TANGENTS

  Tabitha//

  In the space between space, Tabitha’s agony melted away as her reeling mind found the refuge of a dream. Nothingness bloomed into the muted greens and deep browns of twilight. The haze of pain became the cool, early morning fog of New England wetlands in autumn.

  Somewhere in a bog in Crystal, Maine, she was leading Agent Harris as the two tried to find their way back to their car. They were investigating reports of three different group sightings of a will-o-wisp by conservationists in the area.

  Twelve people with identical descriptions: a ghostly orb of amber light floating through the trees. The last report included a missing person, after a man decided to follow it off into the fog, which is what put it on Blackwell’s radar.

  On their way back from a debacle in Matinicus Isle, the agents thought a lower level lead would be just what they needed to lift their spirits.

  It had been a long night of wandering the drenched forest in circles, after Agent Harris insisted on the wrong direction more than once and got them lost. Now that the sun was rising, Tabitha was nearly certain they were going the right way.

  “I mean, yeah—fuckin’ -hell—now that the sun is up, you know where we’re goin’,” Agent Harris said, fighting the soggy field of sedge and shrubs they were crossing. He had already nearly lost a boot once to the peat, meaning every sucking step after that came with a groan or complaint. “Where were—ssshhitt—where were you eight hours ago?”

  Tabitha let out a pointed sigh. “I’m not even going to dignify that with a response.”

  Agent Harris struggled through a laugh. “But ya just did,” he told her in a wry tone. “You dignified it.”

  “I hate you.”

  Laughing at her irritation, he tried closing the distance between them with carefully chosen hops from one patch of sedge to another. “Oh, come on! You’re—,” poor placement put his foot into a puddle, “—oh, come on! You gotta be kiddin' me, man! That’s down to the sock, for sure. Right through.”

  Tired as she was, Tabitha did not stop to wait. Stopping meant an end to whatever momentum was carrying her through her exhaustion. It meant sinking in Crystal Bog.

  “Hey!” A moment later, Agent Harris was chasing after her, again. “Come on! You can’t still be pissed about Matinicus. I told you I’m sorry. I’m sooorrrrry!”

  “It was only three days ago,” she reminded him. Her tone cooled. “It’s still fresh.”

  “Yeeeaaah, but that includes something like ten hours of—god—goddammit—ten hours of trudging through a shitty New England swamp to—there—together.” One last hop over a puddle saw him in step with Tabitha. He gestured at the situation. “Trudging.”

  Tabitha raised an eyebrow at him. “Okay?”

  “I’m just saying…,” he stopped to consider his words, and another soggy step, “…trudging is…no, yeah, it’s like trauma almost. It's traumatic, right?”

  Unable to tell if he was serious, Tabitha stopped to give him a questioning look.

  “What?” Agent Harris carefully picked a spot to stop in. He looked as serious as could be. “It feels fuckin’ traumatic.” Holding his hands out in front of him, he linked his fingers together. His face was starting to crack. “And trauma? That shit bonds.”

  Tabitha could see how hard he was fighting his laughter. The way the lines next to his eyes and mouth deepened as he strained made him look like he was doing a terrible Robert de Niro impression.

  As his face contorted further with exaggerated penitence, he put his hands together. “You forgive me?”

  “Gah.” Now, she was the one straining to keep a straight face. “Are you fucking high?”

  Agent Harris spit laughter at her.

  Unable to help it, Tabitha broke, too. She continued on, shaking her head while she chuckled.

  “I was serious about a word, though,” she told him.

  He snorted. “A safe word?”

  Tabitha groaned. “What are you thirteen?”

  “Huh? Isn’t that what it’s called?”

  “A signal?”

  “Right.”

  “Seriously, aren’t you like twenty years older than me?”

  Waving his hand at the question, Agent Harris rolled his eyes. “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

  Near the edge of the field, Tabitha began to outpace Agent Harris, again. She was just about to step under the trees, when his foot found a weak point in the peat floor.

  “Shiiiit!”

