Carlos had seen it all as it happened. After his fall onto the second story balcony carpet had knocked the wind out of him, harder than anything he had felt in years -- and most likely cracked a rib or two -- he thought he was out of the battle for good. It took everything he had left to drag himself to the railing, and peer down through the slats at the melee taking place on the floor below.
Once he did, he wished he had breath to cheer when he saw how Kelly had ridden the Qoloni's horns all the way down the floor and kept right on fighting, or when Dale took that first chunk out of the Qoloni, or when Manoj had come into view around the end of the stairway, staggering back into the fray. And when he saw Benny's struggling hand fling the Deertail logo across to aid him? He wished he could be a part of it, but also realized how important it was to have someone to bear witness to it all, from a distance, so that they could then tell the tale objectively, even if that meant just telling those who participated in it the parts they had been too distracted by other things to notice. So Carlos lay there, taking it in and gradually getting control of his lungs back.
He didn't try to rise until after Sheryl had left his side. He needed no explanation from her; he knew precisely where she was going. She seemed to know the point when it was all but over, and then turned her attention toward getting back to the one who now needed her most.
Getting on his feet was rough. His arms and legs felt oxygen-starved, a deep burning ache that only started to dissipate once he got them moving. The pins and needles set in after that, and for a few agonizing moments he thought all his limbs were going to lock up in cramps, but then the feeling dissipated. He finally managed to draw himself up fully, using the balcony railing, and then he moved toward the stairs, only starting down them when he thought he could be trusted to balance properly.
By the time he began to descend, the alarms were gently roaring in the far distance, and their presence seemed to make his breath come even more easily. He patted Dale on the shoulder, the way you would silently congratulate the quarterback after a winning game, but Carlos wasn't sure the man even saw him. There was clearly more to be done, and the security guard wasn't going to stand around waiting for someone else to do it. It gave Carlos a little pang of guilt, for having to the sit out the last fight against the Qoloni.
At the bottom of the stairs, the mood was much lighter.
Manoj had realized what was on the threshold of the door to Harmon's room, pushed only slightly ajar by Benny's mangled body. Manoj was just stepping over the author's sprawled form to get to him, letting out an incoherent yell of shared triumph.
Carlos saw Manoj recoil at the full sight of Benny, and understood. At first look (not to mention second and third), Benny was in horrific condition, his head a mess of dried blood and scorch marks, eyes unfocused, and his lower lip hanging down ponderously. It was hard to believe that he could have aided the fight at all, much less throw the Deertail sigil accurately to Manoj when the time came. Luck must have played more than a small role in that.
Nevertheless, Manoj was bending down to see if Benny was okay, and as he did his injured knee gave way under him. Fortunately, instead of falling against the door and crushing Benny, he twisted so that he ended up slamming his shoulder hard against the wall on the other side, and slide to the floor. He ended up half-sitting next to the injured man down on the floor.
Kelly was halfway over to him before he landed, and Carlos could see that she would have thrown herself in the path of his fall if she had time. As it was, she could only drop to her knees close to the fallen men. She took a look at them, and said, "You must be Benny."
The fallen wreck of a man managed to raise his hand and turn it on its side, clearly meaning to extend a hearty handshake. This charmed Kelly enough to make her laugh.
Carlos came up to the little group, cautiously eyeing Bruce's body as he went by it. It looked even more forlorn now, lying out in the middle of the lobby rug alone, all evidence of what it had been through erased. He thought that he had never seen anything so entirely still, and that sent a cold flash through his arms and legs. Unnerved, he quickly turned his attention back to his comrades.
Kelly had just finished gingerly shaking Benny's hand, and she then reached out for Carlos with the same one, this time turning her palm down, as if urging him to take it so she could ease herself to the floor with the rest of them. He did just that, and was soon in a small, informal group of four sitting just outside the door of Harmon's room.
Carlos nodded back toward the front windows, where the sounds of the avalanche sirens seemed to be coming from. "Sounds like the cavalry's finally on the way."
Manoj looked behind them, at Bruce's body, pondering. "I don't know if it was destroying the Qoloni, or Bruce dying, but it appears we've reattached to our... home world." There was something about the way he said it, that made Carlos wonder if Manoj was hedging his bets on just how many such worlds he thought there were.
Instead of pursuing this, Carlos turned to something that had been on his mind. "When they do get here, what do we say?" He made an expansive gesture around him, one that encompassed the Deertail and everything in it. There were at least two people dead, random handheld objects strewn about, a broken mirror from the second floor...
