Motel 6+6

[mnemosyne]

Dan rents the hotel room, pays cash, brings back the keys. Yes, actual keys on plastic diamonds inserted into locks to admit the patrons into the room. An old-fashioned motel that long-since lost its franchise for failing to live up to the lax standards of some low-end chain targeting itself to strapped tourists and unexpected travelers, and is now instead directly marketed toward truckers and prostitutes of every variety.

While they’re exiting the van, Dan hits the glovebox firmly and watches it open. Takes in a breath, glances over his shoulder at the others there, then pulls out two handguns, checking the clips and assuring himself that the safeties are on. They make him nervous, he can't hide that, but he knows the basics. His voice is drawn, quiet.

“Hey,” to Sid as she’s going inside. “ – do you know how to use one of these?” Offering it to her as casually as he can. She does not; he nods. Dan makes asks the same question of Mara – can she use one of these? If she says yes, he offers her one. Sid and Mara are the only ones he queries. Sera is fucked up. Jim is Working. Jake is -

- well, he should not have a weapon close to hand.

--

Inside the hotel room, Sera sinks down against the wall between the a/c and the door, her spine straight and upright, legs bent at the knees, elbows resting on her thighs. She looks thoroughly disconnected from the world and these levels of reality, but the truth is she’s following the weaving Jim performs on some altered level, feeling the cage he builds around them with his resonance, breathing in the shifting patterns as he warps them to form the powerful wards he builds. No: not just breathing them in. She sees them pulled like taffy from the raw stuff of the universe, weaving them into braids, braiding them into weaves, patterning them into the walls and the ceiling, changing and charged and dark and raw. She has not seen work like this in -

- well. Quite literally, she could not say.

--

This is the second time Serafíne has told this story tonight. The first time, she muttered it in five addled and virtually inchoate sentences into a cheap prepaid phone in the brilliantly lit parking lot of a BP filling station. The coronal flare of headlights in her peripheral vision like the birth of galaxies, her awareness all smeary-bright, her heartbeat in time with the steady pulse of the universe. Just so - exquisite - all the cross-sections of awareness and the way they converge, the cage and mobile ward Jim was building around that van with the raw stuff of his own desires, every fucking level of them.

--

Now it is later. Now always becomes later, except when you play with Time. Then now can become both later and yesterday, without discrimination. Sera is still on the floor; the beds are left for others. The reflected resonance of the Disciple's wards is creeping into her spine, beneath her skin. That's why she's sitting up so straight, her head canted aslant, forehead against the doorjam, listening to the work of the walls. Which are living with Jim's energy. The desire for a cigarette, if only for the familiar movement of her hands, the crackle of the tobacco in her lungs, is like a lozenge in her throat. But - oh, stoic (hah), infected by that sensation, lingering in it like a strange dream, wallowing in it the way she might revel in the space she has in a cool, clear, empty porcelain bathtub, she resists. Takes a sort of pleasure in that resistance and does so half-a-dozen times without realizing she has done it before.

So, see. Jim asks her to tell the others what they saw, and she is summoned back to now-or-later, and looks at him, this brief and focused survey that drops away to her guitarist. Dan is seated on the edge of the bed, watching over Jake. Watching over Sera, for that matter. Though from a bit more of a distance. He has put the weapons he retrieved from the car away, tucked them into the bedside table with the Gideon Bible and the 1987 Greater Denver Area Yellow Pages, careful to assure himself that the safeties were thumbed on. As Sera starts to speak, he retrieves Sera's leather-bound folio, opens it to the next blank page, which is the first one after her dream as she's written nothing all week, and takes notes. The names, particularly.

"We saw nothing of whomever worked the illusion," Serafíne's voice is always low, more rough and raw tonight than it often is, but it still has a certain power to it. With Jim's wards, the pulse of his resonance surrounding them, it might seem somehow disconnected from the creature seated beside the door, who is now, while she speaks, slowly pulling the piecework of her French braid down, alive to the feel of her hair between her fingers. Perhaps to some of them the sound of her voice floats in a susurrant stream, like mist drifting through some half-deserted forest, the broad, protective trunks of massive trees the stoic walls caging them in, while strange, unruly night-sounds, that undeniable sense of disorientation and dissociation woven into Jim's working, too play havoc with their senses.

