THE FAR SIDE OF EXILE

By Sharon Ferguson and Jo Anzalone

(Sharon writing Rachel, Jo writing Cort)

THE DIRECT CONTINUATION OF THE CORT/RACHEL STORYLINE FROM THE END OF "HOPE...RISING"

FOR MAXIMUS/CAROLINE/BUD, SEE "A LOVE FOR A LOVE"

FOR TERRY/DEE, SEE "A SECOND BYLINE:

Terry cut the engine but Cort still sat in the passenger's seat, arms folded across his chest, head hanging down. He'd left Maximus, there on the grounds of NanoCorp, he'd left Maximus, the destroyed building still flaming, walls still crashing down. Terry had been pulling on his arm, urging him to come, saying something, saying words Cort couldn't quite hear. All he could hear was the crackle of the fire, the creaking, splitting sounds of over-heated green glass bursting.

All he could see was Maximus' face, orange and gold in the firelight, disbelief writ large in his widened eyes.

Caroline.

Somehow Caroline had been inside when NanoCorp went up. And Maximus had seen, had seen with his own eyes the very...last. They had all seen. Nothing could be done. There was simply nothing to do. The heat, the fire, the blasting down of the huge glass wall. Survival was not a question. Caroline was gone. Something inside Cort imploded with empathy for his best friend, the man he now regarded as his brother.

Terry's words came vaguely to him, as from a great distance, something about having to get out of there, get out of there NOW! But Maximus would not come.  Nothing would make him come. Then Bud had come up to Cort and Terry, had urged them to go, to get to their women, to get

to Hope. He'd said he would stay with Maximus, said he had no one to get to anyway, and he'd exchanged some long look with Terry that had made Terry agree.

Terry had practically hauled Cort through the bushes and the small section of woods to where his car was waiting. Now, here they were, out somewhere in the night in the countryside. Cort felt numb. He couldn't get the sight of Maximus' face, of his eyes, out of his mind. Then someone opened his car door and cool night air flooded in against his hot cheek. He turned his head, blinking, his lips parted, his arms still folded tightly over his chest.

"Rachel?"

In the silence that had filled the car as Terry drove away from the destruction, the fear of being seen, the utter panic to be as far away from the scene as possible – did anyone see them illuminated in the fireball that went up? – all of that was shoved aside by the horror and the helplessness he had felt at seeing Caroline immolated in front of Maximus.  How could she have come?   How could she have found her way into the complex, when all else was in lockdown?  How…how…how…?  Tears brimmed, but he had to drive.  He knew he could have stood there and argued with Maximus for time immemorial, but he would not have moved…and yet they needed to go.  None of them could be anywhere near.  He practically kissed Bud when he stepped forward to say he would stay with Maximus, but that didn’t stop the following grief, didn’t stop the pall of confusion and sorrow at leaving Maximus behind.

Neither he nor Cort said a word to each other as he shut off the lights and began the drive onto the property, began the ascent to the hill’s crest.   Terry fought to regain perspective – he would go back once he saw Cort and Rachel away, he and Deidre were going to have to face the music somehow anyway.  Maximus wasn’t left entirely alone.

But Terry didn’t enjoy the thought of having to tell the women.  Just as he saw two figures running toward them in the moonlight, he unfastened his seatbelt, feeling the weight of the night and the impact of the explosion all over again.  This was as bad as witnessing it.

“Sweetheart,” Rachel said, throwing open the door to the car and bending to pull her husband out.  She stopped short when she heard his voice catch.  On the other side Deidre was doing the same and Terry was as still as a rock.  “What’s wrong?”

Cort turned ragged eyes on his wife. "Almost everything is wrong," he said dully. "Caroline's dead."

“What?” Rachel asked in disbelief.

“God, no!”  Deidre was already pitched into tears and in the light of the overhead lamp, Rachel saw Deidre collapse on the ground next to Terry, who took the moment to be distracted by her emotion.  He began to climb out of the car, positioning his legs so that she sat in between them and he began to tug her upwards.  She was sobbing.

“But she…how can she….what happened?” Rachel was cold in the night air, but not half as

cold as the feeling in her stomach.  “How do you know?”

"We saw it," Cort said, lifting his eyes to his wife's. "We stood there and we watched it happen."