Kelly took a quick look, and then said, "You know, I don't think we need to say much of anything. You and Benny were in the kitchen when it happened, Benny got hurt, you triaged him and brought him out here. That's easy enough."
The sound of voices upstairs were becoming more apparent. It seemed that Dale was coaxing people out of their rooms, finding out if anyone else was hurt (a couple of pained cries evinced that some were), and the upper hallway was starting to fill. Kelly looked at Manoj when she said, "Noj and I can blend in. Our room was half destroyed. We got lucky. If you think about it, the person with the hardest job is going to be the investigator who finds the snowmobile on the roof."
This prompted her to laugh cautiously, and the others picked it up. At that moment, any future problems they might have seemed trivial. That they had all managed to survive, for the moment, trumped the fact that so much else had been destroyed. Carlos wondered how much of this night was purely coincidental, and how much had been fated. They didn't even know how much of their misfortune Bruce was directly to blame for. So many people here knew the fabled Sarah, including Bruce, although he had used her as the protagonist in a book that at least two of them had gone on to read. Kerren's presence seemed to have somehow triggered them all to bring aspects of that book to life, including its horrifying villain.
But that brought him back to the quartet he was currently celebrating/commiserating with. Why had they remained here, in the Deertail, when they had no discernible connection to Sarah? Why hadn't they temporarily winked out of existence like others, and missed the whole thing? He would be considering this for a long time after this night, and the best he would ever come up with was simply this... they were all there because they had to be. The story wouldn't have ended correctly if they hadn't been.
Not only this, but in the darkest hours of future nights, he would not even be able to discount that other, random inhabitants of the Lodge could have done the things they did. No one but him could have been able to keep Benny from bleeding out on the kitchen floor -- and probably wouldn't have been stupid enough to tackle the Qoloni when he did. None but Manoj's outsider thinking could have figured out what was happening to them, and Kelly's leadership had kept the group together and made crucial decisions at the right times. Even Benny had played his role. Speaking of which...
His coworker and friend was actually turning around on the floor, sliding his back up against the doorframe and determinedly pushing himself up into a sitting position. It was an amazing feat, considering everything the man had been through. He still looked like a horror show, but the amount of muscular control he was exhibiting was kind of miraculous.
"Benny," Carlos asked, "are you feeling better?"
All heads turned toward the injured man, and he responded by tremulously lifting his hand in a thumbs-up. With his other hand, he pointed to something inside the room he sat on the edge of, and Carlos realized he knew what that something was. Harmon was still in there, sitting on the cot.
-15.6-
Harmon's body had remained still throughout his travels. After he had tried to help Glenda, and came back with only a message for the man she loved, he was distraught. What good was this power if he couldn't use it to help people? He needed to see whether he really could enact any kind of positive change. So he turned to the next person who required the most help.
Benny's mind was still in a state of near-total disarray as he entered, but he felt welcomed there. He couldn't tell if this was something Benny himself was doing, or if Harmon was merely going becoming familiar with foreign ground he had already tread upon. Either way, the tangle of misshapen, planet-sized electric storms and vast mental continents cracked down their centers didn't seem quite as intimidating. Harmon did a quick search, found a place that didn't seem quite as bad as others.
To his surprise, when he focused all his attention on it, the places that had become disconnected began to fuse. He wasn't entirely sure what he was doing to them, but he watched as he eased them close, and became fascinated with the way they began to reach for each other, as if by will they were able to complete the job of returning to their original configuration. He guessed that Benny was making just as much effort in this process as he was.
So he could help a small portion of Benny's mind to heal. It wasn't much, but it was a start. He began to think that if the two of them could work together, given enough time, he might be able to completely restore Benny's mind to the way it was before its trauma. He hoped that this suddenly, intensely intimate friend of his would be willing to help him find out. The possibility of using his abilities this way was so heady that Harmon immediately began to wonder about what more wonder might lay beyond... could he help heal other parts of the body? More specifically, could he help Kerren?
His mind was unable to keep from returning to her. The connection they had was now irrefutable. His mind had accepted it readily as fact with no effort at all. It made perfect sense. The idea was still frightening, though, with its own measures of guilt and awe. He felt such a sudden sense of responsibility...
