Participants:
| Scene Title | Family Meeting |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | During a rest stop in their long journey, Chess comforts her niece in a time of need. |
| Date | July 16, 2021 |
Ruins of Rochefort Bridge Trading Post
Just Outside Edmonton
Ontario, Canada
July 16th
8:30 pm
The aftermath of dinner leaves the air laden with the lingering scent of canned vegetables and beans. The faint hum of the diesel generator outside is a constant backdrop, broken only by the occasional murmur of quiet conversation. Makeshift beds dot the floor like scattered islands, though here and there people cluster together. Some have already succumbed to sleep, or at least rest, due to the fatigue that comes with such a long journey, made more exhausting by the threat of unknown dangers in the dark.
Chess hasn’t attempted to sleep yet; instead she’s taken it upon herself to walk the perimeter, watching and listening for signs of trouble. Her bow and quiver over her shoulder, she’s done a couple of routes of the parking lot and the surrounding area, her blue eyes scanning every shadow before the beam of her flashlight scatters the darkness, at least temporarily, to be sure there’s nothing there.
After the last lap, she finds Nick sitting by Frizzle, rifle across his lap – apparently he’d had the same idea. “You go in and get some rest. I slept half the day in the bus. I’ll shoot a warning shot if I need backup,” he tells her.
His words give her the permission to go back inside, though it’s not to find her bedding or to rest. Instead, she looks for Glory.
Back inside the trading post, the air still has the crisp chill of the outside. A kerosene space heater is running in the middle of the dining area, which has been converted into a communal sleeping space, tables pushed to the walls. A half partition by the entrance divides that area from the old gift shop, nearly all of its kitschy memorabilia still on the dusty shelves.
Glory is sitting on a vacant stretch of shelf, cradling a cracked coffee mug in both hands, rolling it around slowly. Crosses hang on the wall behind her along with a collection of sun-faded and dust-caked art prints with vaguely religious themes. The mug is decidedly irreligious, depicting the Wheel of Fortune tarot card. The mug is broken, with the missing piece marring the print on its side.
“How d’you think you’d go about finding the missing piece of this?” Glory asks Chess, hearing her approach. She fingers the rough edge of the broken mug, then gives it a tap with her fingernail. “Think it’s even still here in the store? Maybe it got swept up in some trash? Thrown away who knows how long ago.” She looks up from the mug to Chess. “When is something so lost that it might as well not exist?”
After spotting Glory, Chess unslings the bow and quiver from her shoulder, setting them down on top the counter after shoving a few point-of-purchase jars out of the way. Her brow lifts at the question, and she squints at the mug, the question clearly why would you want to? but she doesn’t give voice to that thought.
Instead, she asks, “This sounds a bit like a metaphor, and like you might be meaning you, or maybe less personally, us. But it definitely sounds like you.”
She moves to the shelves to lean against it, next to Glory. “Is there a way home for you? Regardless of what happens to us.” She’s quiet for a moment, before she looks up again, her brow knitting together with pained worry. “You don’t have to see this through with us. Unless you do have to. I don’t really know anything, I guess. Everything’s been…” She struggles to find a word, but just shakes her head, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees, staring down at the dirty floor between her feet.
“My guess is it broke into more pieces, got kicked to the far corners of the room, or crunched under feet into dust. Hopefully that’s not a metaphor.”
Glory manages a faint smile, setting the mug upside-down on the counter before she hops off. “I dunno,” is her blanket assessment of everything. It’s said as a sigh, one big fuck this to her previous navel gazing attitude.
“I mean, home, yeah.” Glory backtracks. “Forgot you dipped out of the big meeting before I got to the nuts and bolts.” She nods, away from Chess, toward the door and the vehicles beyond. “The suit I came here in has a kind of, uh—rip-cord, let’s call it. I tug that, and I get yanked back to my time…” She continues staring past Chess, avoiding discussing the mug and its metaphor. “Should’ve pulled the trigger on that a while ago, when I found out what happened to Crowley. But now…” Glory’s attention blinks back to Chess. “Now I feel like I’ve found everything we’ve been looking for all these years.”
