“The Horn has long been denied the presence of the Divine.” The demonic hero’s words echoed in Medika’s mind months and years – hundreds, to be accurate, though only three subjectively – after they had been uttered. Three years it had been since the time-traveler Blur had brought her to the war-wasted future that was her now. Three years spent being terrorized: fighting, running, and hiding as part of Humanity’s Resistance against the Nyorn. Three years where prayers grew futile and the Divine in which she had so fervently believed – the Divine which had ordained the sanctity of all life -- had grown very distant.
Medika lay on her back, gazing up through the darkening rubble that had once been – very long ago – one of Paragon City’s proud sky scrappers. A star winked down from the patch of sky she could see. The Nyorn had not put out the stars. She watched it. Neither sleep nor tears would come, although as a freedom fighter she had quickly learned to take sleep whenever possible. The tears – had all dried up. “They must have been part of the Divine,” she thought. “I wonder what Horn would have said to that idea?”
“I wonder what the Horn – and Bansidhe – would say if they had known that the evil they showed me so long ago in that inadvertent merging of minds to save an innocent – had been my – touchstone? What would they say if they knew that what they tried to shield from me has given me the strength to come this far? To survive. To keep fighting until the Nyorn know We Are Not Food!” She felt the familiar tightening in her jaw. It no longer made her sick. But the Divine was very far away now.
Once she had believed that the Divine had placed the stars amidst the rules by which the universe ran. The stars. The stars had shown a week ago when Jason proposed to her. Jason Wilke, code name StarBlast; an ex-con like Bansidhe; a philosopher like the Horn; a sweet and gentle man who had not been surprised to learn that she had never yet “known” a man – despite the daily horror of survival these past three years. Jason.
They’d been on the undergrown railroad together this evening; their assignment had been to get yet another family out of hiding and to the make-shift portal maintained by the Resistance. Another family who would survive on another world without the Nyorn. The woods had long ago mutated and overgrown the city that had once enclosed parks. The Resistance had as many hiding places as the Rikti had had back in the when from which she’d come. Freedom fighters always trod the woods carefully; many ruins covered ancient Rikti traps and concealed the slow-moving Nyorn poison-beetles.
A scrawny teenager and woman with a baby cowered in the streak of half-light as Jason lifted away the brush overhanging the small ruined room. A knife flashed down from the side, as Jason started speaking the password. Medika risked a single Aura of Healing to immediately identify them as friends. It must also have healed a beetle-stunned creature, for wings burst from an overhanging bush – followed by a choking, deafening explosion.
The infant started to wail. Medika had grabbed the baby, psychically willing it to silence and clinically noting the fresh burn that had opened its entire left side. She was a healer; the baby would die of fluid loss before they reached the portal. Her eyes met Jason’s. He nodded and she risked another Aura. The adults would have to make do with that much healing. “Go,” she whispered. “I will take the time necessary to ensure this child can survive. But they will investigate the explosion. Go.” Jason gathered up the man, woman, and teenager with a gesture. Then he had touched his fingers in mock salute to her, with eyes full of love. And they had left.
It had taken more time than she had hoped against hope. Children born since the Nyorn invasion had more and more problems responding to the psychic manipulation of energy and matter that made healing powers possible. Perhaps because super beings with healing powers had also been altered by the Nyorn’s environmental contaminants. Coming from the past as she had, untouched by the Nyorn, she’d been a valuable tool in the Resistance movement. “There, little one, I’ve kept my promise,” she whispered.
She’d strapped the sleeping baby to her own body and carefully started her own trek to the portal. An hour later the circling of ravens warned her to be cautious. There was a smell of charred meat; no doubt that was what attracted the scavengers. Bird after bird swooped from the air. “If it’s safe for them, I can take a look,” she thought.
She was not sick. She recognized a Nyorn butchering when she saw it. Medika was a doctor. She examined what was left of the bodies. The Nyorn had only bothered to take delicacies. There’d been enough time, she decided, for the man to use the knife on his wife and daughter. And on himself. She could not tell if he had been successful or if the Nyorn had finished the job. But Jason ….
All the signs, the blast marks, the explosions. Jason had bought them that time – and the Nyorn had paid him back in his own blood. Jason… whom she’d never yet made love to and never would. Because Blur had not been around for her to ask, “How much longer?”
Psychically Medika turned off the part of the brain controlling the baby’s hearing. She had neither time nor resources to see if its physiology could withstand her Psychic Wail. Then, patiently, carefully, determinedly, she tracked the Nyorn patrol. The Wail then annihilated the butchers. And she had risked a teleport to get as far away from the spot as she could.
Now she lay hidden, with the sleeping baby beside her, waiting and listening. Tomorrow she would try again. The Nyorn would not take this child to be a midnight snack.
She wondered if the Horn would recognize her when they met at last again – in Hell.
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