  Slowed by the dense vegetation of the forest, she turned to watch his struggle.

  “Goddamn—shiiiit! This—the—fuck!” He fell forward with a groan, and began trying to push himself out with his free leg. “Come. The. Fuck. On!”

  After a valiant effort, he craned his neck up at Tabitha, more stuck than ever. “Yep. I’m stuck.”

  Tabitha tried not to smile at the pitiful sight of him.

  “Come on, Hale,” he said. “You just gonna leave me here?”

  She shrugged. “There’s probably better partners they could find me,” she told him, softening it with a laugh.

  Agent Harris groaned at her. He tried one more strained attempt at freeing himself.

  When he was finished fighting the ground, he looked back up at her. “But are there better friends?”

  Tabitha scoffed at him. “Friends?!”

  Hearing the acid in her own voice brought clarity to the moment. The pain of the present cut through the mire of the past. An image shredded by thorns played through her mind.

  “I’m with ya every step of the way, k—”

  A twig snapped.

  Tabitha’s head swung around to look into the forest behind her.

  Finding nothing, she turned back to where Agent Harris was.

  There was no one. Not even the hole his boot made in the peat.

  “Harris?”

  A hollow pang echoed through her left eye, accompanied by a flash of light, and then half of her vision was gone.

  Standing there, she pawed at her eye, while scanning the trees for any sign of her partner.

  “Agent Harris?”

  Another pang in her dead eye.

  Tabitha was about to backtrack through the mushy field of sedge, when she saw a light.

  Just beyond the forest’s threshold, an orange orb was floating through the trees. It was a gentle, comforting glow, that reminded her of another.

  A cigarette cherry? Tabitha wondered. For a moment, she thought she heard the clink of a flip top lighter.

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  “Agent Harris?!”

  She did not need a response, Tabitha was already breaking trail through the wall of dew covered greenery between them.

  “Isaac!”

  She clawed and fought and tore at the undergrowth. Nothing would stop her from reaching him.

  “Isaac! Isaac Harris! Hey!”

  Still, the light danced in and out of view as it moved ever out of reach.

  Tabitha would not stop though. Even as the forest tore away at her hair and clothes, she carried on. She paid it no mind.

  She pushed past the agonies and soreness that began returning to her in crippling waves.

  She ignored the softening ground as each step became addled all the same, by exhaustion or mud.

  With each careless step taken toward the wisp, Tabitha sank further.

  “ISAAC!”

  More and more, until she was up to her neck in water and clinging peat.

  Fighting only worsened it. Kicking at the loose floor of plant decay below only made more room for her to fall. By the time she realized she had lost sight of the wisp, it was too late.

  “ISAAC!! PLE—”

  As her mouth and then eye went under the dark water, Tabitha was pulled back into the mire of nothingness.

  Above her, the surface shimmered with light.

  Below her, pitch black void.

  The further she fell, the less warmth she felt from the sun.

  Deeper down, the cold darkness slithered over her, like tendrils. It enveloped her until nothing else could reach through to her perception.

  Only the icy ache of the past existed to center herself around.

  With only it to cling to, Tabitha wrapped her mind around the hurt like a cocoon. If that was all she had left then so be it. Even as it thrashed and ripped through her in waves, she held it close and squeezed it tighter.

  Imagining herself as vines, she hugged with all her might, and for a time, she and her misery floated together alone, entangled.

  Until even that began to slip.

  And just when Tabitha thought she might be lost to the pain, or it lost to her, she felt it return the embrace.

  Tracing the path of the cold tendrils, and undoing their hold on her, warmth took her in a familiar, motherly grasp. All it was missing was the stinging bite of scorn.

  As the icy depth slid away from her, the friendly light above returned.

  Up and up, she went, through peat and water alike, until suddenly she broke through the surface to be blinded by the late morning sun.

  Coughing up bog, and gasping at the dazzling light, Tabitha fought for understanding of what was happening to her. Through her blurry, waterlogged eye, she managed to get a glimpse at what could have only been Mother Nature’s hand, all tangled vines and moss, carrying her like a piece of luggage.