Then he was overcome by the need to have her in his arms, to feel her warm, alive, pressed against him. He stepped the rest of the way out of the car, practically grabbing her, startling

her with the quickness of his movement. His arms went around her, so tightly she could barely breathe, and he buried his face where her shoulder curved up to her neck, murmuring her name over and over and over.

He was shaking so hard, holding her so tight, she could scarcely stand with him.  She could hear Terry murmuring to Deidre to get up so he could explain, but it still wasn't registering with her.  Caroline was just late...right?

Stroking her husband's back and trying to get him to raise up somewhat so she could talk with him, Rachel managed to position her hands on both sides of his head and separate herself enough to whisper in return "I don't understand.  Please tell me."  His tears were wetting her cheeks.

"I knew there was something wrong," Deidre told Terry.  The sense of foreboding had grown stronger the longer they waited. "We thought she got lost.  We thought she had gone ahead of us and gotten lost...but we didn't know what to do...we had to come here..." Terry was shushing her the entire time.  He glanced behind him to see Cort and Rachel in a locked embrace, so he began to step away, towards the cluster of trees where they were supposed to be waiting, pulling Deidre along with him.  The helicopter had not arrived yet, thank God.

"What do you mean you stood there and watched it?"  Rachel coaxed, getting in a peck or two on his cheek and neck.  That seemed to bring him around some, but he spoke slowly, as if in a bad dream.

"She was there, Rachel," he said, his voice hoarse, "right there inside the glass. He...Maximus ...saw her, started to run back. But it was too late. Everything was too late. It just...melted... darlin', the whole wall of glass just melted and fell on her." He closed his eyes. "And then there was fire, fire everywhere. Huge, blowing fire."  His eyes gripped hers. "And he was watching it. Maximus. He was watching the whole thing. I...I...."

Rachel couldn’t think of anything to say, as the brief picture he described became clear to her – Caroline had gone to NanoCorp, followed Maximus…and got caught in the building, probably while looking for them.  Sorrow shot through her now as the meaning of the rest of it came over her.  Maximus, watching his love die, once more.  In a fire he helped set off.  And knowing how close Cort felt toward Maximus, an even more painful picture was drawn: Cort had to leave him behind to deal with it alone.

She in turn clasped him tight then, not hearing the dull thudding in the skies above that grew louder by the moment.  All she knew was that it was a field of pain they stood in.  She should have said something to Caroline, should have been more watchful.  God help Maximus!  God help Cort!

“How could she have been there?”  Deidre asked as Terry pulled her under the low-slung boughs of an oak, acorns sliding and crunching under their feet as they went. “Terry, maybe it was some other woman…”

“No.  It was her,” Terry replied, voice ragged.  “Maximus and I saw her standing at the window and she…was trapped.  We didn’t have time...mere seconds.  All we could was watch the whole place go up.  And we can’t go back.  Not yet.”  He looked up as the tell-tale sounds of the helicopter began in the skies above them.

“What of Maximus?  We can’t leave him alone…”

“Bud’s with him.  He’ll manage.  He’ll get Maximus to where he needs to be.”  But it's going to be hell on earth for all of us tomorrow.”

“I feel so sick,” Deidre whispered.  They watched Cort and Rachel make their way towards them, diverging somewhat to go to the spot where Hope in her car-seat sat.  “I feel like I'm in some kind of…bad movie where everyone just goes away and…”

“Don’t,” Terry said, putting his fingers over her lips, and then pulling her close again.  The image of Caroline would not go away and having Deidre’s warmth in his hands made him want to hold on.  “We have a way to go before we put some kind of label on it.  Let’s get them on their way and then we can deal with the rest.”

Hope was still sound asleep when they got to her, nestled in the blanket Deidre put around her, tucked in the crook of a large root.  The helicopter was bearing down closer and Rachel, her arm still around Cort’s waist, picked up a part of the blanket to hold as a shield in front of the child, to protect against the dust that would be kicked up.

Cort stared at the landing helicopter. It looked like some monstrous locust. He'd ridden in airplanes now, but never a helicopter. Any other time, he would have been entirely leery of the thing, but now he had no emotion left over for that. Mutely, head bowed, he handed Rachel up into the bowels of the thing, then passed her the handle of the baby carrier. Then he turned, hair whipping wildly from the rotors, and stared at where Terry stood, his arm around Dee's waist.

