Gateways 07_ What Lay Beyond - Diane Carey [80]
Oddest feeling of deja vu… no… more than that… as if he’d already experienced all of it during some sort of… of odd dream…
The air of his surroundings was warm in his chest as he drew in great lungfuls of it. It was the breath of life; he’d never been so fundamentally grateful for the simple act of breathing. Slowly he sat up, his back stiff, the circulation only now hesitantly returning to his feet, his arms. He let out a low groan, felt the dampness of his clothes sticking to him as the ice and snow that had coated them melted. It was a most uncomfortable sensation.
He opened his eyes and immediately squinted against the brightness of the sun. He put up an arm and winced at the motion, feeling a stiffness in the joint that made him wonder whether he’d injured the arm in its socket. But his only vocal acknowledgment of the pain was a low, annoyed growl, even as he continued to shield his eyes against the sun. There was more pain, racing down his back, and in his elbows and knees, but he was beginning not to mind it so much. It was, after all, a reminder that he was alive.
“Eppy,” he said again, and there she was, miraculously, sitting up a few feet away from him on the parched ground. She looked as utterly disheveled as he imagined he did, with her uniform just as wet, and her strawberry blond hair hanging down in sodden ringlets. But the way she was looking at him, with those eyes that seemed to own his entire soul, spoke of both gratitude and appreciation of the purely miraculous, because obviously she had never expected to see him again. She had probably never looked quite as awful in her entire life, and she had never looked quite as good to Calhoun as she did at that moment. When she smiled at him, it lit up her entire face.
“Hey, Mac,” she got out, and her voice sounded as cracked and strained as did his. But none of that mattered, none of it at all…
Because he wasn’t looking at her. He was looking through her, around her. For all the attention he was paying her, she might as well not have been there at all. Apparently she was aware of it, for her face fell and her lips thinned as she reflexively shoved her hair out of her face. “Mac,” she said, making no effort to keep the annoyed disapproval out of her voice and failing spectacularly. “Mac… I’m right here.”
Calhoun still wasn’t listening. Instead he was getting to his feet, and astoundingly all the pain, all the hurt, all the stress that his body had been through was instantly forgotten. His legs were strong and firm again, blood pumping through them as if they were the legs of a twenty-year-old. And although there was a look of utter incredulity upon his face, there was also calm certainty, as if he was convinced that what he was looking upon couldn’t possibly be there… but if it was, it wasn’t going to daunt him. As if, upon seeing this, he could handle pretty much anything.
“Mac,” she said again, but this time her tone of voice had changed, for clearly she was aware that not only was it odd that they were alive, but odder still that her environment had changed so radically. It only made sense, Calhoun realized; she had not, after all, been conscious when they went through the gateway. The last thing she had known was that they were upon a nameless ice world with death imminent. “Mac… Mac, what’s wrong? Where are we?” She glanced over her shoulder and an instant later she was squinting as well. “God, it’s bright here!”
“And dry,” he said.
“Where… are we?” she asked in wonderment. She had staggered to her feet, and was pulling on the bottom of her uniform shirt, wringing it out as best she could. Enough water to boil up a nice cup of tea poured out of the cloth as she twisted it. “It… seems familiar… but I… I’m not sure…”
“You’ve been here… but you haven’t been here. Neither have I.”
“What…?”
In the near distance, Calhoun studied the castle-like structures that dotted the horizon. The towers were tall,