Exile (The Oneness Cycle) by Rachel Starr Thomson

Author:Rachel Starr Thomson [Thomson, Rachel Starr]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little Dozen Press
Published: 2013-06-06T05:00:00+00:00

* * *

The warehouse on Kliff Street looked, from the outside, like any other building in the industrial part of Lincoln. It was sandwiched between other warehouses, the outside facade corrugated tin painted a dull rust colour. Loading docks lined the back where Reese lingered in the shadows of a dumpster, watching.

Saturday morning, the industrial zone was quiet. No extra activity was happening here either—nothing to identify the warehouse as different from its neighbours. Even the spiritual darkness was remarkably damp—indistinct, low-lying, hard to sense. But then, that was a characteristic of this hive. It was better cloaked than any demonic operation Reese had ever encountered; it was part of how it had stayed undetected for so long, gaining an enormous foothold without the Oneness catching on.

It had been Reese who insisted there was more here than met the senses, something bigger going on than anyone realized. Reese who treated the war against this place as a full-scale assault—an offensive rather than ongoing defensive tactics. Reese who was sure she knew the way of the Spirit in this and had led teams in to follow that way.

Reese who had gotten Patrick killed and had inspired more conflict and dissension in the Lincoln cell than the Oneness had known perhaps ever.

She swallowed the lump in her throat. She couldn’t dwell on the sorrow, on the grief, now. She had come here to die, but not without inflicting damage first. And she couldn’t do that if she was emotionally incapacitated.

She felt weight, pressure, in the palm of her hand. Spirit gathered and concentrated its energy against that which was counter to it: against the dark powers of evil, hatred, and negation. The Spirit—life—found a thousand expressions in this world, but the one Reese wielded did more to express the potent reality of the world as it was than any other.

Sword.

They were at war.

An irony struck Reese: that as an exile, as one cut off from the Oneness and thrown into the world alone, she was acting toward the enemy as she had thought it was acting toward her: as a renegade. She would strike a blow for the sake of those she loved but was no part of.

Let me die in a blaze of love, she thought.

She stepped out from behind the dumpster in the oppression of memory, the trauma of victory ended in soul-cleaving defeat cutting at her heart. She stepped across the parking lot toward the inauspicious door next to a closed loading dock, carrying the absence of Tony and Patrick, the absence of the Oneness, with her—bearing the emptiness that undid her. But the sword was coming to hand, not denied her this one last time. She gripped it and pushed the door open.

The sound of empty, cobwebbed silence greeted her, the warehouse vast in its disuse. A cluster of pallets, six by six, stacked with cardboard boxes, sat in one corner. The rest of the empty concrete floor, shiny and smooth from the traffic of hundreds of feet, spread out from the door unencumbered and disappeared in shadows on all sides.

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