Nothing, and everything, the loudest of pains, the hardest of rushes, and a chasm of numbness, of no feeling, of, of –

  “I love you, white blossom.”

  A bare smile touches my lips, the last action this face will ever have in this life.

  I know, you coward.

  one

  I am awake.

  A restrained silence greets my ears, as if there is a crowd of people bending around me, awaiting for me to open my eyes, but not wanting to overwhelm me with noise. I suck in a bout of cool air through my nose and shift, attempting to awaken my body the way my mind is.

  I blink my eyes open, which seem to almost creak in the endless reticence. Around me is seen purely in a shroud of dizzy confusion as my eyes begin to acclimate to a world of swirling white. Perhaps my eyes are still closed, and I am in a room in my mind still. I shift my stiff body, but it hardly responds, and so I freeze, lying on my back, staring at what may or may not be the sky above me.

  I do not know where I am.

  This is an innocent enough statement, or so would say the foolish. Many use it too daily and too often. Perhaps the one posing this statement does not know the coordinates or name of their whereabouts, but more common than not, one does know generally where they are. By a tree, or near a pond, on the planet of which they were born, of which they survived many years upon.

  Though my luxury is not the same as theirs, I suppose, in some sense of the word, I do, indeed, know where I am.

  I appear to be awake from what I must presume must be a deep slumber. There is an omnipresent ache in the back of my skull, pattering away violently at my mind. I sit up slowly, my vision blurred and still quite white, and I work on steadying my breathing as I allow my senses to befall me.

  This is not my first day alive – a groan in my bones makes this apparent – yet this, here, is my earliest memory.

  How fascinating.

  My vision comes to me, gently, slowly, like ocean waves beginni
ng to wet the sand before high tide washes in and encases it, and the blurred curves and lines of my world turn into solidified objects just clear enough to process. My face is staring blankly at a sky – a starless, sunless, moonless sky, shrouded in company of white and paled pink mist. There are no people as I had once believed, and it appears that I am completely alone here. Beneath my hands is something smooth and nearly slippery – I offer it my visual attention.

  My first glance frightens me. I jump slightly and look away, in an attempt to steel myself, breathing deeply. I have just awoken and already my heart is racing angrily in my chest, screaming to find a way to escape the confines of my ribcage.

  What I see – or rather, don’t see – is most likely, a figment of a stray and tired mind’s imagination, for either my sanity is not firm, or there is nothing beneath me.

  Early evidence proves my first theory is likely more accurate. Yet still, ignoring my surroundings is illogical, if I do, indeed, wish to know where I am. I peer beneath me once again.

  And, for the second time, my eyes are greeted with nothing.

  My numb and chilled fingertips begin to grasp at the nothing that appears to be supporting my form. Half of my palm finds a smooth ledge – the other, bottom half, finds air.

  I arch my body away from the structure and feel about it, silently, attempting to ascertain how I am being held by something invisible, until my fingers feel, over and over again, ledges that drop down slightly, and then another one, below it minutely, just around the length of a foot.

  Foot. I blink, slowly, allowing it to sink in. Stairs? I am on a staircase?

  Very intriguing. An invisible staircase.

  I make sure my feet have found the same stair before forcing my weight on them. They’re donned in tiny white shoes made entirely of fabric and seemingly carrying no plastic. I lift my them, attempting to stretch them out slightly, force them to relearn the feeling of moving.

  Long, silvery blonde hair falls from my shoulders and swings in front of me, straight and fine. I touch it and feel the softness of it, see the shine.

  My hair is shiny. This implies that I do have good nutrition, that I was not for many months kidnapped and had my memory erased or something similar. My front teeth find my bottom lip to worry, silently, as I raise my eyes to look ahead of me.