Newu Pt 44

"I miss her," I said sadly as I looked up at the statue of Faye. It was situated on one side of the lake that had grown in my city as a result of my bonding with her. We had made love on this spot, we had sat and talked and joked and lived - in a manner of speaking - on this spot, and now, in the place of all those cherished memories, was a statue of the girl who had literally saved my life in every way that mattered. The sun was high in the sky, shining its light and its warmth down onto the grass that surrounded the water, but whereas the bust of Becky's face seemed to fit with the hollow, haunting, lower light of her mournful monument, the sun seemed to refuse to leave Faye alone. It was like it was shining a light on her in celebration of everything she had become to me and the heroism of her second, final death. Or at least the second time I had lost her.

Charlotte's had curled into mine. "She was wonderful and so funny," she sighed, resting her head against the side of my shoulder. "She was always lovely to me."

"She was a woman of honor and integrity," Uri nodded from the other side of me. "She knew the right thing to do and just did it without hesitation. That is a rare quality in one so young. And..." a soft smile pulled at his lips. "... she had... spirit."

I huffed out a short laugh; trust Uri to be the master of understatement. She had spirit, she had heart, she had charisma, and fire, and passion, and determination, and more courage than anyone I had ever known. There was an energy and vitality about her; a tenacity, a mental fortitude that she hid behind humor, sexuality, and a general zest for life, despite hers having been cut tragically and criminally short. She had given her last full measure of devotion to a woman whom she had never met in her life, to someone whom I had known for less than a year; she had seen a way she could save Philippa from a lifetime of mental pain and anguish, and she had taken it. Uri was right; there had been no hesitation. It was an act of love, not for Philippa, but for me. It was pure, unquestioned selflessness, designed to ease my suffering and my guilt as much as it was to ease Philippa's pain. She gave up her home, her love, and possibly even her life just to save us both from the torment of what the Judge had done to her.

Part of me wanted to scream in fury to the heavens at the loss of her, part of me wanted to smile and honor her sacrifice, and another part of me wanted to sit and wallow in self-pity and despair at everything that had been taken from me. Yet succumbing to that, giving in to it, would have been the greatest disservice to Faye's memory that I could imagine. Her loss was the epitome of everything wrong with the world, and yet it was an act in keeping with the very best of what people could be. It was loss, and it was promise. It was a penance and a gift. It was darkness in the light and light in the darkness of this life and this war.

It was savagery and love in equal, overlapping measure.

And I missed her.

I missed her smile; I missed her laugh; I missed her humor and her wickedness. I missed that naughty glint in her eye; I missed the pride in her gaze when she looked at me; I missed the lilt of her accent and the love that was behind every word she spoke. I missed her flaming red hair and her endless emerald eyes. I missed the way she saw the best in the world and saw the best in me. I missed her faith. Faith that we would get through this, faith that we were in the right, and the unshakable faith that we would win.

I missed how much of a better person I was because of her. Not because her simple presence made me better but because she inspired me to be the better version of myself.

My eyes were locked on the statue of her. It showed her standing, slightly turned away but looking back over her shoulder at me, just as she had been on our very first visit to the mindscape together during the duel at the party. It was a perfect representation of how she had looked at the point that I realized that something was happening between us. It was the moment our bonding process started. There was that playful, mischievous, happy smile on her face, and her eyes - despite apparently being made of a shimmering white marble - seemed like they were dancing in time with the laughter that would forever be heard in that frozen moment in time. It was the perfect image, the perfect moment to memorialize, before the attack on the party, before her death, before the war, when life was still full of promise and potential.

I sighed heavily. Unlike Becky, I didn't feel like I was saying goodbye to my lost love, mainly because I didn't know with any sort of clarity that she had actually been lost. Her plan, in theory, could still work perfectly; she could have merged with Philippa's mind, healing it completely, and would live as long and healthy a life as Philippa would. She may even force something of an awakening in my nurse friend and rejoin the fight at my side, or she could have failed just as completely and be lost forever, trapped inside the same fractured mind as Philippa was. She may have been killed, lost, gone forever the moment she transferred herself out of my mind. I simply didn't know, and it was the not knowing that was torturing me. But at the same time, she was still gone. She still wasn't here, and my city felt hollow, empty, lifeless, and meaningless without her.