"I seem to be leaving all my brothers tonight," he shouted over the din. "I don't know what to say." He tipped his head to one side. "You two be careful. And try to find out anything you can about Maximus, ok?" He managed a weak smile. "God be with you."  Then he climbed in beside his wife and gripped her hand.

It was some time before they ventured to speak to each other over the prevailing din of the helicopter blades and then it was only small sentences. Neither one of them felt much like shouting and Hope, now awakened by the noise, was handling it much better than Rachel had feared.  Instead of being frightened by the sound, she was very still, listening attentively, turning her head this way and that as if hearing new sounds and watching any movement that occurred in the small cabin.  Rachel held onto Cort’s hand, trying to watch him without seeming to, to make sure he was not having the same reaction he had on the jet…and that was where they were going now, the airport, where the private jet awaited, to whisk them away to yet another airport where their forged passports would get them passage to Sydney, Australia.  She wanted to collapse in his arms and sob her heart out; knew that he wanted to do the same.  But they couldn’t yet.  They had too far to go.

As they landed at the airport and the sounds of the rotors began to fade away, Hope clapped her hands. "Birdie!" she chortled happily. "Big birdie!"

"What do you mean, Little Darlin'?"

"We inside big birdie. We fly!"

Cort looked wearily at his wife. "We fly," he repeated. He wanted to do something, anything to lighten the look on Rachel's face. "And Daddy not barf."

"Barf! Barf!" Hope took over, sounding like a tiny dog.

Cort tried to smile. He'd learned a lot of new words since arriving in modern times. That was one of them. But the pilot had hopped out and opened the side door. It was time to fly again, fly on that small jet he'd flown from the Czech Republik to Montana in. He sighed. God bless Terry, though. The man had made extensive arrangements for them in very little time. His hand touched the passport now in his breast pocket. Clint Rogers. He had no idea why Terry had smiled as he'd handed the passport to him. Sounded like an ok name to him. And Terry had assured him it was very American, very 'western', in fact. Cort was satisfied because the first name started with a 'C' and ended in a 'T'. He thought he might remember to answer to it a bit better that way. Hope had to have a passport, too. He had it tucked in the same pocket with his. Faith Rogers. He liked it. If she couldn't be overtly Hope in Australia, he could call her Faith, and what was faith but the substance of things hoped for. He wasn't sure how Terry had known to come up with that, but he was mighty grateful.

"You ready, Mrs. Rogers?" he asked, standing now on the tarmac and holding his hand up to Rachel.

She was looking at her own passport – she was now “Mary Rogers,” a name so ubiquitous and common that she had frowned a bit when Terry handed her the papers.

“You liked ‘Little House on the Prairie,’ didn’t you?” Terry had asked her.

“Yeah…but that was Laura…”

“Mary, her older sister.  I was going for not so obvious.  You didn’t want to be Dale Rogers, did you?”

“Yes!”

“Mary’s a good name,” Terry parsed.

“But you give my husband the two most obvious names in the Western universe?  Why not just call him Marty McFly?”

“I’m sure you’ll explain it to him,” Terry said with a grin.

“Ready as I’ll ever be,” she told Cort, taking his hand.  She even cracked a smile as Hope continued with her dog imitation, blissfully ignorant of the more slang meaning; but the smile was fleeting.  The new names only made the situation more ill-fitting – new names, new places, new identities, new beginnings…beginnings they had not asked or wished for.

She couldn’t even call her father…

Rachel stopped at the bottom of the steps leading into the jet, the smell of the plush interior wafting out to her, a fragrance that brought back the bliss of their wedding and the flight to Montana in full force, as if they had just stepped out of it a few hours before. It was so funny how certain smells were associated with certain emotions, and the glorious happiness that had reigned in the little cabin as they flew over Europe and into the sunset returned, making her flesh tingle again.  The only thing that kept her from fully embracing it was that now she would have to add the sorrow of losing Caroline and Maximus…and Dee, and Terry, and Bud, and John…to the memories of this plane.

She felt so old.

