Melissa Sweeney

Maïmoú of Athens, in all her spanning years trapped on Earth, had never liked the ocean. Ever since the Hellenistic Period, this’d been the case. She’d seen it up close when she was a kid and thought she’d drown in it. Little did she know she couldn’t drown like a normal human. Now, fully in the realm of her godhood, she hated it even more. She hated the Deity it was prescribed to and hated how…

Chapter 41: Kevin, Nikki, & Derek

He didn’t know where he was, who he was. His brain was floating in weightlessness, a blissful ignorance. Maïmoú said reincarnation existed in this world. He still had trouble processing that. If he had drowned and was now dead, would he simply come back as a baby in a new mother’s arms? Was he about to start anew? He didn’t know if he wanted that. Some people might’ve, but he’d worked so hard at…

Kevin, listen to— Run! We— Come on, go! Now! Now! Maïmoú’s voice was making him delirious. It was unending, the warnings layering and jumbling up his brain. He’d been trying to focus on Nikki’s instructions on escaping the fallout shelter, along with his own footing, his search for Viper, and if he could get a word in-between Maïmoú’s hysterics, not to mention keeping himself from passing…

“Everyone, out!” Nikki yelled. “Now!” Nobody needed to hear it from her. The amount of smoke and fire filling the fallout shelter was enough to get people trampling. Once the smoke hit whatever sensor was built into this place, red lights started flashing. People who hadn’t run from the initial explosion were booking it now, preserving their livelihood in a place that should’ve protected them.…

As Derek got dressed without trying to wake up Oliver, he came to the obvious conclusion that Raeleen was shitty; the derelict and vacant buildings, the insufferable humidity, the Guard, the Líders. It wasn’t a good place to live. But it’d been his home. When he thought of home, he saw his apartment above the clothing store, the yellowed grass, the Sun setting over the Muralha on a roof he…

Nikki half-expected Morgan to get them out of the fallout shelter by next morn. She pictured her family rampaging through the streets in the Drill with Morgan’s packs of guards, screaming demands and busting through the Muralha for good. That night, Morgan ordered her family to stay in the fallout shelter. When morning came, it was Del who found her passed out in the kitchen with enough empty…

“Derek, are you sure you’re alright?” Oliver asked through the door. “Yeah, totally. Totally fine. I just need a few more minutes with Holly. Again, totally fine. Nothing’s wrong.” “Are you lying?” “Yeah, sure. I’m just…” He looked over the notes he’d scrawled on the back of his hand. “I need to talk with her.” Oliver paused, panicking Derek’s heart, before hesitant footsteps creaked the…

His family took the news as well as he expected them to. Mom was close to tears. Dad didn’t believe them. Morgan and Del had a question for every sentence Kevin got out, and Nikki tried to help by adding in her side of the story. Shockingly, talking about trading bodies with past carnations from a future that was still in the past didn’t help them make their case any clearer. It also didn’t help…

Kevin knew where he was. It hurt to wake up and he couldn’t open his eyes, but that musty scent of a basement was all too familiar. He awoke on his belly, neck numb, throat burning. He swiped at his eye crust only for his arm to get prickly. After a few minutes, he opened his stinging eyes. He was in Morgan’s fallout shelter, in one of the bedrooms where Vanna liked doing his homework. He’d…

Nikki dropped to her knees to catch Kevin’s body. He was still breathing but weakly. His wing was broken. She pushed back his hair to feel that the texture had changed. Broken blood vessels crossed his closed eyes like worm trails, and his finger beds had been picked to death. All of them huddled around him. Their mother touched his face. Their father tried controlling his hiccups as he checked…

Nikki awoke stubbornly inside a room that smelled of a home-cooked meal and sunlight. She sat upright, her left side numb. She was in a living room made up of fine decor. A bookshelf took up the right wall, stocked with expensive-looking books and glass figurines. A strange machine sat in one corner of the room, glowing faintly, and the windows behind her let in warm sunlight and the sound of…

Derek quickly gathered up the old papers and photographs and shuffled them together. “We didn’t mean to break in.” The two strangers exchanged worried glances. The man seemed to warn the woman not to do something. They spoke in a language Derek would never understand in a thousand lifetimes. It wasn’t Drailian, wasn’t even close to it. The woman answered with coughing, wet and sickening like the…