I missed her like the desert missed the rain. A deep, aching, yearning

need

for her. It was deeper than a longing; it was more profound than simply mourning her absence; it was an ache I felt in my bones, in my soul, in the very core of me, and it was excruciating.

Uri placed a hand on my shoulder, the opposite one to where Charlotte was resting her head, and nodded to me. He said nothing further; he didn't need to. He knew what I was feeling, and not only because he could feel what I felt. He had a wife still alive in the real world, a woman he loved with every fiber of himself, and he would never see her again. She wasn't dead; she hadn't been lost, and yet he would never see her again. He would never feel the warmth of her embrace or the softness of her lips. He would never feel the caress of her breath as she whispered those three cherished words into his ear at night. He would never watch the moonlight dance in her eyes, nor would he watch the sunrise kiss her sleeping face. He had lost her without losing her. He may not feel the exact same thing I was feeling, but his loss was close enough, and it was just as profound. He shared all of that with me in a single look and a single gesture.

Uri took a few steps away and then shimmered away into nothingness as he disappeared back to wherever it was he went when he wasn't around my conscious mind. I turned my gaze back toward the statue and squeezed Charlotte's hand a little. I missed Faye more than words would ever be able to adequately convey, but there was something different this time, different than it had been the first time she died or when Becky had been killed. I knew her; I knew the very core of her. She had done something wonderful, and that is how she would want to be remembered: for that, for the good times, for the laughter, the teasing, and the playfulness. She wouldn't want me wallowing in the pits of my own grief.

At least this time, I had gotten to tell her I loved her. I let the happier, cherished memories flow through my mind for a few more minutes. Time was short, and Faye - or at least the memory of her - would be with me forever. I already knew that I would be spending a lot of time basking in their warmth.

"C'mon," I said to Charlotte softly. "We'll be landing soon."

********

Reflecting on the wealth and the opulence I now found myself in, I couldn't help but feel like a stranger in a garishly splendid world. Rich people, through their material grandeur, lived on a different plane of existence -- one of abundance and silence, the latter bought by thick walls and expanses of privacy - no, secrecy - that would take too much effort for noise to cross. The concept of money had long been elusive to me, a shapeshifting entity that sometimes spoke of freedom but more often than not whispered the weighty tales of greed, abuses of power, and downright criminality.

For me, the only true desire I had for wealth lay in the potential that it presented--the reward at the end of an effort to build, to create, to foster something special. And if that something made me a lot of money, that would be fucking awesome, and I would indulge in every penny that hard work earned me. But I wouldn't cheat people to get it, I wouldn't rob people of their pensions, I wouldn't fuck with global economies, and I wouldn't make another person or another group of people poorer just to make myself richer. That was generally how it worked, right? Rich people either invented something that changed the world or they exploited a part of the world to make - and then keep - a quick buck... a lot of quick bucks. If I ever got to a position where I had the sort of money that would afford me my own private plane, I wanted to have earned it honestly, not through the misfortunes of others.

My aspirations didn't lie in the accumulation of assets; my goals were not to be knighted by riches. That distinction clung to me, even as I sat, surrounded by the trappings of a wealth that I had inadvertently stumbled upon--a wealth that felt both boundless and hollow.