He pushed the thought away again, refusing to deal with it for the moment. Instead, he convinced himself that he needed to take one more tour of his surroundings before returning to his body. This state of projection, as he was starting to think of it as, allowed him to see the world at all its scales, or so it seemed -- he hadn't found the boundaries of the ability yet. So he drew back from Benny and took a long sweep through the Deertail. Rescue crews were definitely on the way, assembling now down in the village, and would take only a few hours to excavate a path up the road to the Lodge. Harmon felt that, considering the strangeness of all that happened in the missing hours, he was obliged to assess what they would find when they arrived.
The group in the lobby had fared the best. Harmon already knew he could help Benny, and the others were relatively unharmed. He was mildly amused by the bright filaments of affection, the bond of affection bonding Manoj and Kelly together, which were multiplying even as he watched; it was clear that they were going to be part of each other's lives for a long time. He also noted that, once the adrenaline dropped off, Manoj was going to find out that he was much more injured than he currently thought. He would need all the help Kelly could give him then, and Harmon had no doubt that she would do so, without a second thought.
Carlos had an entirely different aura about him. There was a strength inside him that he hadn't been aware of before this night, but now that he had made contact with it, Harmon saw the way it had changed his focus entirely. What the man would do with this newfound purpose remained to be seen, but Harmon guessed that it would manifest in some undeniably positive way. Perhaps he would return to his kitchen and nourish people from the inside; perhaps he would run for office and do the same from without. There were a multiplicity of possible paths emanating from him, and every single one was open.
As for Bruce, the author? Bruce was gone. Harmon truly wanted to spare some kindness for the man, who had disappeared so far into the enchantment of his own mind that he no longer understood the difference between reality and his fantasies. Harmon was quite sure that this, more than anything else, had been the original source of the great discontinuity they had witnessed tonight. Either Bruce had caused the avalanche, or the avalanche had been what triggered Bruce. Regardless of the true origin, Harmon doubted that it was the sort of thing that could never happen again. Such things likely happened every day, and only if they were deemed good or ill did they take on names such as "fate" or "miracles".
He rose up, up to the second floor, where Dale was rounding up the survivors. He did so solemnly, for Harmon could feel what the head of security was already sensing -- that there were going to be more victims found amid the wreckage. Only Glenda and her knowledge of the room assignments would have known for sure, but it seemed inescapable that Bruce was not the only occupant of the wing that had collapsed. Harmon recalled the group of young people he had spoken to in the restaurant earlier in the evening, all of whom presumably were here somewhere, either being roused by Dale or forever trapped beneath the wreckage. Either way, Dale would not rest until they were all accounted for, all karmic ledgers balanced. It was just the kind of person he was. There was grief powering him now, but Harmon could see that when that dark force faded -- as eventually, it would -- the gears of his compassion would be gilded with fierce courage, and nearly unbreakable.
With a slight reluctance, he moved farther down the hall, passing faces that he remembered from the day before. Then, it had been his job to surreptitiously scan them all, to take the measure of their intents and report them all back to Jimmy Gough. Now, with the practice he had gained over the course of their collective ordeal, he saw every person differently, still as human beings, but as so much more as well, their spiritual selves all origamied open, infinitely regressive layers of heart and mind. It was hard to resist diving into each one and immediately learning more about human nature than most can learn in a lifetime. But for now, Harmon had to move on. The room at the end of the hall was his ultimate destination.
He passed through the first room, into the open chill of the next. Three women were there, and among he could number his greatest failure and his greatest achievement. Between them was Sheryl, a woman who had come here looking to renew her belief in love. This was the glow that was radiating from her, a new understanding of her place in the lives of others, and theirs in hers. It was funny; in all his years of watching and studying people, Harmon had never found the level of self-awareness that Sheryl had gained in one night. It was clear she would emerge from this nightmare with her soul renewed, having discovered that it had not originated in her beloved at all.
Finally he came to those last two women, one with light hair, the other dark, both laid down and motionless under the cool moonlight that speared in through the open hole in the roof. Looking at the latter, he sighed with grief. He had done all he could for Glenda, and he could only hope that in the end it was enough, that he brought her and Dale some kind of comfort. It was a small comfort, but he would take all he could get.
Kerren was the most difficult to look upon. Now, as he gazed down from his vantage point somewhere below the ceiling, he couldn't help but smile. He could continually study her face, finding pieces of Sarah, pieces of himself; the angle of an eyelid, the swept-back ear. In a few moments he was going to return to his body, and would rise and greet his friends anew. Then he was going to walk up the grand stairs of the Deertail Lobby and into this room, and together he and his daughter would begin to work toward understanding this unusual world they had managed to unlock together.
Kerren opened her eyes as she lay with her head in Sheryl's lap, and looked directly up at him.
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