  “Hel-help!” Tabitha choked out as the giant green hand swung her toward a solid piece of the fen. “Heeeelllll—”

  “Hallo!” A soft voice interrupted.

  Tabitha’s eye snapped in the direction it came from, but, being in motion, she only saw a green and brown smudge that barely stood out from its surroundings.

  “Whaaa—,” she hollered, trying to get an eye on whoever it was as the hand gently lowered her onto the ground, “—Isaac?!”

  Once she was on the cold peat, Tabitha laid there, hyperventilating. She stared wide-eyed through the canopy while the vines unwrapped themselves from her.

  When she was finally free, she sat up as quickly as her body would allow her.

  Every motion was agony.

  “Ahhh—Isaac?”

  “Nooo,” someone replied in a chiming, wounded tone.

  Tabitha’s eye quickly found the source right in front of her, though, it took a moment of blinking for her to see it.

  Beginning at her hazel eyes, which had a glow to them despite her back being to the sun, the slight shape of a woman untangled itself from the greenery. A mess of muddy brown hair ran down to her shoulders, in clumps and knots, to complement her muddied clothing. Handmade from flax or tweed, before flowers and grasses had been woven in, the simple shirt and shorts did little to hide her pale, dirt-flecked skin. With bare feet caked in mud, running up her shins like socks, she was the image of wilderness itself.

  If perhaps too young to be Mother Nature, the elfin woman was most certainly her daughter.

  And her voice was a bell, both airy and light, yet with a ringing edge.

  “I’m Uffie!”

  Sebastian//

  Seems redundant, he thought, staring at the shackles SecCon put him in. Thinking back to the monster of a man who fitted him with them, Sebastian dazedly laughed to himself. Like I’m gonna fight a damn space marine.

  Since the flash of golden light, everything felt like it had to travel through a long tunnel before finally reaching him. It did not matter to him how he ended up in the white space above the yard, or how he was looking down through the floor at the scene.

  One moment, he was on his back, stunned by the lightning strike. In the next, before his eyes could even fully readjust, he was in whatever room SecCon had poured out of.

  Sebastian had never seen what looked like an endless expanse before. The empty white void was difficult to look at. Not only was it too bright, but without shadows or lines to reference, his depth perception was off, giving him a queasy feeling when he stared too hard. It did not help that the soldiers, in their deep black unvarite armor, contrasted so heavily against the background that they looked like giant-shaped holes in space. Whenever he looked at them, he could not help but feel like his vision was slipping into the dark metal.

  Instead, he chose to stare down at the torn apart yard where—

  ~~~

  Sitting in the library of the University of Oregon, Sebastian was working on his Masters in Folklore. It had been nearly two years since he left home, leaving behind twenty years of plans and aspirations foisted upon him by his parents. Birthright is what his mother called it. Disappointment was another word she threw around that day. She made sure to drive her point home, by speaking for his comatose father. All the while, Tabitha stood behind her, staring daggers at him.

  His sister had waited until after their mother was done to twist the knife.

  “I’ll never forgive you,” she told him.

  Almost two years later, to the day, Sebastian was taking a break from working on his thesis, when he checked his email. In a sea of unopened junk, his eyes somehow jumped right to the only one that mattered. It was the domain name of the address that stood out, with its dreaded initials: @bwf.com.

  There was no subject.

  For a moment he considered deleting it, and moving on with his life.

  When the thought that something might have happened to Tabitha crossed his mind, he told himself they would surely call if that were the case.

  Then he remembered exactly what the initials BWF stood for, and opened it.

  Sebastian,

  Your sister and I decided it was best to let your father go.

  You knew him better than most. He hated being tethered to one place.

  This is what he would have wanted.

  Best wishes,

  Advisory Board Member-01

  P.S. – A memorial service was held for him. You were sorely missed.

  ~~~

  “…for your loss, but I am glad to be rid of that fiend,” AB1 oozed.