Yes, okay, I could see the irony of me saying that, considering what I had done to my bank account. The wealth I wielded now was a banking anomaly, a digitized ledger with unlimited credits that dared to defy economics and ethics alike. It was a facade, a sleight of hand that provided all the benefits without any of the effort or consequences. Theoretically, I was the richest person on earth; I literally had limitless amounts of money. But that money wasn't at someone else's expense, nor had it been acquired through my own hard work; it was creating money out of thin air, and I had no plans to spend enough of it to start messing with currency exchange rates or the national GDP. More importantly - at least to me - that limitless amount of money didn't count. I had done it as a measure of convenience; I hadn't earned it, and it was perhaps for that reason that I couldn't quite bring myself to accept that I had it. I still felt as poor as I always had done. Maybe not Oliver Twist poor, I was never at risk of becoming destitute and homeless in the weeks and months leading up to the acquisition of my powers, but I was still pretty close to the bottom rung of the ladder. That is still how I felt.

Being able to fork out for a few drinks at a bar or a few items of new clothing, those were okay. I probably would have been able to pay for them anyway. But waking up from the visit to my city - Charlotte holding my hand in her place in the seat beside me - in the most lavish form of transportation I could imagine, I was still experiencing that very acute feeling of imposter syndrome. I felt like a charlatan! I had been on a private plane before, on my way to Ukraine, but I had been too preoccupied with everything else to really pay it much attention. I had no real idea if this was the same plane, although the stewardess from last time was nowhere to be found. Now, though, with my rage tempered by the successful purge of the Sect and with my friend by my side, I felt like I could take it in a little.

Opulence wasn't the word for it. It was sheer extravagance; it was like the whole aircraft had been furnished and decorated not to make the plane more comfortable for its passengers but to prove a point to the people riding in it. The person who owned it had some serious money to throw around, and everything about the interior of the aircraft seemed designed to make a statement. My eyes wandered across the endless stretch of luxury within the private jet--the fine grains of the cherry maple detailing like ancient scripts revealing depth, the supple cream leather seats - eleven of them in all, including a curved sofa along one side that currently contained the ever vigilant Fiona - inviting me to surrender, the exquisite silkiness of the carpet beneath my feet, even our meals had been served on actual fine china with real knives and forks, not that hellish plastic shit known the world over to contain an airline's closest attempt to approximate food, and our drinks were served in something that looked a lot like crystal tumblers--I grappled with a stark realization. I was careening through the stratosphere in a vessel more grandiose than my entire apartment, and it was unsettling. Every furnishing, every meticulously crafted element around me screamed of an excess I had not known--nor particularly longed for.

This, if I understood correctly, was Isabelle's private plane, as opposed to the ones owned by the Inquisition as an organization, and we were currently about half an hour away from landing at Oberpfaffenhofen Airport, a few miles outside the Bavarian city of Munich. Munich was a stunning city, complete with its culture, its history, and its cathedral with its awe-inspiring clock tower, but although I hoped to visit the city at some point during my time here, our destination was about seventy miles to the southwest: a tiny town, nestled on the German side of the Alps, called Einsiedl, overlooking the majestic Alpine lake of Walchensee.

More accurately, our destination was Isabelle's private estate - a somewhat muted term for the fact that she owned her very own fucking castle - on the hills above Einsiedl. No matter how extravagant the luxury around me, it was a whisper compared to the estate we were heading toward -- Isabelle's private castle. A fucking

castle!

No matter how many times I said it, the sheer scale of it was impossible for me to wrap my mind around. A castle was the stuff of fairy tales, stories that resonated through the ages, of kings and queens, knights and damsels--a timeless symbol of power and dominance etched into the landscapes of Europe.

The irony that a castle, a remnant of history, was now home to beings far more powerful than any ancient ruler was not lost on me. With the evolution of humanity into something more we had ushered in an era where such battlements were not only unnecessary, they were laughably obsolete. It was a longbow in the age of battleship-mounted Gatling guns and cruise missiles. Yet the grandeur still pulled at something primal, a recognition of the dominion one must have to command such a space. A castle wasn't merely a home--it was a stronghold, an empire contained within stone walls, and just like this plane, it was a statement...

I am important.

As I pondered the estates and riches of layers of value, both monetary and personal, I realized wealth was as much about appearances and expectations as it was about comfort. It made for an odd mentality--this expectation that one's surroundings should reflect their status, that others should see and instantly know the pecking order.

