Chapter 10: No Story To Be Told

The mosquitos ended up being the thing that scared them off. Sierra grabbed Sam’s hand as she pulled the two of them inside, giggling as she did. Whether it was the laughter, the beers or something else didn’t really matter; the blush on both their faces stood out all the same. 

They didn’t really say anything. Not that Sam didn’t want to. She wanted to ask Sierra a thousand things. Her favorite foods. Her happiest memories. Where she wanted to travel to more than anything. But right then didn’t really seem like the best time. Sometimes, not saying anything was the best way to say something, and they said a lot of nothing as they sat down on their respective beds in the hotel. 

They looked up at each other, and then down and away, blushing. Back up, back down. After a minute, Sierra laughed, and then Sam did too, and then the laughter died away and the silence filled up with unspoken words again. 

Sam had swum to the edges of space. She had bathed in nebulae and showered in the radiation of a dying neutron star. If the moon could dream, she would have been the shadow across its nightmares. She had acquired an understanding of the universe that would have driven physicists mad, and had peered beyond that veil, into levels of existence that subsumed the layers of reality as they were known. Sam was, in every sense of the word, the oldest and wisest being in existence. 

And she didn’t know what to do, because there was a beautiful woman in front of her and the woman made it hard to breathe, hard to think. If there was one truth that Sam was only learning now, it was that it is very, very hard to be old and wise and clever when a beautiful person bites their lip at you. 

The room spun slightly, but it pretended like it didn’t every time she focused on it, which was strange but also comforting in a sense. She was used to reality conforming to her expectations when she paid attention to it, though usually it didn’t feel like the whole thing was sort of trying to be sneaky behind her back. 

Several times, she thought about reaching out, but then worried that that would look or feel awkward, and then she stopped herself. Saying something also felt strange, because she didn’t want to break the spell that was over them. There was a magic in the air she was deeply unfamiliar with, and it was wonderful, like floating through warm clouds. 

But then again, maybe she should say something. After all, what if things weren’t suddenly just fixed? What if it was all going to go wrong again? But then why had it been going wrong? Her connection to the greater Sammaël entity had been reduced as much as possible, but that was no guarantee, after all. Maybe it hadn’t been Sam or Sammaël at all. 

She had seen a lot of things. No proof of fate or anything of the like, though. She had seen events unfold differently when things were changed, and she had never seen any proof of a self-correcting timestream. But then again, her perception of reality required a temporal x, y and z-axis, and she had found that the easiest way to think about the universe is not as a linear stream, but as mathematical concept of objects existing perpendicular to themselves in Time, Space, and Squeemp.

And in all that time, she’d never been the target of some kind of assassination plot. It would’ve been interesting if it didn’t keep getting Sierra hurt, too. And she didn’t want her time in this body to be over yet, either. Not until she’d had the time to get to know this world, at the very least. So what was causing it? She looked up at Sierra and her thoughts slowly evaporated like breath on a mirror, fading into the background. She smiled. Sierra smiled back. Well, that was it for that train of thought. 

That’s when Sam realized something else. She hadn’t been listening to music all day. That’s why she’d originally come down here in the first place, wasn’t it? And while she wanted to listen to more music, she also realized she didn’t mind. When the original frantic “Oh god we might die again” had worn off, the “I think I might be experiencing dysphoria” had waned a bit and when she wasn’t in the middle of “Sierra is sitting really close, isn’t she,” she had felt… comfortable. Happy, even. 

“Penny for your thoughts?” Sierra said. She looked divine. 

“I think I might like you more than music,” Sam said. Sierra stared confused for a moment, cocking her head slightly and looking slightly like a samoyed with blue hair and pronouns, and then broke into a grin.

“Isn’t music why you came down here in the first place?” she asked. Sam nodded. 

“It is,” she said.

“Sam,” Sierra said, “that’s…” she reached over and took Sam’s hand. She had touched Sam’s hand before. She’d done so as they came back inside. Why was the touch so much more electric this time? Her stomach was doing flips, the room was positively whirling now, and her lips were dry. 

“Yeah?” Sam said.

“That’s kinda gay,” Sierra said, and stood up. Sam looked up at her. Sierra looked down at her. Sam’s heart was in her chest, thundering away, and she could feel the blood rushing in her ears. It roared, rhythmic pulsing that made her feel like she was standing in the eye of a hurricane. 

The roof of the motel exploded. Sierra and Sam both dove at each other, Sam realized as they wrestled each other to the floor, both to protect the other. There was a loud crashing noise, like a freight-container sized can of soda being crumpled up and thrown into a woodchipper. Sierra had the presence of mind to roll under the bed as brick and wood rained down around them, and Sam was trying not to be aware of the fact that she was on top of her. After a moment, whatever had started happening stopped. 