She watched Cort move about in the jet, more than a little impressed with the fact that he did not flinch, or look as though he were ready to tear open the fuselage.  Hope kicked her little legs in glee, telling her father she wanted to get out.  Quietly reasoning with her, he simply fastened Hope’s carrier into one of the seats and turned to beckon his wife all the way into the plane.  She saw that the flight attendant was waiting patiently next to the door, so she sat down next to Cort and grabbed his hand again.  They were about to leave everything behind them.

The door closed and the jet scooted smoothly down the runway. Dawn spread in peach and pinks across the sky and Cort looked out the window, thinking of Maximus in this first dawn for him with Caroline gone. He felt a hollowness in his own chest. He'd become really fond of her, had been so glad that Maximus had someone who loved him again. How was Maximus feeling in this dawn? His face screwed tight with pain for a moment and he felt Rachel squeeze his hand.

Wordless, and world-less, they both sat in silence, fingers entwined, her head on his shoulder.  Several hours flight would bring them to an airport in Los Angeles, where they would transfer to a larger airline, using their new identities.  After changing Hope, she let the child out of her seat to toddle about the seats, with a promise from the flight attendant that she would be no problem at all.  There really wasn't much to do on a private jet anyway, she said, and Hope was in an exploratory mood.  Rachel found herself too drained to push that aside and was thankful

to have a moment to give her attention to Cort.  And Cort was trying very hard to keep it all in.

He saw her intently watching him. "Maximus," he whispered. "I left him, Rache. I just left him there on the lawn. Caroline, she...she'd died less than a minute before and he was so...so...." He closed his eyes. "He was lookin' like I would have if you'd been in that building. How could I leave him like that, Rache? How could I do that? After...after everything...."

She squeezed his hand, feeling how intensely he hurt.  "You didn't betray him, Cort," she began, but knew that wouldn't ease the pain.  "The whole objective was to get everyone away.  He would feel just as awful if his objective had not been accomplished.  But I know how you feel.  I wish we could be there to help him in his sorrow.  I just keep thinking: what would staying have done?  He would still feel her loss..." she trailed off.  She didn't have answers for this.

"It just goes on," he whispered, turning away to stare again out the window, though he still gripped her hand. "It never stops, the loss doesn't. I keep thinkin' I've got a handle on it, that this will be the last, that even if it's not, I can just step up on it and keep goin'. But...sometimes ...it's just so hard." He pressed his forehead against the small pane of glass. "So damn hard." 

He shook his head a bit. "And there's this part of me that's so grateful, so grateful I can't find the words for it, that you're sittin' there right beside me."

He turned jerkily, quickly toward her, gathering her into his arms. "I love you, my Rachel. I love you so much it hurts!"  The mere thought that the form behind the green glass could have been hers....  No! He didn't even want his mind to go there. He'd come so close to losing her before, there on the curtain wall of Kamen, then when the grizzly had found her alone. Both

man and nature had almost killed her. How did you trust in the safety of love? It came to you, beautiful and wondrous, and then...it was snatched away, snatched by snakes or bullets or... something else.

Maximus knew all about such things. It was one of the reasons he'd felt so bonded to him. And Maximus had risked again, had loved again, loved fully, loved completely. Now what? Where did that leave him?

"I can't lose you," he murmured into her ear. "I won't."

Then he bit his lip. Was he making some choice here? Was he letting go of things he needed to hold on to simply because he was afraid? But such fears were never simple. He knew he needed to love with open hands. He knew...many things. But right now, right in this moment when he had Maximus' face as it stared wide-eyed at the collapsing building, when he had that imprinted on his eyeballs, when he had his own arms tightly around his wife, he couldn't seem to find enough of himself left to do it, to let his hands open and surrender to divine providence. He shuddered, his fingertips pressing too hard into the flesh of her arms.

"I love you," Rachel responded, clinging to him in her own anguish, anguish for his sorrow.  This was survivor's guilt, something she knew from her mother's death, a dichotomy of feelings she knew herself to have experienced - bereft and yet so blessed.  The only other words she could call to mind were ones she had found from that wandering so long ago: "hope looks beyond the bounds of time, when what we now deplore, shall rise in full immortal prime, to bloom and fade no more."  She couldn't think of anything more to say, wondered if they were even the right things to say.  This was too tough for words.

"I'm so tired," he murmured. He pulled back just enough to touch his forehead to hers. A slight smile curved one corner of his mouth. "I must be more tired than I thought. When you were talkin' just now, darlin', I could almost swear I smelled cookies." He shook his head again, leaning back against his headrest. "Very strange."  His lids felt really heavy. "Hope ok?" he asked softly, already starting to fall asleep.