I shook my head clear and looked around the aircraft at the rest of its passengers.

Of course, it wasn't just Charlotte and I. Fiona was with us too; now that the security concerns associated with the Sect traitors had been dealt with, I trusted Agatha, Evie, and the others to keep Philippa safe. Jerry was due to meet us there. He had been here since Isabelle and Bob had relocated from The Hague. He and Bob were due to be waiting for us on the tarmac.

With us were the six traitors from the Collective.

Personally, I would have said that a private plane this luxurious was probably something they didn't deserve. Bolting them to the floor of a shipping container and mailing them to where we needed to go was more in line with what I had in mind, but Isabelle valued expediency over petty acts of vengeance. When put like that, I suppose there wasn't much of an argument to be made. Fiona, on the other hand, hadn't been convinced and had been watching them like a hawk from the moment they had sat in their seats. It was unlikely that she could defeat all of them if the prisoners decided to revolt at the same time, but she sure as shit could hold them until I came to her aid. They were under no illusions, though; any sort of problems would be dealt with by introducing them to several tens of thousand feet of thin air and gravity on the other side of the plane door. They didn't know enough to consider them valuable sources of information, so killing them wouldn't have hurt my cause in the slightest. In fact, there was a not-insignificant part of me that had considered dumping one of them out of the plane just to make a statement to the others.

My vote would have been for Rachael. The look of sorrow and regret on her face was almost enough to show her mercy, but the expression of pure devastation on Charlotte's every time she looked at the older woman was enough to stamp that mercy out in its infancy. Charlotte was crushed. I didn't have a family; the closest thing I had to that was Charlotte herself and Jimmy. I couldn't even imagine how broken I would be if either of them betrayed me, but like everything else in the life of an Evo, it was exaggerated. Their connection transcended everything I had ever known as a human. Charlotte was heartbroken in every meaningful way a person could be. That look alone was enough for me to consider her the top of my "fuck you" list.

Now that I thought about it, that list had become pretty big.

But that had been one of the reasons for disappearing into my city. It was, of course, partly to say goodbye to Faye, and to see the effects her absence was having on it. But another part was to get Charlotte out of the plane and away from the source of her own pain. I had suffered warfare and death, but the betrayal of Marco was

nothing

compared to the betrayal of Rachael. Her entire world had been shattered.

It never took long to regain my awareness after being in the mindscape. The very early days of exploring my city had often left me feeling a little disoriented when resuming my place in the real world, but it had been a long time since then. Still, though, my mind drifted back to those innocent days for a brief moment before I glanced out the window.

Well, maybe not so innocent. There was a lot of exploring and experimentation in those short weeks between leaving the hospital and the party with the nurses that seemed to have been the catalyst for my life taking this new path. There had been a lot of sex, too.

A

lot

of sex.

It had been a month or so, maybe a little longer, of pure, unabashed hedonism. I had been a guy who had been the romantic or sexual equivalent of a footnote, often overlooked and easily ignored. I had spent a lot of my adult life blaming my parents for my social awkwardness, and there was a part of me that still heaped the lion's share of responsibility onto them, but to say that it was

all

down to them wasn't just incorrect, it had been lazy. The confidence that came with

knowing

I could do what I wanted with almost no consequence was life-changing, and I vividly remembered the realization that I had started approaching women, talking to them, laughing, joking, and flirting with them, long before I snatched them up with my powers. I had grown immeasurably in those few weeks, not just in the use of my powers but in terms of my own self-worth. People hadn't been assholes for rejecting me. I had just never given them the chance to accept me in the first place. They didn't know me. Of course, there were the odd few people whose minds repulsed me with the sheer amount of vindictive and manipulative thoughts, and there were some genuinely ugly-minded people out there, but it hadn't taken long for me to change my assumption that it was

most

people who thought like that, to just the occasional one or two.