Distant Shores - Marco Palmieri [72]
Kes; her face filled his mind’s eye, that eternally calm expression she wore, the laughing eyes and the perfect mouth. The memory of her stabbed him. At that instant all he wanted was just to see her once more, to feel her lips on his again. The emotions were raw and passionate, as fresh as they were on the day she had departed Voyager and taken with her all the things that made her his. No one had seen Neelix that night as he returned to his ship in Voyager’s shuttlebay. None of his friends had been there to watch him close the hatch behind him and lock himself in with his sadness and regret. They had not seen the tears he shed for her, poor Kes, dearest Kes, gone and transformed into something so far removed from the crude matter of his flesh and blood. He could not have stopped her-he would not have dared, as her burgeoning powers had begun to endanger them all-but that realization did little to ease the pain.
Neelix paused and propped himself up on a wall, panting. He tried to call out to her, but the cry died in his throat. Even giving voice to her name was a colossal effort, the emotions tied to it too heavy for him to carry. Seven’s warning rang in his ears and he pushed himself off the wall and kept walking, his face twisted in turmoil. He refused to accept the Borg’s narrow-minded, suspicious conclusions; how could she hope to understand the connection that existed between two lovers? The joyless drone knew nothing of empathy, and Neelix knew Kes-by the Guiding Tree, I know the woman I love! He had seen her, he had touched her and spoken to her, not some shapeshifting monster. Kes wasn’t a figment of his fevered imagination, she was as real as he was…
He so desperately wanted her to be real. More than anything, even at the cost of his life, at that moment Neelix wanted Kes to be real.
The mnemosia appeared from behind a group of mushroom-shaped habitats as he rounded a corner. He recognized the structure at once, the tips of the marble columns just visible over the lip of the staggered tiers. The stones were different now. Before, their placid gray-white forms had reflected the dull glow of the veracite roof; now they glittered with an inner luminosity the color of Kelodan roses. Neelix felt a subtle vibration through the soles of his boots, a quiver that throbbed and faded; he ignored it and pressed on, slipping into the open arena and on to the uppermost tier.
“Kes!”
She was laughing, her hands cupping an ephemeral mist drifting in the air in front of her-but no, not mist, something else. Neelix started down the ledges toward her and the shape gained definition as he came closer.
It was a face, a ghostly head disembodied and floating like a summer cloud. This was no harsh phantasm from one of the captain’s gothic holonovels, it was a smiling man, animated as he whispered to the Ocampa girl. Neelix saw the man’s ears, the same turned flower of skin that Kes bore-the ghost was someone from her species. He could see better now; there was more than one, and they faded in and out, gaining color and definition as they approached Kes. Lines of letters on the floor and the pillars glowed each time they spoke to her. She was communing with the spirits in the stones, the telepathic imprints of Nyma IV’s populace speaking to her from across the ages.
Neelix felt the rumble flicker once more beneath his feet as he stepped on the glowing stones. Slight glimmers of dust disturbed by the motion wafted into the air from the tops of the pillars. “Kes,” he said again, and she blinked at him, that smile emerging again like a dawning sun.
“Neelix, there’s so many