  Sebastian could not remember when she appeared next to him in the white room, or when he had sat down.

  “Is this fresh?” Standing over him, she looked down her sharp nose to inspect his bleeding ear. “A piercing? How old are you now? And gold, too. How tacky.” She clicked her tongue at it, and turned to walk away. “I suppose this is what happens when one makes the mistake of befriending a variant,” she told him over her shoulder. “Think hard about that while you’re in Foundation custody.”

  Piercing? Sebastian’s hand rose to the dull throb of his earlobe. He had forgotten about it almost immediately after Lord Tredici dragged him through the door that led them to Virginia. The door that led to a house with a red smear of people running through it.

  Touching the botched job, done hastily with a paper clip, the pain offered him enough clarity to remember what the point of it was.

  “The earring will help, yes, but you cannot rely on only it,” Lord Tredici had said.

  The sound of the paper clip pushing through his skin was nearly as bad as the pain.

  “You must say it aloud. With gusto! Demand it!”

  After listening to Sebastian complain about the piercing, and not be able to repeat his instructions, Lord Tredici wrote them down for him.

  Struggling with his shackled hands, he fished around in the pockets of his dirty chinos, for the sticky note he had put there. When he found it, he pulled it out and unfolded it.

  Reading the instructions, he recalled exactly why he struggled to recite it from memory.

  Scribbled at the top, it said: For when things go right, but all feels wrong.

  Sebastian slowly got up to his feet. The entire time, he felt all six members of the SecCon team staring at him from somewhere behind their helmets.

  His mother was nearly to a doorway cut into the colorless void, when he cleared his throat.

  “Yaa—YAAAAAAAR!” Doing his best pirate impression, Sebastian began hollering at the top of his lungs. “‘ear me, ya filthy landlubbers, fer fears of bein’ made to walk the plank! By the—,” his mother’s glare caused him to flinch, “—by the agreed upon articles put to parchment and signed by Roberts, Phillips and Low, I demand a parlay with yer captain! Abide or be taken by the tides!”

  For a long, awkward moment, nothing happened.

  Glancing down at the sticky note, he wondered if he misread it.

  One of the soldiers began laughing over his helmet’s intercom.

  The soldier closest to Sebastian started to join him, before his hand flew up to his head, and he began groaning.

  AB1 took a step away from the door.

  “What have you done?” she asked Sebastian.

  The groaning SecCon member raised his rifle. “Ah—fuck—fucking variant object! Breach! Breach!”

  There was a click from AB1’s tongue as she began marching toward Sebastian.

  Then a click from the rifle.

  “Do not!” AB1 shouted at the soldier. A bramble began rapidly growing from her hand.

  “Aaahhh!” The soldier put Sebastian in his crosshairs. “It’s trying to get into myaaah—”

  Dropping into the floor, like it suddenly gave out beneath him, the SecCon member vanished with a sudden splash of water.

  While AB1 paused her advance, two of the five remaining members of the SecCon team raised their guns. One of the three smarter soldiers threw his hand up, and yelled something at them over their radios.

  Then, one after another, the two with their guns drawn plunged into the floor.

  Jets of seawater fired into the air from the holes they splashed into.

  “What have you done, boy?” AB1 bellowed at him as she raised her whip of thorns and moved to continue. “What is your plan?!”

  “I want to—crap—,” Sebastian paused to resume his pirate impression. “Arrrr! I wanta parlay, me says! Show me ta yer captain!”

  In the blink of an eye, the leader of the SecCon team was standing in front of AB1.

  She looked like she might try to bowl over the man four times her size, but stopped.

  “Have you forgotten yourself, Murdoch?” Her tone was doom itself, controlled and imminent.

  “Mam,” the giant said sternly, “these are good men. And you’re flyin’ blind here. Could be you next, for all I know.” He raised his rifle to her heart. “He’s requested an audience with the Advisory Board, mam.”

  The click of AB1's tongue resounded through the empty expanse.