Escaping the Pyre by Jayel

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Escaping the Pyre, Part 9
by Jayel

Tara was still sleeping--she had to be. This had to be a dream. She was burning again--she could feel her skin crackling into crisply blackened shreds; her blood was boiling in her veins; her hair was crumbling into white-hot ash. Worst of all was the smell, the sickly-sweet aroma of her own roasting flesh that she couldn't escape. She used her special awareness to fight the drug that was trapping her in this inferno, but she couldn't reach it, couldn't even find the circuits that controlled her consciousness in the midst of this stinking heat. She screamed, her burning throat a raw gash of purest agony, but she knew no sound could reach outside the prison of her dream.

Suddenly a blissfully cool hand calmped down hard on her wrist. Whirling around in the fire, she found herself facing a Terrian who held her in an icy grip of iron. He chortled to her in his Terrian tongue, a sound which should have been unintelligible but which seemed to dissolve her panic into calm. Clinging to the Terrian's arm, she found she could push the dream and its pain away, as if it were a VR program she were scanning from the outside. "Thank you," she murmured, forcing herself to wake.

***

Julia felt like the laziest human who ever lived, but she didn't care. By all rights, she should have been using this unexpected break from travel to catch up on her journals and fabricate fresh supplies. But she just couldn't seem to make herself leave the cozy comfort of Alonzo's arms, even to accomplish these worthy goals. "I love you, fly-boy," she remarked conversationally, lacing her fingers with his.

"I love you, Doc," he answered sleepily, planting a tender kiss on her temple.

She nestled closer against his shoulder. "By the way," she murmured. "What were you and Tara discussing the other night?"

Alonzo reached back from the very brink of sleep to catch the tail end of this. "What?"

"Bess said you and Tara had a very earnest discussion on watch the other night," Julia elaborated. "I asked Tara about it, and she suggested I ask you."

"Oh," Alonzo replied, remembering and waking up simultaneously. "I had asked her advice about something," he explained.

"What?" Julia asked curiously.

"About you, actually," he said, sitting up. "I told her I had been trying to think of a way to--"

"Alonzo, Julia, come quick!" Uly shrieked, bursting into the tent. "Tara's gone crazy!"

***

Julia had somewhat further to go in the dressing process, so Alonzo managed to beat her outside. And Uly seemed to be quite right--Tara Donahoe had apparently lost her mind. The spit holding the nearly-roasted carcass of the pig was lying broken in the dust, and she had piled the entire auxiliary woodpile onto the abandoned fire to create an orange blaze whose tongues seemed to lick the sky. As Alonzo came out of the medtent, she was throwing a seemingly random collection of her possessions into the center of the dancing flames--a hairbrush, books, a backpack, several articles of clothing. As he and the rest of the Eden Project looked on in stunned disbelief, she even tore out of the shirt and pants she was wearing and added them to the blazing pile. Still half-asleep, Alonzo had the peculiarly masculine thought that she would have been quite fetching if she hadn't looked utterly insane.

"Die, damn it!" she screamed at the blaze, all but dancing in her wrath. "Why can't you just die!"

"Alonzo, what is she doing?" Julia demanded, running out to join him.

"Burning all of her stuff is what it looks like," he replied, thinking "losing her shit" might have been a more apt description.

"No," Bess said, a sudden light dawning in her eyes. "Burning all of Val's stuff--she's trying to put an end to Val."

"Bess, what are you talking--Bess, wait!" Morgan called as Bess ventured closer to the madwoman and her fire than anyone else had dared.

"Tara, it's okay," Bess said, moving closer still. "Let me help you." She bent down and picked up a boot that had been dropped in a mad dash from tent to fire and dropped it onto the blaze. "I understand," she promised.

"Thanks, Bess," Tara managed, obviously struggling to regain some semblance of control. Then suddenly all the mad energy she had gathered seemed to leave her in a rush, and she fell to her knees, her hands splayed before her perilous inches from the flames. "Sweet Jesus, just let me go," she wept, reaching toward the heat.

"Bess, don't let her do it!" Uly screamed, his eyes huge with terror. "Mom, we have to stop her--"

"Shhh, Uly, it's all right," Devon soothed, picking him up to carry him inside, away from this little horror show. "Tara's going to be just fine--" She broke off, realizing the girl on the ground was staring straight at her, her blue eyes seeming to pierce Devon's very soul.

Suddenly Tara sprang to her feet and lunged straight for the flames, and Uly and True both screamed like frightened banshees. Only a lightning-fast full body tackle from Wolman prevented her from doing exactly as Uly had feared.

"Julia, for God's sake, knock her out," Wolman yelled, struggling to hold Tara still as she fought him like a tiger.

"No!" Tara screamed, clawing at his face even as Julia gave her the shot. "Let me--" And then she went limp beneath him.

"Bring her into the medtent," Julia said shakily, climbing to her feet with Alonzo's help. "And somebody bury that dead pig, okay?"

***

Devon had let Yale take Uly from her arms as soon as Tara was safely stowed away in the medtent. But she couldn't seem to walk away from the fire. As the sun sank into the promised land of the west, she watched as the tangible remains of this man she had never met burned away to dust. Even when she closed her own eyes, she could still see the terrible hurt in Tara's at the moment she decided to immolate herself in flame like another of her dead husband's abandoned possessions. Julia had said she should wait and allow Tara to reach out to her, but this was too much. Why had this girl who seemed to despise her so nevertheless chosen her to share her pain?

"Where is everybody?" Danziger asked, seeming to simply materialize behind her. "And what the hell are we burning?"

"John!" She threw herself into his arms, weeping with a crazy mixture of grief and joy, aching and relief. "I'm so glad you're back," was all she could manage by way of explanation for the moment, and he seemed to accept it, holding her close and letting her cry.

And even after she stopped crying, he kept her safe in his arms while she explained what she knew of what had happened. "I guess she felt like this was a way to create some kind of closure," Devon finished.

"It makes sense," he agreed, kissing her temple. "Where's True?" he asked, squeezing her tighter for a moment before letting her go.

"She's in the medtent, I think, with Tara," Devon said. "They seem to have become thick as thieves while you were away."

"Terrific," he said with a snort of ironic laughter. "Come on, let's go tell her I'm back and make sure she's okay."

They had started toward the medtent hand-in-hand when Danziger suddenly stopped. Reaching into his pocket, he took out a small platinum tube. "Be right back," he said gruffly. He went back to Tara's dying pyre and dropped the tube into its still-glowing center. It burst almost immediately into a tiny explosion of blue-white light, then disappeared entirely. "Let's go," he said, lifting Devon's hand to his lips before leading her on to the medtent.

End of Part 9--One more part to go.

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