Glory’s gaze is unwavering. As if Chess is the thing she’s been searching for all these years, after a fashion.
Once as dark as Glory’s, Chess’ pale-eyed gaze drops at the mention of that meeting on that day she’d rather forget. Her lips twitch into a short-lived, apologetic smile of sorts. “Sorry about that. Leaving you to the wolves, so to speak. I just…” Chess shakes her head, reaching into her pocket for one of the stones she always keeps on her, to worry at it, and feel the molecules charging, warming in her palm.
“That’s good. That you can go,” she says after a moment, glancing back up when she feels that gaze on her. “If we’re what you were looking for, I hate to think about how disappointing that must be.” It’s said with a small smirk, meant to be a little funny, but it falls flat, at least to her ear.
Her brows draw together again, and Chess picks up another mug, peering inside of it like it might have something tucked within. “If things get bad, you should get back home, okay? It may be awful but you at least have a chance to survive. Don’t worry about me. I’ve lived longer than I should have, a couple times over, I think.”
Words churn behind Glory’s teeth, but none of the immediate things she wants to say come out. In their place is a soft grunt of vague acknowledgement. Her gaze falters down to the dusty floor, and Glory crosses her arms over her chest, beginning to pace back and forth. Some measure of tumult crosses Glory’s expression, an inner battle being won and lost in an instant.
“Things’re already bad.” Glory finally says, coming to a stop in her pacing mid floor. She still can’t quite look at Chess. “You don’t know what it’s like where I’m from. How desperate it is.” She blinks her stare to meet Chess’, but it isn’t indignation in her eyes, it’s hurt. “This? You people?” She says, lowering her voice to a harsh whisper for emphasis without disturbing the others across the building. “It’s the first time I’ve felt hope in—in—” her gaze falters again, “I don’t fucking know.”
“Maybe not,” Chess says quietly, regarding the future Glory comes from, of not knowing what it’s like to be there. “But I know what it’s like to feel like there’s no future. To have no hope.”
She stares at the ground for a long moment, her brow furrowed. There’s a weight that comes with Glory’s words, one that adds to the twin weights of guilt and duty already on her shoulders, put there by no one but herself.
Eventually, Chess’ eyes come up, to find Glory in her sideways glance. “Maybe you can help us change what happens,” she says quietly. “I hope so.” For a moment, she lets that sit, before she asks, “Are you okay? You were having a chat with your plate earlier. These days, I’m sort of used to it. Half the people here have someone in their head. Someone keeping you company in there?”
For a moment Glory is still and silent. Embarrassed, but that’s not everything. She stares at Chess, through Chess, and then turns away while running a hand through the dark tangle of her hair. “No,” she says softly, perhaps in answer to Chess’ question, perhaps to herself. Glory isn’t adept at dodging personal questions, lacks a lot of social graces Chess would expect from someone her age. It speaks a lot to her upbringing, the world around her as she grew up.
But as Glory pauses, back to Chess, it’s clear she doesn’t want to just run away. Not from Chess. Not from someone who looks so much like—”Yes.” Is said just as softly. Just as embarrassed. It is not a comforting admission to make.
Glory’s not unlike Chess was, a few years ago, when she’d finally come out of the shadows of the Second Civil War, rejoining society after being on its fringes for so long. She lacked social graces. Was blunt as a club, to protect the fragility that hid beneath a rough exterior. It’s hard not to see herself in Glory, especially knowing that the woman is her sister’s daughter, even if she stands taller than Chess and seems the same age. Pale eyes remain on Glory’s face, and Chess nods slowly when the yes comes.
“It’s not…” she begins, also slowly, as she tries to frame her words carefully, so as not to spook her niece away by pushing too hard, too fast. The right way to say it doesn’t come, and Chess frowns down at the dusty ground beneath her feet.
She begins again. “Is it someone spying on us through you? Like with Gracie?” she asks, the volume of her words dropping. “Or is it… I don’t know. It’s probably better not to guess at things and offend you,” she adds contritely, a small, apologetic smile curving the corner of her mouth upward. She glances in the direction of the makeshift sleeping quarters, then back to Glory.