She heard rather than saw Hope clunking around with a toy the flight attendant had given her, but she didn't look.  She'd check on her in a minute. For now, she'd hold Cort.  His eyes were closed and his features already relaxing.  "Hope is good," she assured him, leaning back as well so that their foreheads touched again.  She needed to feel his living breath on her face.  If she couldn't say what she was feeling, then she wanted him to know she wasn’t going to leave, so she mirrored him.  She kissed him softly on the lips as she tucked his hand into the space between him, watching him close his eyes, thinking so many things.

He slept dreamlessly for some time, then began to mumble and turn his head a bit, finally waking enough to be aware of a weight on his chest. Looking down, he saw that Hope had somehow crept up and was sound asleep across her parents. He smiled fondly at her, stroked

her hair, then closed his eyes again. Sleep was not something he wanted to do again right now.  He vaguely remembered dreams where he left his grandmother's grave and headed alone with his rifle into the desert. But Sid was waiting for him there in the wastelands, laughing, standing with one of his feet on Henri's neck. No, lying here awake was better than that.  He loved the feel of Hope's head resting on his chest, of Rachel's arm curved over his. That was what he wanted to be aware of. Not what they'd left behind, not even the uncertainty of where they were going. Them. The two of them.

"Mr. Rogers," the flight attendant said, moving gently into view, "I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to wake your wife and put your child back in her seat.  We're approaching landing within the hour."

"Thanks," he said softly, then tipped his chin down to look at his sleeping daughter. He must've dozed off again himself as when he lifted his arm to check his watch, it was a lot later than he'd thought.

The attendant hadn't gone far then turned back to add, "I hope it's all right that I helped your daughter up on the seats with you last night. She was pulling at her mother's leg and I was afraid she'd waken her, so I just sort of set her there in the middle. She settled right down so I left her there."

"It's fine," Cort smiled. "I was wondering how she'd managed that."  It was, in fact, one of the things that had kept him awake after he'd discovered her there.  He'd had this jab in his gut that maybe she'd figured out how to do it all on her own.

Letting Hope sleep a moment longer, he rolled his head to his left, nuzzling Rachel's temple. "Darlin'," he said, still keeping his voice low, "time to wake up."  His right hand was curved over Hope's back. Couldn't they just stay like this, the three of them, all nuzzled together, both his women safe with him?

Groaning, she raised her head to the sound of Cort gently talking to her.  Her muscles ached - sleeping in a reclining chair was not the most comfortable thing for her neck and back.  Hope moved her head so that she could look between the two of them, green eyes bright and awake.

"Wake up, Mama," she said and lifted a finger to touch her on the nose.  "Sleepy Mama," she added, and then let out a giggle so like her father...so like Sid...that Rachel was instantly awake.

"It's all right, darlin'," Cort said, seeing the startled expression on Rachel's face. "We're landing."  He slid his hands under Hope's armpits and held her close to the window. "Blue, Hope. See all the blue."

Her eyes narrowed. "Not like blue."

He propped her on his knees. "Why?"

"Blue inside. Blue hurt."

His mouth dropped open. "Blue...hurts?"

She nodded, her eyes fixed seriously, with way too much understanding, on his. "Inside."

He knew how that could be. He'd never forget the disturbing feeling as the nanobots were infused into his body. But he'd never thought that what was in Hope's system might...hurt.

Did growing as fast as she did cause her pain?  His eyes sought out Rachel's. "Oh...God," he mouthed, then turned back to Hope, filled with questions he didn't think would have answers.

"How, Hope, how do you know it's blue? What's inside, how do you know what color it is?"

"Eyes, Daddy. My eyes feel it. Inside."

"Your eyes feel what's inside you?"

"See inside, yes."  Couldn't everybody see and feel inside themselves with their own eyes? She was puzzled. "Daddy not?"

He licked his lips, not wanting his daughter to feel too different. "Daddy not see inside so good."

"Get glasses," she suggested placidly. "Then Daddy see."

"What do you see, Hope, when you look inside? What does it look like?"  He was aware Rachel had nearly stopped breathing beside them.

