Legacy to Zero

Interlude - Binding / The Drive

Crash

I didn't really understand why Kendra walked out of the room.

It was as though there was a gap in my memory, like entering Grant's office was crossing the threshold into a new universe. Like I was trapped in the distorted reflection of my creation, across the bridge and staring at myself. Staring at the mess I'd made.

One second, Kendra's arm hooked around my shoulder, so close I could feel the rhythm of her breathing getting faster and faster. I'd never heard my sister hyperventilating. The next, she wasn't smiling. She was silent, out from my grasp with practiced ease, and the door swinging closed behind her.

I tried to stand, but the floor cracked. The gemstone-white tiles beneath Grant's carpet fractured like they were going to bow forward and send me into the floor below.

"I should—" I started to say, but Grant spun my chair toward him, and I stopped.

"I have another room here. Let's go." 

Kendra, I wanted to scream at him. Kendra needs me. My sister. And you don't understand. She's never needed me for anything. Nobody ever does. I have to go to her.

But I didn't.

I didn't.

Grant's hand stayed on my back as he guided me into his workshop. Every wall in HQ was moveable, and I hadn't seen the inner room of his office yet. The space smelled of the plants that grew wild on the roadside highways Astra drove me on, like something familiar and heavy on my shoulders. Like something I knew at the base of my throat, but that burned every time. Like something I'd breathed in for the first time and never would again.

His disassembled radio sat on a plush reclining table. The chassis lay fractured with the screws bleeding out. He didn't say a word and carried it to the other side of the room, to join the other half-finished projects: a photograph without a frame, and a block computer displaying a string of text in storm-cloud blue.

"Sit," he said, so I did.

I faced the direction we'd come, at the white expanse of shifting tides and the cycling, coiled snakes of its thread. My thighs sank into the upholstered seating, and I shifted a little, falling further into its depths.

Grant approached me the way one came to a beast. His gaze cool, but his stance straight, prepared to stand his ground. His hand curled around a thread so long it trailed across the floor, while the other hovered halfway between us.

"We have to do this quickly." His eyes pinged to me, as if seeing my ghost. The ghost of everything I wasn't. The usual gleam in his gaze was gone. It had vacated, packed its bags and fled as far away from me as it could get. "Tell me. What's the one thing you could carry with you forever? Like Kendra and her violin."

I set my cold palms on my knees. I didn't have much. Just my watch, Sage's jacket, Kendra's jewelry box I only ever stole from.

When I first showed up at Prismatrix, all I had was my sister.

I said, wondering whether I'd ever use it again, "The jewelry box."

"I'll fetch it."

He was out of the room like he'd rather be anywhere but here. And I just sat, the threads fraying inside the seat. I tugged at the stuffing and held it in my palms. Wondering whether I deserved to feel the softness inside of this thing I'd destroyed. Wondering whether it was worth it to stop.

Wondering if this was how I'd finally get rid of my old self.

It seemed quite fitting, really. I was going to leave this room, and I would be me for once. I would be Ken. Drew. Everything, everything, and not the sorcerer I was before.