“I don’t… really know how to explain it.” Glory mumbles, still keeping her back to Chess. A long moment of silence hangs after, and Chess can see Glory mustering up the trust to say more, embodied as a slow breath drawn in and held as she turns to face the aunt she never knew. There’s tears in her eyes when she turns around, tears she’s quick to sweep away with a thumb, putting on a strong front that does nothing to conceal the hurt inside.
“You can’t tell her,” Glory whispers as she steps closer to Chess. It’s at this distance and hearing that sharp intonation that Chess realizes Glory’s tears aren’t from hurt, they’re from fear. “It’s Eve.”
Palpable, helpless fear.
Chess remains quiet while Glory struggles with the words, giving her the space to find them, put them in the right order, find the breath to say whatever she’s finding it hard to say. When Glory turns to her, she reaches out for the woman’s other hand. Glory is taller, the same age or maybe even older in years lived, if not on paper, but somehow she feels… not maternal, but a familial urge to protect her, like she does for her fellow clones, for Jac, and for those others who aren’t blood but may as well be.
Eve among them.
When that name is uttered, Chess’ blue eyes widen and she stares at the woman in front of her –who, genetically, could be her own daughter. “What? She’s…Eve is with you? Like in your head? Why?” she asks, voice low. There’s no skepticism in those short few words, only wonder and worry, twinned.
“I don’t know,” Glory whispers, squeezing Chess’ hand tightly. On realizing how softly she’s speaking, she reiterates. “I don’t know.” And that only makes her sound desperate for answers. “It’s—I don’t know if she’s in my head or if she’s here, but I’m the only one who can see her.”
A silence briefly falls over Glory, but it’s clear from the look in her eyes that there’s so much more to say. An infinity of words, all tangled up together in a spider-web of uncertainty and fear. When Glory finally speaks again, those thoughts babble out of her mouth. “Eve—the one from where I’m from—she died. But I—I see her like a fucking ghost. It’s just riddles. Everything she says. It’s like she already knows everything and is just—it’s like I’m taking a test. She keeps asking me for—” Glory’s hand wanders to the empty knife sheath at her hip, fingertips recoiling from its touch as if it were hot.
“I feel like I’m going crazy.” Glory pleads in a strained whine, tears tumbling down her cheeks. “Sometimes I talk to her and—and it’s like it didn’t happen—or no time passed. I feel like—maybe it’s just my brain. Maybe I’m hallucinating. All the—the—all this—like it’s breaking me apart.” She’s terrified of that being the truth. That so many journeys through time are literally tearing her mind apart. Chess feels the fear reverberating through the trembling quality of Glory’s touch.
“That sounds like Eve,” Chess murmurs at the mention of riddles, with a huff that’s almost a laugh, only devoid of humor. But even that little bit of levity is flattened by the next words – by Glory’s next action – before she cuts off the sentence.
She lets go, briefly, of Glory’s hand, only so she can step away from her spot leaning beside the other woman to stand directly in front of her instead, face to face. She reaches out to take both of Glory’s hands in her own, to try to steady the trembling by sheer will and her own solid flesh.
“I don’t think you’re going crazy,” Chess says softly. “There are enough people around here with extra people in their heads that, fuck, it’s getting to be the norm instead of the exception among people like us. And Eve’s ability…” She’s quiet for a moment, glancing over her shoulder to where the sea of bodies sleep, or try to sleep, for the night. Turning back, her gaze alights on Glory’s face again. “Her ability is fucking weird, okay? Maybe the last time she died, she couldn’t find a dead body. Maybe she took a corner of your head, like Saffron had in Baz, before that got reversed when we jumped. I don’t know. But weird powers do weird things, especially once you start jumping into weird timelines. I’d guess it’s more something like that than you being crazy.”
A small smirk tips one corner of her mouth upward. “I mean, if she’s in there at all, you’re probably being driven a little crazy,” Chess adds, squeezing Glory’s hands again. But her features darken with another frown, and she returns to that cut-off sentence.