" - though there was a piece of memory sliced out of the timestream. Erased, or warded from our seeing." A thought arises and she turns her head, finds and focuses, vaguely, on Jim's shadow on the far bed. "If the illusion was the Work of the mirrorshades, why would they have bothered to erase themselves from the moment?"

Her question is not rhetorical, and has just occurred to her, but it is a question for later and now is now and also then, and she is telling the story of when. So she returns to it.

"We saw the girl from my dream. The one who asked for my help."

Something of the girl's reflected, remembered confusion and fear insinuates itself into Sera's voice. It is not merely empathy. Closer to a spasm of the sympathetic nervous system. No matter. It passes. Slips back into the stream of consciousness.

"Her name is Leah Walker and she is sixteen years old."

"Shelby and a man named Will rescued Leah from," a flexion of her neck, a movement of her jaw, "the mirrorshades. She was unconscious when they brought her back to the warehouse and they warded themselves in, and let her sleep. They spent a day watching over her by themselves."

"That night, the rest of their cabal found Shelby and Will. Shelby let them in, and they crowded into the warehouse arguing about the rescue and Leah Walker's fate. A man named Jai had instructed Shelby to leave Leah to the technocrats, but Shelby refused. And so, this split between them. This dissension.

"Shelby said, she could not leave Leah. The mirrorshades were going to dissect the girl, splay her open, study her and needle her and break her down into her constituent parts, and use her as bait to catch," a soft, sharp breath. Withheld and raw, " - the others."

"Jai wanted to kill Leah. He said," Something of the Euthanatos' remembered passion, his fury, his righteous power, infects the remembered words. "She is Widderslainte. She is Tamas gone mad."

"No." This is Shelby, in response. An abrupt, calm cessation. Steady certainty. The other half of the echoed argument cool as a hand on a fevered brow. "She is a child. Her name is Leah Walker and she is sixteen and she is terrified and she is a child, and fate can be changed.

"So they argued."

--

"That's when the Technocrats arrived." Sera is far away now, her heart beating faster. The fight vivid in her mind and body; her spine though, against the walls and those stoic wards holds her upright even as her throat constricts around the words, makes them rougher, ragged with violent sensory overload from the memories. "The other six, who make twelve.

"Leah was asleep as the fight exploded around her, but she lurched away when she was wounded. She was crying, mad with pain and fear."

Quiet.

The tale returns to, "Shelby was pinned beneath one of the Technocrats, in desperate straits. But she Worked a healing on Leah from across the room, before the woman attacking her sunk a knife into her heart. And her blood - "

Sera's hands are tucked beneath her legs. She looks so relaxed, so tuned in, so dropped out, but beneath her knees her hands are fists, nails digging into the palms, the punctuate clarity of pain leashing her focus to the immediate and physical, to the spare-bones facts she seeks to relate. When the nails are not enough, her grip shifts. Fingers pushing deeply through maze of flexor tendons in the inner wrist, into the distal radial-ulnar joint.

"A man leveled a gun at Leah. He had and took a clear shot, but in that moment, something in Leah Awakened. Virulent and dark and powerful - quiescent before and quiescent after - but so, so strong in that moment.

"The bullet froze, mid-air, and crumbled to ash.

"And then the gun. And then the man who fired it. And then the rest.

"Flesh and blood and bone. Bricks and mortar and stone."

When they walked through the warehouse, they were walking through a crematorium.

--

"And just as abruptly, whatever awoke in Leah Walker went quiet. Disappeared. Evaporated. Burrowed its fucking," sudden, unleashed vehemence. Venom. " - way back inside her, and left her standing in the ruins.

"And she was a sixteen year old girl, again. And she screamed.

"And she ran, away."