"Flowey," she replied. "It moves. All the time it moves. And sparkly."

This was worse than anything he'd ever imagined. What had the nanobots done to his baby? What had Sid done? Nanosauce. Hope was describing nanosauce.

Rachel felt the blood drain from her face, flashes of memory flitting across her own eyes: the interminable blue surrounding her in a way that no other warp had ever formed around her,

the connection she had felt of two separate entities, in a vast universe of blue blue blue....

"Sir?" the flight attendant interrupted, startling Rachel into a sharp gasp.  "I'm afraid you'll have to get the baby in her car seat now. She needs to be strapped in for the landing."

He scooped Hope up, sliding out into the aisle so he could buckle her in. His fingers fumbled with the latches, couldn't seem to get them to snap. The straps, they....  "Rachel," he whispered, barely able to speak, "didn't these straps fit her when we got on the plane?"  He looked at his wife, his eyes desperately hopeful. "You adjusted them?"

If the plane had decided to go into a tailspin, Rachel could not have felt more out of control.  This had all been arranged so they could leave behind Sid's influence.  Tears filled her eyes, even as they both went through the motions to get Hope and themselves situated for the landing.  "I don't know....I don't know..." she whispered helplessly.

Cort settled into his seat, staring unseeing out the window, completely undisturbed by the way the ground was rushing up to meet the plane. Hope was definitely bigger. There was no way the lengths of the straps would have gone around her. They were very difficult to adjust, too. You had to turn the blasted seat over and fiddle with things and yank and pull. He knew Rachel had not done that since they got on the plane. It was Hope who had changed. He closed his eyes, remembering the feel of her little body under his hands, much less baby-like, more resembling what they nowadays called a toddler. What did all this mean, for her, for them? Would she just...grow...like this? How fast? How often? His jaw clenched tightly. Would she be grown by the time she was five? What about aging? Would she grow old too quickly, would her life, therefore, be vastly shortened in its span? No one knew. There were no answers. Sid himself would not even have known. He wasn't human. He'd have had no idea what affect his experimentations would have on a human baby. Cort's baby.

Damn Sid to hell! Then he almost laughed. You had to have a soul to go to hell. Sid was just a computer, just a mass of horrid programming. If he'd melted there inside the conflagration NanoCorp had become, he'd simply be...gone. Somehow that was too good for Sid. Sid should have to pay for his crimes. It wasn't right that he could just cease to exist. No, it wasn't right.

The wheels bumped down. He scarcely noticed. Always before there had been this release of tension in his gut when he felt them contact the earth again.  It would take a hell of a lot more than that to release the tension he felt in his gut right now.

The private jet met with a bit of turbulence on its landing at LAX, but both she and Cort were

so consumed with more internal maelstroms that they scarcely noticed until the flight attendant said they could take off their seat belts and get their things to transfer to the airline that would take them to Australia.

She held Hope to her as they walked the concourse, the attendant staying with them as far as making sure that they arrived at their gate in due time.  The child even felt a bit heavier, more solid, as she held on.  Rachel found herself worn out by the time they were seated in the waiting area, baggages next to them.  Cort looked as if he were in a dark cloud, brooding, and she knew exactly how he felt.  Several times she wanted to break down and call it quits - what was the use?The monkey-brain chattered shallow remarks: she would have to buy a whole new wardrobe... good grief, was Hope going to be the size of a teenager by the time they got Down Under?  Another part of her wondered if it had really been wise for Terry and the others to destroy NanoCorp.  Their one hope of finding a way...but what way?  With Sid invincible, what did they have to do besides sit and wait?

There were already a lot of people waiting for the arrival of the plane, but she and Cort found a small section of the rows of seats that seemed separate from the rest.  She needed to sit and hold Hope to her, just a little bit.  The jet plane attendant bid them farewell and she sat with Hope in her lap, rocking slightly back and forth.

Cort sat, head down, repeatedly rubbing his left thumb as hard as he could across the palm of his right hand. It was something he'd done after his smashed hand had gotten fairly far along in its healing. The motion, the pressure, seemed to release some tension he'd felt in that hand. Then he stopped, thumb still in place, and flexed his right-hand fingers. There were times, even now there were times, when he missed his gun. Everything was so out of control now, absolutely everything.  He closed his eyes, a clear memory surfacing of himself standing with his .45 drawn, a thin wisp of bluish smoke trailing out its barrel. He'd just solved a rather prickly problem involving a fellow who didn't want him to take what he intended on taking. All very quick, very simple. Not like now.