“What does she ask you for, Glory?”
Glory is quiet and still, eyes fixed on the floor, shoulders rolled forward. For all her height she seems small in this moment, younger and—in the face of a woman who is a ghost of mother whose face she does not remember—childlike. She swallows, draws in a breath to try and steady her nerves, and looks up. Not directly to Chess, but to a point in space right over her shoulder, as if looking at something else. But it’s only for a moment. Defiance locks her gaze on Chess’ eyes, ones familiar in a way she has forgotten, and answers.
“She asks me ‘where is your knife?’”
The opacity of the question, combined with the literally pointed nature of it and Glory’s emotional state, elicits a surreal sense of threat behind Eve’s words repeated across time. Even if Chess can’t hear the way they’re uttered, she can feel the way Eve would ask a question like that. Unhelpful. Confusing. But not without purpose.
“I—I dropped a knife on a mission. To the past.” Glory continues, tears in her eyes, fingers fumbling at the empty sheath at her belt. “Eve—when I see her, she has it. But then—” She shakes her head, realizing she’s failing to board her own train of thought. “She knows something I don’t.” And that much is said not as though mad she is not let in on a secret, but rather that Eve knows something so terrible that Glory is afraid it would unmake her to know.
Chess’ head tips to the side and she’s quiet, listening, her expression thoughtful. Worried, too, if the crease of her forehead is any indication, but that never seems to go away, not here in this broken, flooded world. All of her smiles are fleeting these days, as if they’re too weighed down by the weight of the mission and her newfound ability she tried to avoid.
“That sounds like her,” Chess says again, this time with no humor at all, no upward tip of the corner of her mouth.”Maybe she’s trying to tell you to go back to that place… it might not be the knife that’s important, but where you left it?”
She has no idea. She frowns again, and glances over her shoulder once more to where the floor is littered with bodies, some still, some moving as they try to find a comfortable position. “Was it just an ordinary knife, or was there something special about it?”
Glory exhales a sharp sigh through her nose, swallows again, and forces some distance between herself and Chess. Her earlier frenetic energy returns as she eases away from the subconscious comfort of someone who bears a mother’s face she only remembers in forgotten dreams. “Maybe.” Glory says as she tries to sort through her thoughts herself. “I—I dunno.” She takes a moment, wipes her hands over her face to mask that she’s wiping tears from her eyes.
“I was—When I was on my assignment…” Glory’s eyes track from side to side as she digs back to that moment. “I was in Texas. A Company facility—Primatech. I was doing an Incision, information-gathering. I was supposed to retrieve something from the vault. A uh…” Glory makes a little triangle shape with her hands. “Black stone pyramid thing. Not important.” She makes a dismissive gesture. “But there was a lot of other stuff in the vault. There was a knife there, in the locked display cases. Short, squiggly blade.” She shrugs. “The thing of all of this…” Glory says with a shake of her head, “is that I don’t remember dropping my knife. I never even took it out of the sheathe. It was just—gone after I did my Pull.”
As Glory talks, Chess can feel that she’s pulling away. Her descriptions of events become more clinical, like log entries rather than a real conversation with a friend. She clocks that as a defense mechanism right away. Seen it enough times in other people.
“But I—” Glory scrubs her face with her hands, still trying to shake off the tremors in her hands. “I saw Eve tonight. She kept telling me that I was close now to where I needed to be. Lots of cryptic shit.” And, based on what Chess saw, Glory was trying to talk back to her discreetly. “It’s like she enjoys fucking with me.”
Chess hadn’t worked at the Deveaux Society long before the series of unfortunate events that led her to jumping through a portal in the ocean to another dimension, but she did learn some things in her time there. “Primatech. That was a front for the Company,” she says quietly. “The people who used to come and classify us or take us away if we were too dangerous.”
She’d been considered too dangerous. But she had people making sure she didn’t get put into one of those dark holes – or white coffins.