Every once in a while a rock still came down, but the danger of getting their heads caved in seemed to have dissipated. Both of them crawled out from under the mattress and looked at their surroundings. The roof of the motel had been sheared off, revealing a slowly-lightening night sky. Dawn wasn’t too far off. The sound of running water and crackling fire was all around them. 

“What…” Sierra said, but there was no real way to give a concrete answer. The top half of the building was just gone. Sam looked up, at the one thing moving in the night sky. Sierra followed her gaze. “Is that a person?”

“Seems like it,” Sam said as their eyes followed the parachute as she tried to piece together what had transpired. An airplane? But something that big would have destroyed the entire building. So not that, then? The only way to find out was to ask the pilot, and that was likely to be the person currently trying to land behind the hotel. She and Sierra climbed on top of the rubble. The swimming pool was gone. If they’d been back there, they’d have been smeared across the landscape. 

Where it had been, there was… well it could still be called a pool, if only by technicality, since it was a hole in the ground and there was water in it. What seemed like a jet of some kind had impacted with it at a high enough velocity to disintegrate the patio, and that was after slowing down by way of impact-with-the-motel. 

The wreckage of the actual plane was easily a hundred feet away, the entire way there a scorched and burning path lighting up the early morning sky. The crash site itself was, miraculously, not on fire. 

“Holy crap,” Sierra said. “We were almost…” She swallowed. Sam nodded. She didn’t like thinking of that either. Sure, they’d be back again tomorrow, but the idea of impacting with a few tons of steel at Mach 3... The question then was why they had survived. If this was what or whoever was aiming for them, why had it missed this time? Especially with a projectile this deadly. 

The pilot landed with an oof. Sam was sort of surprised at how hard and fast the man hit the ground. She didn’t know much about parachutes, only whatever Abe had known, and that wasn’t very much. The man seemed to be a professional, though, turning his fall into a roll and immediately cutting the chute off and tossing his helmet to the side. Sierra was about to demand an explanation when she saw his face. 

He looked terrified. “Are you two okay?” he asked, looking at the burning buildings. Flames reflected in his horrified eyes. “What happened…” He looked back at the jet. “No no no no.” He was mumbling to himself, and seemed to be in the middle of a panic attack. Sam could sort of relate to that, at least.

“Hey,” Sierra said, snapping her finger, “hey, focus, soldier man.” He looked at her, focusing. “We’re okay, but other people might not be. What the hell happened?” She looked at the wreck. “Were you flying in that?”

“I… I was,” the man said. “But I didn’t… I wasn’t supposed to…” He frowned, like he was trying to remember something from a dream. “I don’t understand.” He looked at her in confusion. “Where is this?”

“Look… buddy… What’s your name?”

“Mark,” the man said, “Mark Diakos. Callsign Zeus.” He looked around and awkwardly picked up his helmet. It did have the callsign stenciled on it. He held it up as proof like a toddler showing a drawing to a parent. “Wait, why did I…” He looked back at the plane and then his eyes grew wide. “No!”

He broke into a sprint. Not in the mood to let the situation slip out of her hands, Sierra immediately gave chase, and Sam wasn’t going to stay behind with… well, nothing. She found that, despite her longer legs, Abraham’s body was in lousy shape and she had a hard time catching up to Sierra, who was already running alongside the pilot and demanding an explanation, but he seemed too preoccupied with whatever he was doing to answer her questions. 

When the two got to the plane, the pilot ran a circle around the plane and threw himself at the twisted metal. Whatever had once been a plane had been reduced to glowing-hot scrap, and even with the full pilot-suit on the heat had to be unbearable. “What are you—” Sierra asked as she saw the pilot throw panels and metal to the side with a frenzied look on his face. “What are you doing?!” Sam joined them, gasping for breath. If she survived for longer than a day, she needed to do something about her physical condition. Maybe go running. Or yoga. She’d heard about yoga. Was yoga good for breathing? “Answer me, Diakos!” Sierra shouted.

The pilot didn’t answer until he got to a specific piece of wreckage. “I just have to see,” he said, barely audible over the sound of crackling fire and the pinging of cooling steel. “The casing… If-if it’s ruptured…”

“The casing of what?” Sierra asked with a voice that betrayed a growing trepidation Sam felt too. The pilot pulled carefully and then breathed a sigh of relief. 

“Oh thank god,” he said. “It’s intact.” He sat back and laughed. The fact that he seemed to be relaxed and was taking his gloves off didn’t comfort Sam in the least. She had a really, really bad feeling about this.

“The casing of what, Diakos?” 

“That, right there,” he said, “is an armed nuclear warh—” 

Beep.

The pilot looked down. “That’s not supposed to happe