"Damn it!" he snapped, standing quickly and swatting at a nearby palm frond so hard that he knocked over the large potted plant and had to twist rapidly and catch its trunk before it crashed to the polished floor of the waiting area. Righting the plant, he looked rather sheepishly in Rachel's widened eyes for a second, then just strode down the long concourse, taking huge strides. His entire body felt coiled, tight, and he needed to move, to do something, anything, to get rid of that feeling before he burst. At first, he shook both hands as he walked as though they were coated with something he needed to shake free of. The tension had settled over his hands like leather gloves, shrunken from being wet. He went up to one of the huge window-walls, pressing both palms against the glass, leaning his forehead between them, taking slow, deep breaths.

"Come on, Cort," he exhorted himself, forcing an image of Father Michael's face into his mind. He was surprised, though, at the picture that formed. It was Father Michael, yes, but he was standing on emerald green grass, smiling, and on his left stood Father Pavel, his hands dripping with river water. On Michael's right was Henri. Cort felt his racing heartbeat slow as his eyes moved from man to man down the line. They said nothing, but only looked back at him and in the faces of each man he saw reflected that man's opinion. The tension left him so quickly that his knees felt weak with its going and he sank down heavily on a backless bench.  It was as though each one had urged him to remember, to remember who he really was, to remember that not once had peace ever come to him through the smoking barrel of a gun. He spread his right palm over his chest, infinitely grateful to these three men, then moved his hand in the familiar gesture of the sign of the cross.

Opening his eyes as he turned on the bench, he looked back down the concourse at the distant figures of his wife and child, both of whom had their eyes locked on him. Smiling slightly, he got to his feet and walked toward them.

She knew by the way he flexed his fingers, by the cat-like pacing what he was thinking, what energy boiled inside him, a feral desire to take action into his own hands, quite literally; and it reappeared in her mind's eye, the sight of him pacing in the gun shop, eyeing the guns laid out before him with a thirst for control and action, with the same kind of spark that Deidre got in her eyes when she saw a new artifact.  She watched this without any other feeling than aching compassion.  If Hope had not wrapped herself so tightly around her middle, Rachel would have gotten up to put her hand on his shoulder, face him and tell him it was okay to hold onto her.  But seeing him pause, control himself, his shoulders relaxing ounce by ounce, she continued to watch - and when he made the sign of the cross, she somehow knew something other than the old hunger had won.  She took his outstretched hand, the one she had tended so long ago, and as he sat beside them, brought his fingers to her lips: a signal that he would surely understand.

"I'm sorry, darlin'," he said softly, cocking his head as he watched her kissing his fingers. "Sid has a way of taking me back to Herod, to the me I was in those days."  Then he sighed as she continued to move her lips over his hand. "Thank you," he whispered, and seeing her slightly puzzled expression, added, "for my hand, for everything, for all that you are to me."  He turned his hand then, cupping her cheek with it. Shaking his head almost wonderingly, he leaned further, and just before finding her lips with his, murmured, "So precious, so very, very precious...."

Their flight was announced, a direct Quantas one to Sydney. He stood, holding out his hand to Rachel. "Headin' off to the far side of the world, darlin'. I hear tell they've even got some cowboys down there." He smiled, not exactly whole-heartedly, but the best he could manage. "And maybe seein' a kangaroo or two mightn't be all that bad, eh?"  He slung a large carry-on satchel over his shoulder, picked up Hope's diaper bag and seat. Not much stuff. They'd had to leave just about everything they owned behind. Terry had slipped him a fairly large amount of Australian currency along with his passport and other ID, telling him there'd be a bank account in their name before they arrived. Clint Rogers. He was pretty sure it would take him a while to start answering to that name.

ON TO PART 2

BACK TO LIBRISCROWE

BACK TO END OF "HOPE...RISING"

ON TO BEGINNING OF "A LOVE FOR A LOVE" (MAXIMUS/CAROLINE/BUD/SID)

ON TO BEGINNING OF "A SECOND BYLINE" (TERRY/DEE)

BACK TO NANOCORP INDEX OF STORIES