“If we accept that this Eve is real, or at least a part of her consciousness is here sharing space with you, it must be something that can do something. Maybe against the entity,” she says, her voice more hushed now than it has been. “When we fought it before, there was a sword that could hurt it – or we hoped. It didn’t work, but it did something.” Chess’ pale gaze drops, her brows drawing together at the pain of the recollection and everything that had happened in that moment. “But maybe it’s something like that.”
When her gaze lifts, she lets go of Glory’s hands, to let her have that space she clearly needs. “I think you should tell her. No one can understand an Eve riddle like Eve, after all.”
Glory’s shoulders sag in defeat. “Maybe,” sounds like a yes, mom more so than anything else. Drying her eyes, Glory’s attention shifts to the mug she’d left upside-down on the counter. Something about the missing piece from it lingers in the back of her mind.
“I’m… really scared.” Glory confides, attention lingering on that mug rather than shifting to Chess. “I’m afraid there’s no—that there’s nothing anybody can do to fix anything.” Her dark eyes swiftly shift from mug to Chess. “We’ve been trying to avert disaster for so long, and nothing’s changed that one constant. That the world ends with that solar flare.” Her jaw grows momentarily unsteady. “That I lose everything.”
The helmet that Glory holds on to come back to mind. That sentimental piece of hardware, with Chess’ name stenciled across it. A helmet that does—would—will—contain her hollowed-out skull. That image haunts Glory, too, for entirely different reasons.
“Tell me we’re gonna figure this out.” Glory pleads.
Chess reaches past Glory for a mug from another self, suddenly – one that reads Best Buckin’ Dad in the World with dopey looking stag on it.
“I’m bringing this back to Luther,” she explains, as if it’s the most normal thing in the world to be picking out souvenirs from the road trip across a flooded continent on this fool’s errand that she’s already been told ends badly. “He’s my war dad. Your mom had the hots for him, which was really fucking weird for me.”
It’s not an assurance they’ll solve this problem, not in the least. But it’s a tiny symbol of hope that they will.
“Maybe you being here will make all the difference,” Chess says instead.
Her pale-eyed gaze drifts then to the helmet, before finding its way back up to Glory’s worried face. “We’ll figure it out,” Chess finally says. It’s a promise she can’t make. “We have to.”
Glory wipes at her eyes again, swallowing down a lump of emotion in her throat. There’s an irrepressible ghost of a smile that keeps fluttering across her lips as she stares at the mug Chess picked. Then, that smile slowly fades. A silence hangs between the two. At first it’s filled with just a nod, a moment of recognition between aunt and niece.
With a resolute nod, Glory echoes Chess’ sentiment. “We have to.” But she can’t bear to tell Chess what’s on her mind.
Not yet.
Twenty-Five Years Later
(Five Years Ago For Glory)
There is a rambling green space near the center of the Ascent, penned in by low concrete dividers, within which trees and scrub vegetation blooms under the phosphorescent glow of artificial sunlight filtered through a matte white screen. Recordings of birdsong are piped into the space from discreetly placed speakers, giving the garden a semblance of what surface life once resembled.
A spider’s web of mulch-bordered flagstone paths wind through the green space toward the park’s namesake, the Plinth. Here, a simple monument made of old, cracked concrete rises up from the park floor. Lights are nested in the ground at its base, ensuring that the monument is illuminated regardless of the artificial time of day. A few curved stone benches rest around the face of the monument where a rusted steel plaque is crudely bolted to the stone. The Plinth was erected in the years following the disaster in the geothermal plant, created in memorial of the lives lost there.
Ulysses Ngata and and Kimberly Oliver aren’t on this plaque, but she remembers visiting it as a girl before and after her parents both passed away. She knows their friends are marked here, friends who gave their lives defending Gateway from a fascist rebellion. But now, an adult, she cannot remember the names of all of her parents friends who died. So she comes here to remember them in generalizations. By the descriptions told to her through sad smiles and long, rambling stories that come before tears.
There is a name on there that, in this moment, Glory does not remember. But one day, when she meets her mother’s twin, she will be reminded. A hero, gone before his time. Died in the defense of others.
BELLAMY, LUTHER